by David I | May 9, 2018 | Conference, Developer Relations, DevRelate, Education, Machine Learning |
When springtime arrives, developers and developer relation professionals know that it is major developer conference time in the US and around the world. Of course it all started with the annual Evans Data Developer Relations Conference, this year in Palo Alto California at the end of March. Most of you know that there are developer events and conferences throughout the year on every continent. At the same time, some of the most important and influential conference,s that impact developer programs and developers, are all scheduled during the months of May and June.
The Grand Slam of Springtime Developer Conferences
Facebook started things off on May 1 & 2 with their F8 conference in San Jose California. This week we have Microsoft Build 2018 in Seattle (from May 7 to 9) and Google IO 2018 in Mountain View (May 8 & 9) in the same week. It was fun to hear Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore, Corporate Vice President of Operating Systems, tell developers during his day 2 keynote that he would end at 10am so that some developers could switch over to the Google IO opening keynote. Apple will complete the grand slam with WWDC 2018 in San Jose from June 4th to 9th.
But Wait, there’s even more for Developers this Spring
Ciscolive! happens in Orlando Florida June 10-14. You might think that Cisco is a networking and hardware company, but they also have a great developer program with DevNet. I attended last year’s event in Las Vegas and the DevNet Zone has a huge exhibit and workshop space and loads of developer sessions during the conference.
DocuSign’s Momentum developer conference takes place in San Francisco on June 20-21, just before the end of Spring. “If you thought replacing paper with eSignature was a win, get ready to go further. It’s time for the modern System of Agreement. Get the insights, inspiration, and networking to take advantage of all that’s possible, next, and new with DocuSign.”
So Much New Tech to Learn. So Little Time. Tons of Developer Fun!
So much development tech to digest in such a short period of time. Let’s summarize them all with: more AI, more cloud, more services, more devices, more IoT, compute at the edge, more serverless, more APIs, more tools and more fun for developers of all types, sizes and locations. I’ll try to cover more in coming DevRelate blog posts.
If you are having a developer conference that starts before the first day of Summer (in the Northern Hemisphere), send me an email with the details.
David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://devnet.evansdata.org/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99
by David I | Oct 24, 2017 | Developer News, Developer Programs News, Developer Relations, DevRelate, Newsletter |
In today’s interconnected world, companies in all industries need to publish APIs and cultivate a developer community to access and use them. To be competitive today, attracting and supporting developers is essential. The key to cultivating a vibrant developer community that uses your APIs and supports your platform is a good developer relations program. “Developer Programs and APIs in the News” is a series of news items from developer programs around the world.
Developer Programs and APIs in the News
Amazon – October 24, 2017 – Introducing the All-New Amazon Appstore for Android Devices – “Today we’re excited to announce the all-new standalone Amazon Appstore mobile app for Android. The Amazon Appstore is available on millions of Amazon Fire TV, Fire tablet, and Android devices in 236 countries and territories. The new mobile app is redesigned from the ground up, allowing customers to enjoy the same apps and games that they engage with on Fire TV and Fire tablets on their mobile phones.”
Google – October 24, 2017 – Gmail Add-ons framework now available to all developers – “Now anyone can start building a Gmail add-on. Gmail Add-ons let you integrate your app into Gmail and extend Gmail to handle quick actions.”
Apple, GE – October 18, 2017 – Apple and GE partner to bring Predix industrial apps to iPhone and iPad – “Apple and GE today announced a partnership to deliver powerful industrial apps designed to bring predictive data and analytics from Predix, GE’s industrial Internet of Things (IoT) platform, to iPhone and iPad. The two companies unveiled a new Predix software development kit (SDK) for iOS, which gives developers the tools to make their own powerful industrial IoT apps.”
