A counselor once told Melanie Warrick, “I don’t think this is the right fit for you.” They were talking about tech. Melanie had been interested in this space for years, but after hearing discouraging words telling her that it wasn’t the right fit, she started to wonder whether she simply wasn’t “smart enough” for tech.
Despite this, she set out with determination and persevered. Today, Melanie is a Senior Staff Developer Advocate for AI at Temporal, and the route there wasn’t an easy one. She started in film at USC, spent time in consulting, learned to code at a women-only Python bootcamp, worked as a machine learning engineer putting AI into production, and later led engineering teams. That technical experience now informs her work in developer advocacy, while the storytelling skills she developed in film help her make complex topics accessible to others.
If you catch an episode of her AI-centered live stream Vibe Check (which you absolutely should) you’ll notice these skills she learned early in her career in live action. Her narrative storytelling and personable hosting makes the complex AI topics she breaks down digestible and entertaining. One of the best parts is the show is deliberately allowed to be a little messy. That willingness to try something before knowing exactly how it will turn out has followed Melanie through most of her career. To understand how she got from being told tech might not be for her to building a career in AI, it helps to start somewhere that seems pretty far removed from it: film school.
Before tech, there was film#
Before Melanie became the voice she is in the AI space, she was learning how to make movies.
At USC, she studied film production and made student films, learning how to take an idea from its earliest stages to something finished. After school came the less glamorous side of the industry: working her way up through the ranks. Melanie started her career answering phones, reading scripts, running errands, and occasionally editing.
What stuck with her was the process behind making a film. Production taught her how to take an idea through an entire project lifecycle, get the work done, and eventually decide that it was done enough to let go.
You could spend forever and a day sort of in the same space, or you could just call that project done and move on to the next thing.
It also gave her an early education in storytelling, a skill she still relies on when translating technical ideas for an audience. For Melanie, storytelling is about understanding a subject well enough to help someone else follow it, which can be especially difficult when the subject is technical.
Her ambition carried her even further, and an MBA and consulting came next on her path. Until this point, tech remained an interest in the back of her mind, but never one that she allowed herself to pursue. It would take a much more personal turning point for her to reconsider that.
“Let me just go see what I can learn”#
Melanie’s life changed after her father passed. The loss made her question where her career was headed and what she wanted to spend her time doing. The question of whether or not she was good enough for tech still lingered.
I didn’t really care if I was or wasn’t. I was just like, let me just go see what I can learn.
She was especially curious about AI, a true trendsetter, as this was well before the current wave of generative AI, so her career path was far more nebulous and required quite a bit of trial and error. Luckily, Melanie had some unlikely inspiration. She loves science fiction. The unknown and often scary technological futures crafted in her favorite novels made the phrase “life imitates art” ring true. She took that curiosity led mindset into her work viewing AI as the most daring direction she could take. The first step was learning to code.
That led her to Hackbright Academy, where she joined a women-only Python bootcamp and furthered her studies as well, later taking on data science. Melanie thrived here.
Figure 1: Hackbright cohort graduation celebration 2013.
The relationships Melanie built at Hackbright lasted well beyond the bootcamp. Several of her classmates went on to work at Twilio, where they developed connections that would eventually eventually help bring Melanie to Temporal.
Melanie went on to build an impressive technical career of her own. She worked as a data scientist and machine learning engineer at Change.org before becoming a founding and deep learning engineer at Skymind. At Google, she worked in data engineering and developer relations, later moving into engineering leadership roles at Tailscale and Virta Health. She also co-founded Fight Health Insurance. Along the way, she gained firsthand experience putting AI into production, experience that would become invaluable in her work as a developer advocate.
Why Vibe Check is a live stream#
Melanie continued to grow in her career, and as she moved into developer advocacy, she became increasingly intentional about creating the kind of space she had benefited from herself: somewhere people could share what they were learning and grow with curiosity.
At Google, she co-hosted the GCP Podcast, covering Google Cloud Platform while bringing her own interest in AI into the conversation.
Figure 2: GCP Podcast booth at Google Cloud NEXT 2018.
Melanie wanted to talk about the company she worked for, but she did not want the show to exist only to talk about Google. It was just as important to platform technically interesting people, learning from their knowledge and experiences.
She brought that idea with her to Temporal. The result was Vibe Check, a live series where Melanie and her guests build with AI, pull apart technical questions, and see what happens, all while live.
Figure 3: Melanie hosting an episode of Vibe Check with Mark Mandel, Staff Developer Advocate at Discord, and Francesc Campoy of Temporal’s AI Foundations team.
In a moment when AI can generate a polished podcast or video remarkably quickly, Melanie liked the idea of making something that could not be polished before anyone saw it.
Here is something you can see and touch and know that we’re creating it as we speak.
Vibe Check has grown tremendously, as it now streams on YouTube, LinkedIn, and X/Twitter. Most guests appear from outside Temporal, bringing fresh perspectives on AI and what they’re building with it. Melanie also hopes to get more colleagues involved and eventually see others across Temporal hosting their own episodes.
A company of builders#
When Melanie joined Temporal, one of the first things she noticed was the standard people held themselves to. What stood out was how deliberate everyone was about the work and how willing they were to keep pushing the envelope.
Having spent years as an engineer herself Melanie understands the work behind the technology she now discusses with developers. That experience gives her a particular appreciation for the people building at Temporal.
“There’s a real push for excellence in the work that people do,” she said. Melanie sees that bar coming from leadership, but also from the people around her reinforcing it themselves. For someone who has spent much of her career learning by trying things, getting them wrong, and iterating, that environment felt like a perfect match.
Figure 4: Temporal booth at Google NEXT 2026.
Temporal has also given her a wider view of the company than she has had in previous developer advocacy roles. This is her first DevRel role sitting within marketing, and her work regularly brings her into conversations with teams across the organization. Rather than staying focused on one product or a small cross-functional group, she gets to see more of what the company is building.
It’s an environment that suits the way she has approached much of her own career.
Flossing your brain in the age of AI#
For Melanie, staying curious matters even more now that AI can make it tempting to skip straight to the answer. One of the biggest risks, she said, is becoming a “backseat writer” and letting the tool do so much of the work that you stop learning from it.
She catches herself doing it too. Recently, while implementing Temporal on a project, Melanie realized she could probably let AI get her to the result in about 30 minutes. Instead, she asked it to walk her through what it was doing. While she stopped to ask questions and double-check what she didn’t understand, the process took closer to three hours.
The slower route allowed her to truly instill the knowledge. “That’s a way to learn it, to really get it to lock into your head,” Her advice, especially for people early in their careers, is to keep making time for that kind of learning even when the faster option is sitting right there. Sometimes that might mean an afternoon, while other times even ten minutes is enough.
Melanie has a phrase for it: flossing your brain. Just as you make time for small habits that keep you healthy, she believes you have to keep exercising your ability to understand and work through things yourself.
Figure 5: Melanie working with NGOs in relation to tsunami relief efforts in 2006.
That same advice applies to building a career. Show up consistently and put your work somewhere people can see it. Take on problems that are a little ambiguous and be able to explain how you worked through them. The tools will keep changing, but Melanie’s advice is much less complicated: keep building, and make sure you are still learning while you do it.
You can learn alongside Melanie and the team. Start your career at Temporal: take a look at our open roles. We’d love for you to join us.