Mason Egger started teaching computer science when he was 19 years old, before he even had a degree of his own.
Texas State University’s computer science department hired undergraduates to lead introductory labs, and Mason arrived unusually prepared. At his rural high school, his computer science teacher had spent more than 30 years building a program that competed and won programming competitions across the state. Her dedication to her craft was amplified by the fact that she did not like losing. By his senior year, Mason had won a state championship and developed roughly the level of knowledge he would otherwise have gained much later in college.
So, for three and a half years, he taught three or four labs each semester. He worked with majors, non-majors, and honors students, and even wrote his own curriculum.
The job was an early expression of something deeper that was ever-present through Mason’s life. “My family has been in education as long as education has been in Texas,” he says. His mother is a teacher and coach. His grandparents and great-grandparents taught. Mason says one of his ancestors opened an early schoolhouse in Cat Spring, Texas, where the family still gathers for reunions.
Mason originally planned to become a band director. Throughout his collegiate career he changed majors and minors multiple times trying to find what he was passionate about. Eventually, his career brought him back home to teaching. It wasn’t the shortest path. His career took him through roles in software engineering, developer advocacy, technical curriculum design, and, today, a role as a Senior Solutions Architect at Temporal. The title changed, but the work of teaching never did.
“I’m an engineer,” he says. “But in my heart, I’m a teacher.”
A teacher, an engineer, and a performer walk into a career#
Mason earned separate undergraduate degrees in computer science and music. At first, they looked like two possible futures. In practice, both prepared him for the same career.
Computer science gave him the technical foundation to work as an engineer at Forcepoint and later on the Vrbo side of Expedia. When asked “What do you plan to do with your music degree?” Mason would often jokingly reply, “Frame it.” However, later on he realized that it indeed provided him with the skills needed in his career. Studying the performing arts, from his music degree to the four years of theater he participated in high school, gave him the experience and confidence he needed to perform in front of people. This unlikely combination taught him how to understand a technical problem, hold a room, and explain what he knew.
However, his style was also shaped outside of the classroom. Mason grew up in a town of about 2,000 people, and spent his time surrounded by family out in the country telling tall tales around the campfire. After school, he watched syndicated episodes of The Simpsons, King of the Hill, and Malcolm in the Middle. He credits those hours with some of his comedic timing and absurdist humor.
That personality can look like effortless extroversion on stage or in a customer meeting, but Mason insists it is not. He describes himself as an introvert with a switch he can flip into “stage mode.” Performing taught him to summon that energy when the work calls for it, then recognize when he needs time alone to recharge.
The combination proved useful when he began speaking at technical conferences. His first attempts did not go far, so he reconsidered what he genuinely cared about. The answer was documentation and technical writing.
“It’s amazing how bad docs can make you hate a product,” he says.
His first talk, “Docs Like Code: Continuous Integration for Documentation,” was accepted at six conferences in a single year. At those events, Mason met people working in developer advocacy and recognized the job immediately: it joined engineering, teaching, writing, and performance. When the opportunity came to move from engineering into Developer Relations at DigitalOcean, he took it.
Temporal, eventually#
Mason’s path to Temporal was less a straight line than a long-running conversation.
He first interviewed with the company in 2022, while considering another Developer Relations role. He chose another role, but kept in touch with Temporal’s recruiting team. Every few months, he checked whether the right position had opened. Eventually, Brian Hogan, a friend and former colleague from DigitalOcean who now worked at Temporal leading the Education function, reached out. Temporal needed someone who understood Java and could write technical curriculum.
“I took the long way around when it comes to working at Temporal,” Mason says.
He joined as a Senior Technical Curriculum Developer. At the time, Temporal’s learning catalog had a single foundational course in Go, but not yet in any of the other supported SDK languages like Java or Python. Mason built Temporal 101 in Java and then helped expand the curriculum from there.
The Python course came together as a kind of happy accident. While he was waiting for the Java material to make its way through a careful technical review, he decided to just write Temporal 101 in Python. In his time on the education team, he went on to contribute to more advanced courses, including material on versioning and error-handling strategies.
The work still follows him: on calls with newer Temporalites or developers, people sometimes recognize Mason from the training videos. For a moment, he feels as if everyone is back in the classroom.
That work rested on a belief in the product that went back to Mason’s first encounter with Temporal. When he read the documentation, he remembers thinking, “If this product is half of what they claim it does, it’s revolutionary.”
“It turns out it does all the things.”