Google, JFrog, Red Hat, IBM, Black Duck, Twistlock, Aqua Security, CoreOS – October 12, 2017 – Introducing Grafeas: An open-source API to audit and govern your software supply chain – “Building software at scale requires strong governance of the software supply chain, and strong governance requires good data. Grafeas is an open source initiative to define a uniform way for auditing and governing the modern software supply chain. Grafeas (scribe in Greek) provides organizations with a central source of truth for tracking and enforcing policies across an ever growing set of software development teams and pipelines. Build, auditing and compliance tools can use the Grafeas API to store, query and retrieve comprehensive metadata on software components of all kinds.”
Google – October 12, 2017 – Introducing Android Instant Apps SDK 1.1 – “Since our public launch at Google I/O, we’ve been working hard to improve the developer experience of building instant apps. Today, we’re excited to announce availability of the Android Instant Apps SDK 1.1 with some highly-requested features such as improved NDK support, configuration APKs for binary size reduction, and a new API to maintain user’s context when they transition from an instant app to the installed app.”
Dialogflow, API.AI – October 10, 2017 – Introducing Dialogflow, the new name for API.AI – “We realized that we were doing so much more than just providing an API. So with that, we’d like to introduce Dialogflow – the new name for API.AI.Our new name doesn’t change the work we’re doing with you or our mission. Our mission continues to be that Dialogflow is your end-to-end platform for building great conversational experiences and our team will help you share what you’ve built with millions of users.”
Apple – October 6, 2017 – Creating and Promoting Your AR Apps – “ARKit lets you seamlessly blend realistic virtual objects with the real world, so you can take your apps beyond the screen. Use these resources to learn how to clearly indicate when the user enters AR, show users what to expect from your AR experiences with app previews, and build Face Tracking support for iPhone X.”
Google – October 4, 2017 – Apps for the Google Assistant: new languages, devices and features! – “As you may have seen, it’s a big day for the Google Assistant with new features, new devices and new languages coming soon. But it’s also a big day for developers like you, as Actions on Google is also coming to new devices and new languages, and getting better for building and sharing apps.”
Twitter – September 25, 2017 – Refreshing and bringing together our developer resources – “Today we are launching developer.twitter.com — replacing and bringing together gnip.com and dev.twitter.com — as a complete reference center for Twitter’s developer platform. The new site will be a hub for all developer resources. Whether integrating with Twitter for the first time, or innovating and scaling solutions for your customers, you can look to developer.twitter.com as a place to learn, to manage tools and APIs, and to engage with the Twitter developer community worldwide.”
Apple – September 19, 2017 – The All-new App Store is Here – “The App Store has grown beyond anything we could have ever imagined. And now, with daily stories by our editors, a dedicated Games tab, lists for all kinds of apps, and much more, this beautiful new design provides an amazing place to highlight your incredible work — and help customers discover new apps and games.”
Telstra – September 12, 2017 – Welcome to the new T.DEV! – “At Telstra we’re embarking on a new journey to connect you, the developer, to our services. We realise the importance developers have in coming up with new innovations, in growing new businesses and by shaping the world as we all move up the stack. Telstra is getting closer to developers in a big way, and in some ways we’ve already been talking with developers for a long time through programs.”
Amazon – September 7, 2017 – Export your Amazon Lex bot schema to the Alexa Skills Kit – “You can now export your Amazon Lex chatbot schema into the Alexa Skills Kit to simplify the process of creating an Alexa skill. Amazon Lex now provides the ability to export your Amazon Lex chatbot definition as a JSON file that can be added to the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK). ”
Microsoft – August 28, 2017 – Introducing the Xamarin Certified Mobile Professional Badge – “We’re pleased to introduce a new certification level at Xamarin University, the Xamarin Certified Mobile Professional! This badge will be our initial certification level for developers to demonstrate fundamental competency in Xamarin mobile development.”
Arduino – July 28, 2017 – A New Era for Arduino Begins Today – “This is the beginning of a new era for Arduino in which we will strengthen and renew our commitment to open source hardware and software, while in parallel setting the company on a sound financial course of sustainable growth. Our vision remains to continue to enable anybody to innovate with electronics for a long time to come.”
