John Drinkwater is a Zoom Community Champion, Zoom Developer Champion, Zoom MVP, and winner of the 2026 Zoom Developer Innovation Award.
Known throughout the Toastmasters community as “Lord Zoom,” John has spent more than five years producing, experimenting with, and building on Zoom. He now runs between three and five Zoom-focused shows every week, covering production, engagement, apps, integrations, new features, and the expanding Zoom developer ecosystem.
John’s interest in software goes back much further than Zoom.
He has been coding on computers since 1979, giving him a perspective that spans several generations of computing, from the early days of personal computers through the web era and into today’s world of APIs, SDKs, cloud platforms, and AI-assisted development.
During the 2000s, John worked as a WordPress developer, building websites and online systems at a time when the web was becoming a central part of how businesses communicated and operated.
Today, that same instinct to understand technology, experiment with it, and make it do something useful has led him into Zoom development.
The tools have changed dramatically over the years, but the underlying approach has remained remarkably consistent:
Understand the problem, understand the technology, and then build something useful.
John is an active member of the Zoom Community, which now brings together more than half a million members around the world.
As a Zoom Community Champion, he regularly contributes to the forums, answers questions, shares practical experience, and joins discussions around how people are actually using Zoom.
For John, the real value of the community is the opportunity to learn together.
No single person can test every feature, discover every workaround, or experience every possible use of Zoom. By sharing what works, what does not, and what we discover along the way, the community collectively learns far more than any of us could working alone.
That philosophy of learning through sharing runs through much of John’s work.
As Zoom expanded its platform through APIs, SDKs, Zoom Apps, and other developer technologies, John moved naturally from simply producing on Zoom to building for Zoom.
Many of his applications began as solutions to problems in his own productions. If Zoom could almost do something he wanted, the question became:
Could we build the missing piece?
One of John’s advantages as a developer is that he is also a daily Zoom user.
He does not approach Zoom purely from an API reference or SDK documentation. He runs meetings, events, demonstrations, and productions on the platform constantly, so he sees first-hand where workflows are smooth, where they become awkward, and where a small application or integration could make a significant difference.
That day-to-day use has also given him a deeper practical understanding of how Zoom behaves as a complete platform — not simply what an individual API call can do.
For John, good Zoom development is therefore not about adding software for the sake of it. It is about understanding the native Zoom experience first, then deciding where an application can extend it without unnecessarily replacing what Zoom already does well.
This combination of user, producer, and developer perspectives influences the way he designs applications and integrations.
John also works extensively with third-party software. He both uses and develops integrations that connect Zoom with other parts of an organisation’s technology stack, particularly Learning Management Systems (LMS) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, as well as other event, production, and business platforms.
The objective is often to make Zoom part of a wider workflow: sharing data appropriately between systems, automating repetitive processes, improving the participant journey, and allowing organisations to use Zoom in ways that fit their existing operations.
Today, John develops Zoom-connected applications, integrations, and experimental tools through AppsCetera, with selected apps made available to the wider community and more advanced solutions developed for professional and corporate use.
As a Zoom Developer Champion, John is also active within the Zoom Developer community and developer forums. He regularly participates in Zoom Developer Office Hours, contributing the perspective of somebody actively building and using applications in real-world Zoom productions.
This allows his practical development experience to complement the technical knowledge of Zoom’s Developer Advocates.
Again, the philosophy is the same: developers achieve far more when they share discoveries, problems, experiments, and solutions with each other.
In recognition of his contribution to the Zoom developer ecosystem, John received the 2026 Zoom Developer Innovation Award.
John is also a recognised Zoom MVP.
Through this role, he works with Zoom to help promote Zoom, its technologies, its ecosystem, and its partners to the wider world of Zoom users.
That includes demonstrating new capabilities, experimenting with emerging features, creating educational content, and showing organisations what becomes possible when Zoom is treated not simply as a meeting platform, but as part of a much broader communications and production environment.
John has been running live productions on Zoom for more than five years and today produces several Zoom-focused shows every week.
That production background strongly influences the way he approaches software development.
Rather than beginning with technology and looking for somewhere to use it, he tends to start with a real production problem:
What are we trying to achieve? What is getting in the way? And could a small piece of software make the experience better?
Sometimes the answer is a simple utility. Sometimes it is a Zoom App. Sometimes it involves APIs, SDKs, production systems, hardware, or integrations with completely different platforms.
Through AppsCetera, John now works with organisations that want to extend what Zoom can do — whether through small custom applications, branded corporate variations, licensable codebases, workflow automation, or integrations with other systems.
John’s work sits at the intersection of community, production, and development.
He believes some of the most interesting innovations do not necessarily come from enormous software projects. Often, a relatively small application can remove a frustrating limitation, improve a workflow, create a better participant experience, or allow Zoom to work with another part of an organisation’s technology stack.
His approach can perhaps be summed up in one sentence:
Use Zoom. Understand Zoom. Extend Zoom. Share what you learn.