Beyond the horizon: How Ana Cidre turned a non-linear path into leadership

Welcome to Beyond the horizon, a monthly series celebrating the people who shape Upsun’s culture, innovation, and heart. In this month’s edition, we’re featuring Ana Cidre, Director of Developer Advocacy at Upsun and one of the key voices shaping how developers experience our platform today and in the future. 

Ana’s journey to DevRel leadership wasn’t linear, and that’s exactly what makes her perspective so powerful. With a background spanning Fine Arts, international business, and software engineering, she brings a rare blend of creativity, strategy, and technical credibility to her work. She believes unconventional paths aren’t detours — they’re advantages. Each chapter sharpened her ability to see problems from multiple angles and design for real human experience.

In her story, Ana speaks candidly about stepping onto technical stages when few women were doing so, building communities where inclusion is intentional, and redefining what advocacy means in an AI-native world. It’s a reflection on leadership, visibility, and designing for what’s next without losing sight of the people at the center.

Tell us a bit about yourself. What do you do at Upsun and most importantly, who are you outside of work?

I'm Ana Cidre, Director of Developer Advocacy at Upsun. I lead our small advocacy team where we tackle Advocacy, Developer Experience (DX) and Documentation. We work closely with marketing to amplify our developer-focused content and strategy, with engineering to provide feedback and build tools developers actually use, and with the product team to ensure we're building what developers need. My team focuses on creating technical content that developers trust, shaping developer experience across the platform and maintaining documentation that serves both human developers and AI agents.

Outside of work, I'm based in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, though I'm originally from London. That cross-cultural experience shapes how I think about communication, accessibility and building products for global audiences. My path to this role wasn't traditional: I started with a Fine Arts degree and a Master's in International Business Economics before moving into software engineering. That diverse background taught me to see problems from multiple angles and value different perspectives.

I'm also a community builder at heart. I founded ngSpain, an Angular conference that brings together developers across Spain and beyond, and started GalsTech to support women in tech in Galicia because I believe diverse voices make our industry better and we need more intentional spaces for underrepresented groups.

If you could describe your journey in one word or phrase what would it be? 

Non-linear! My journey from Fine Arts to international business to frontend engineering to DevRel leadership wasn't efficient by traditional standards. But that non-linearity is my strength. Each transition taught me to learn quickly, question assumptions and bring unexpected connections to technical challenges. The art background taught me about human experience and communication. The business training gave me strategic thinking. The engineering years gave me credibility. The DevRel work lets me combine all of it.

I want others with unconventional backgrounds to know their diverse experiences aren't detours but they're what make their perspective valuable.

What’s a challenge you’ve faced and how have you grown from it? 

I decided to take the leap into speaking when my good friend Sherry List and I finally got up on stage because we didn't see many people who looked like us (women) speaking at technical conferences. Having her be part of that journey was what got me on stage in the first place. We did it together.

Being a female speaker came with its perks and absurdities. The upside? Never queuing for the bathroom. The downside? People backstage asking if I was there with my boyfriend, clearly unable to compute that I might actually be one of the speakers.

The bathroom situation really tells you everything you need to know about the gender ratio.

Speaker dinners where I'm mistaken for event staff. Technical talks followed by questions clearly testing whether I actually understood the code I just presented. 

I realised I had a choice: try to blend in or just focus on doing solid technical work. However, the real shift came when I had my daughter. I wanted things to be different for her where there are fewer assumptions about who belongs in technical spaces and fewer barriers to overcome.

That's why I helped build ngSpain and GalsTech. Not separate spaces, but intentionally inclusive technical communities where diverse speakers would be the norm. Small contributions, but hopefully they make the path a bit easier for others.

I still speak at conferences and try to mentor other women stepping into speaking when I can. I hope that each woman who shares technical work makes it a little less unusual for the next one. Not pulling down walls so much as finding the doors and holding them open.

Is there someone at Upsun who played a key role in your journey or made your experience possible?

Fabien has been incredibly supportive of the advocacy work at Upsun. What stands out is his understanding of advocacy as a strategic discipline that shapes how developers experience and adopt products, rather than just a marketing or community function.

When I talk about exploring the shift from Developer Experience to Agent Experience, or how we might think differently about documentation in an AI-native world, he's open to those conversations. That willingness to engage with emerging ideas from leadership makes it possible to do work that looks beyond the immediate. That trust to investigate emerging patterns and learn alongside the industry is valuable. It's the kind of support that creates room to try things and see what resonates.

I also want to mention Florian and Guillaume, our field CTOs. They've been generous with their time helping me get up to speed with the product and understand the technical details that matter to our users. As peers, they've made it easy to integrate with the team and ask the questions I needed to ask. That kind of patient, collaborative support makes a real difference when you're learning a new platform.

As we say at Upsun, 'Your greatest work is just on the horizon.' What’s the next horizon you’re excited to reach in your journey?

The next horizon is redefining what developer advocacy means when AI agents are primary consumers of our work.

I'm seeing two things happening at once. In-person meetups are coming back. After years of remote-everything, developers want to gather, share ideas and solve problems face-to-face. There's something about learning alongside others that video calls can't replace. We're building that presence again, creating spaces where people can connect over real challenges.

At the same time, we're learning how to design for AI agents as consumers of our work. If Claude Code can't integrate your API smoothly, that's a developer experience problem, even if your docs read perfectly to humans. So we're figuring out how to serve both audiences: developers who need narrative and context, and agents that need explicit schemas and unambiguous instructions.

It's interesting work because my background has always been about translating between different contexts from art, to business, to engineering, and advocacy. Now it's humans and agents. Not replacing what we've learned about developer experience, just expanding who we're designing for.

The expertise we have in serving developers still applies. We're just adding new dimensions to how we think about what makes something useful.

Thanks for joining us on this month’s journey. Beyond the horizon is all about the stories that shape who we are. We hope you’ll return next month as we continue celebrating the people who inspire our culture and move Upsun forward. 💙