Samsung – June 21, 2017 – A Must Watch for Game Developers: The Seven Rules of Monetization – “In what was a jam-packed hour, Oscar spoke about the importance of learning through experimentation, failure and data, offering expertise and examples designed to help developers avoid the mistakes he’s seen throughout his almost 20 years in monetization and social freemium game design.”
Send me your Developer Programs News!
If you have news about your Developer Relations Program, send me an email about the news.
David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://www.devrelate.com/blog/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidi99/
by David I | Aug 9, 2017 | APIs, Cloud Computing, DevRelate, Programming |
When a developer’s app is built using one or more remote services and a problem occurs, users will start reporting a problem. Users will not necessarily know what is causing the problem. It could be issues with a cloud based service’s API, a cloud storage system or a bug in the software. How can your app know what the problem? Developer programs that provides services and APIs should also provide a live, frequently updated status page. Providing status APIs and pages allows the software, developers, partners, ISVs and even end users to track down problems. Ultimately the solution to any problem is the responsibility of the app developer (and company) regardless of where the fault is. Well designed and implemented developer programs should provide an API to check status and receive notifications for apps to fail-over, recover, fail gracefully and display problem information and solutions to users.
Developer System Status Pages
Here are a few developer program system status pages that I’ve found in my research and assessments. Some sites also provide APIs, feeds and subscriptions to program and API status information.
Status Page Hosting and API services
Altassian, for example, provides to customers a status page hosting service and API. You can find details of the developer service at https://www.statuspage.io/. Here is a list of some of the companies that use the hosting and API service:
3rd Party Status Check Sites
There are several 3rd party status check sites that monitor popular sites and provide an edit box to input a URL. You can use these services to see if another site/service is up or down. Some, like DownDetector, provide APIs (for a fee) to check on service status.
Do you provide a service status page and status API as part of your developer program?
If you have your developer service status and API, send me an email with additional information and the links to the status page and API.
David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://www.devrelate.com/blog/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidi99/
by David I | Jun 30, 2017 | Conference, Developer Marketing, Developer Outreach, Developer Relations, DevRelate, Outreach |
I spent the past few days in Las Vegas for the Cisco Live 2017 C-Scape industry analysts meetup. I had two days (thankfully in air conditioned rooms and buses) of meetings with executives, leaders of product groups, and customers in general sessions, round table discussions and one on one meetings. I also attended the opening keynote with Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins and had the pleasure to witness his sit down conversation with Apple CEO Tim Cook. There is plenty of news about Cisco’s announcements, products, and technologies in the news, so I won’t repeat those sorts of things here. This DevRelate blog post is focused on how Developer Relations outreach can be multiply integrated into a company’s in-person conference.
Best Practices for an Integrated Developer/User Event
At most technology company conferences, you already have most of your executives, product managers, marketing specialists, and technology gurus. Combining partner, analyst, partner, ecosystem and press meetings into the same location makes a lot of sense. Cisco did a great job of bringing us into the middle of their conference including meetings with customers who talked about their success stories. We had plenty of time to ask questions during the meetings as well as during informal conversations during dinners later in the evening.
I got to hear from customers during some of the general sessions and round table discussions. While it is always good to talk with members of the teams, it is a special pleasure to be able to listen to and ask questions of customers and their experiences.
I really enjoyed the discussions with Michael Giresi, CIO of Royal Caribbean about how extended teams work closely together to enhance their customer’s experiences with project teams that include IT, DevOps, Business, Product, and Developer members. From my notes he said “it is about the team being accountable for the complete solution – embedding accountability for the complete experience versus just the application experience. Assign ownership for the performance of the whole solution – assign the right people to the ‘whole team’. The concept of applications and infrastructure being separate is nuts! The old way doesn’t work anymore.”
I also got to talk with Michael Sherwood, Director of the Department of Information Technologies for the City of Las Vegas about the implementation of their Smart City plans to include IoT, Open Data and Developer APIs. Michael even sent me a follow up email yesterday with additional information and links.
