Nate Hessler is a Support Engineer at Sourcegraph and a 2025 Modern Support Award winner.

We created these awards to recognize individual contributors who are shaping the future of customer support — people who build solutions, not just close tickets.

Sourcegraph runs their support on Plain. Nate's work is exactly what these awards are meant to celebrate: he spotted inefficiencies in his team's workflow and shipped a custom app to fix them, without waiting for anyone to ask.

Building Before Anyone Asked

During a team offsite in San Francisco last July, Nate Hessler's manager mentioned that Sourcegraph's support setup needed work. Stale fields. Required inputs that agents were clicking through blindly. Data no one was using.

Nate didn't wait for a project plan. He started building.

Within weeks, he had created a custom app that connected Sourcegraph's BigQuery API and Google Cloud API directly to their ticketing system.

Now, when an agent opens a ticket, they can see the customer's usage data — query volume, instance details, activity patterns — without logging into GCP and running manual lookups. The context is just there.

"I was thinking how can we surface this usage data for our customers without having to log in to multiple tools." Nate says.

What the App Reveals

The app itself is useful. But the behavior behind it is what makes Nate so effective.

His manager Enrique Gonzalez puts it simply: "Nate may ask for guidance but does not wait for permission to own things." That philosophy shapes everything Nate does. He watches for recurring friction, whether from customers or teammates. When he sees it, he starts building before anyone asks him to.

"I think it just comes from: are these questions coming up more and more from our team or customers? Is this becoming increasingly important? How can we streamline this? What's a way that we can just make all of our lives easier?"

That question, asked daily, produces tools and fixes that compound. In less than a year at Sourcegraph, Nate has quietly become the team's top contributor — not just in tickets solved, but in the systems-level work that makes everyone faster.

From Sales to Support Engineer

Nate's first job out of college was at an advertising agency, where he started as an operations coordinator tracking inventory in Excel. He loved being on a computer, solving problems, being the person people came to when something broke. 

Then he got promoted into sales.

"I wasn’t enjoying sales," he says. "I just wanted to work with computers and software and data, and help people.” 

The mismatch forced a rethink. This was 2021, when coding bootcamps were everywhere online. Nate enrolled in SavvyCoders, a three-month intensive in St. Louis, while working full-time.

After bootcamp, he landed a new job at Gainsight, where he spent three years in support, eventually handling the company's largest enterprise accounts. When a Sourcegraph recruiter reached out on LinkedIn, the role was too cool to pass up. 

"Sourcegraph is such a fun technical challenge" Nate says. Sourcegraph's customers are developers with self-hosted instances. The challenge to learn keeps Nate motivated. 

The Permission Lesson

The shift in how Nate works came from a conversation with Enrique during that San Francisco offsite.

Nate had planned to gather team feedback before making changes. But his manager told him something different: "A lot of times we can get so caught in conversations about doing that we don't actually do the doing."

That lesson stuck. Now Nate operates from a different default: "If you own something, you don't need to ask for permission," Nate says. "If you believe that this will make things easier for the team, just go for it."

But building fast doesn't mean building alone. Nate has learned to recognize when solo troubleshooting stops being useful.

He calls it an internal temperature gauge — something built over four to five years in support. It tells him when to push harder and when to pull others in. The gauge isn't about giving up. It's about knowing that speed and resolution sometimes require more than one person.

Advice for Career Changers

When asked what he'd tell someone considering a switch to tech, Nate doesn't hedge. His only regret is that he didn’t do it sooner. 

"There's never a perfect time. There's always an excuse. But if you want to shift careers and you think it's tech, do the coding bootcamp, jump at the opportunity. If it's on your mind, if it's on your heart, just do it."

Because his path is proof that it’s possible and his advice isn’t theoretical. It's what Nate did himself: enrolled in a bootcamp while working full-time, finished in three months, landed his first tech job, and kept building from there.

What Sets Nate Apart

Enrique describes Nate as someone who "may ask for guidance but does not wait for permission to own things." That instinct shows up in specific ways:

• Builds without waiting for permission. He spots recurring friction and starts solving it before anyone asks.

• Treats tooling as support work. The BigQuery app wasn't a side project. It was the same problem-solving mindset applied to internal systems.

• Made a career change stick. Marketing degree to technical support in under two years, with no CS background.

• Learned the fundamentals first. His bootcamp predated AI coding assistants, so he built his foundation without shortcuts.

• Knows when to escalate. His internal temperature gauge prevents him from spinning on problems that need more eyes.

• Invests in teammates. "I try to treat others how I would wanna be treated. If I can help someone out, always want to be available and be a champion for someone."

None of this was handed to him. He built it — one career pivot, one bootcamp, one internal tool at a time.

The Next Build

Somewhere in Sourcegraph's support queue, there's a question that keeps coming up. 

Maybe it's about a specific configuration. Maybe it's a request that requires digging through multiple systems. Nate is probably already noticing the pattern.

Soon, he'll start building something to fix it. He won't wait for permission.

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Plain builds customer support software for teams like Sourcegraph's — for support engineers who want to solve problems, not just close tickets.