The job he never expected to want#
Moving into Solutions Architecture put Mason inside a sales organization, a place his younger self never expected to work. The role made sense once he saw how much it had in common with teaching and developer advocacy.
Delivering a rehearsed pitch will not cut it. The central skill here is understanding what someone is trying to build. Customers bring Mason unusual technical problems, and he gets to ask questions, inspect the architecture, and work through possible designs with their engineers. The conversations keep him close to code and exercise the systems-thinking part of his engineering brain.
A colleague gave him a useful way to understand the transition: he was moving from teacher to doctor. A teacher’s job is to educate. A doctor must first listen and diagnose, then prescribe as well as educate.
That sequence now shapes Mason’s work. He listens for the real problem beneath the initial request. He identifies where an application needs a more durable approach. Then he helps the team understand how to design and implement it successfully.
What matters most to him is believing in the product he’s teaching. Mason learned the hard way in a previous Developer Relations role that he is terrible at representing a product he does not find interesting. Enthusiasm is hard to fake, especially with engineers.
With Temporal, the enthusiasm comes easily. “Engineers are really good at telling people about the cool things they use,” he says. When a customer explains what they are building, Mason wants to know how it works and what strange edge case they have encountered. His excitement tends to turn a sales call into two groups of engineers nerding out, solving a problem together.
That same alignment extends beyond his day job. Mason runs a small self-hosted Temporal deployment for the PyTexas Foundation. It executes only a handful of Workflows each month, but those Workflows take care of pieces of the nonprofit’s business logic when they need to run. He does not have to reach for a hypothetical when he talks about the product. He uses it for work he cares about.
Bring back the third space#
Mason first spoke at PyTexas in 2019. The next year, he helped move the conference online after its plans changed from virtual to in-person and back again. There was no conference in 2021. When PyTexas returned in March 2022, Mason served as conference chair and helped bring the conference back in a post-Covid world. Although only 70 people returned that year, Mason considers it a great success and the spark for things that followed. Shortly after, he was elected President of the PyTexas Foundation, a position he continues to hold.
Rebuilding the annual event exposed a larger problem. Local Python meetups across Texas were struggling to return after Covid, or had simply disappeared. Mason realized that a community is structured like a pyramid, with the local events feeding up. He decided to take action, and through the PyTexas Foundation, Mason helped recruit organizers, find venues and sponsors, arrange food, and share the nonprofit’s resources. Sometimes that meant traveling to another meetup in Houston or San Antonio and asking, face to face, who wanted to help restart the city’s Python community.
His work eventually earned a Python Software Foundation Community Service Award and recognition as a Python Software Foundation Fellow. Those honors acknowledge something Mason considers more important than any particular piece of code: giving people a place to find one another.
He thinks of technical communities as modern third spaces, the places outside home and work where people can form friendships, develop a sense of belonging, and learn without needing an employer’s permission. Some of Mason’s closest friends came from the Python community. One former Texas State student later told him that his persistent invitations to attend PyTexas had changed the direction of their career.
The story supports the piece of advice Mason gives most often to people starting theirs: find a community and participate in it. It does not have to be related to work. The point is to meet people, contribute something, and create relationships before you need anything from them.
That matters even more in a remote workplace. Colleagues can become real friends, but Mason does not think a company should be the only source of community in someone’s life.
Learn the problem, not the incantation#
For people interested in engineering, Developer Relations, or Solutions Architecture, Mason’s path offers another lesson: choose work that gives you a reason to keep learning.
AI is changing how software gets written, and Mason expects engineers to spend less time producing every line by hand and more time defining systems, evaluating tradeoffs, and verifying what gets built. Tools and languages will keep changing. The more durable skill is learning how to solve a problem and caring enough to stay current.
That is also why a career does not have to follow the path printed in a course catalog. Mason thought his music and computer science degrees pointed in different directions. Instead, the performer made the engineer a better teacher. Teaching made the developer advocate a better writer. All of those experiences now help the Solutions Architect earn a customer’s trust.
Mason has been an engineer, a curriculum developer, a developer advocate, and a Solutions Architect. He has written code and courses, taught classrooms and conference halls, and helped bring local technical communities back to life. When he considers what will last, though, he returns to the same thing.
“At the end of the day,” he says, “my community work is what I’ll be remembered for.”
Interested in building your career at Temporal? Explore our open roles.
Come hang out with Mason at next year’s PyTexas Conference or read his writing on his blog.