Developer Advocacy and Innersource at RBC: Cloud Adoption, Community Building, and Sustainable Development

In this episode of "Break Things on Purpose," host Jason interviews Aaron Clark, the Developer Advocacy Director at the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), about his career journey from a Java developer in 2010 to a cloud‑focused advocate and community builder.

Aaron recounts his early work on Java applications in the Risk IT group, setting up one of the first Hudson servers, and later moving to the cloud team where he engaged with Hadoop, Spark‑based ETL pipelines, Docker, Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry, and Spring Boot, highlighting the challenges of scaling technology in a large regulated organization.

The conversation shifts to the concept of "internal resources" (innersource) at RBC, where Aaron helped create shared libraries, OIDC‑enabled Java/Spring components, and a community of tech talks that bridge gaps between siloed teams, aiming to reduce friction, improve developer experience, and promote sustainable development practices.

Aaron explains how he stays up‑to‑date—reading industry blogs, listening to podcasts, attending virtual conferences, and dedicating time to Slack‑based support—while balancing his responsibilities of answering developer questions, providing design guidance, and advocating for better tooling and processes.

The episode concludes with Aaron mentioning open positions on the cloud adoption team, encouraging listeners interested in cloud platforms, machine learning, or large‑scale data initiatives to consider opportunities at RBC.