It was very clear that software, developers and APIs were front and center in just about every hardware and software product presentation and demonstration. Integrating a very active Cisco DevNet Zone in the convention center with class rooms, hands on workshops, and cool developer solutions also reinforced the theme of developers at the center of everything. While developers often think of APIs for platforms, frameworks and services, Cisco also demonstrated the openness of programming at the ASIC level.
When you are planning your conference, you can leverage your company and team members investments to the maximum by integrating your whole “extended” ecosystem – technology, marketing, research, partners, analysts, experts, authors, consultants, developers, thought leaders, trainers, educators, and others to orchestrate a complete event. For those technology and software companies that integrate and add value, you can also be a part of the larger story during the event. I am probably already preaching to the choir, but piggy-backing on an event to reach out to a larger developer audience is always a good thing.
Just before I left the Cisco DevNet Zone and the convention center, I stopped by the Cisco DevNet Opportunity Project pod. Cisco DevNet is encouraging developers, companies and others to get involved to “unleash the power of data and technology to expand economic opportunity in communities nationwide. To create solutions that help families, local leaders, and businesses access information about the resources they need to succeed.” Find out more about the US Department of Commerce Opportunity Project at https://opportunity.census.gov/
While it was extremely hot outside in Las Vegas this week (glad to be home in the cool environment of Monterey Bay), it was also extremely beneficial to see the awesome team at Cisco and the wide array of tech companies and developers working together to move our industry forward. I hope that you all have success in your future events whether they be small, medium, large, extra large or XXXXL.
What are your Best Practices for a Completely Integrated Developer Event Experience?
If you have your own best practices where you integrate multiple audiences, partners, press, analysts, users, developers and others in your events, send me an email with what works best for you.
David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://www.devrelate.com/blog/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidi99/
by David I | Jun 7, 2017 | Developer News, Developer Programs News, DevRelate |
In today’s interconnected world, companies in all industries need to publish APIs and cultivate a developer community to access and use them. To be competitive today, attracting and supporting developers is essential. The key to cultivating a vibrant developer community that uses your APIs and supports your platform is a good developer relations program. “Developer Programs and APIs in the News” is a series of news items from developer programs around the world.
Developer Programs and APIs in the News
Apple – June 6, 2017 – Updated App Store Review Guidelines Now Available – “The App Store Review Guidelines have been updated. We review all apps submitted to the App Store in an effort to determine whether they are reliable, perform as expected, and are free of offensive material. As you plan and develop your app, make sure to use these updated guidelines.”
Apple – June 5, 2017 – See What’s Next for Xcode, macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS – “The new beta of Xcode 9 is now available, and includes Swift 4 and SDKs used to build apps with the latest innovations and powerful capabilities in macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS.”
Apple – June 5, 2017 – Introducing ARKit – “iOS 11 introduces ARKit, a new framework that allows you to easily create unparalleled augmented reality experiences for iPhone and iPad. By blending digital objects and information with the environment around you, ARKit takes apps beyond the screen, freeing them to interact with the real world in entirely new ways.”
Apple – June 5, 2017 – Introducing Core ML framework – “Integrate machine learning models into your app. Core ML is the foundation for domain-specific frameworks and functionality. Core ML supports Vision for image analysis, Foundation for natural language processing, and GameplayKit for evaluating learned decision trees. Core ML itself builds on top of low-level primitives like Accelerate and BNNS, as well as Metal Performance Shaders.”
Rice University – June 1, 2017 – Rice U. scientists slash computations for deep learning – “Rice University computer scientists have adapted a widely used technique for rapid data lookup (Hashing) to slash the amount of computation — and thus energy and time — required for deep learning, a computationally intense form of machine learning. Hashing can eliminate more than 95 percent of computations.”
Google – June 1, 2017 – 2017 Android Security Rewards – “We’re constantly working to improve the Android Security Rewards program and today we’re making a few changes to all vulnerability reports filed after June 1, 2017. Because every Android release includes more security protections and no researcher has claimed the top reward for an exploit chains in 2 years, we’re excited to increase our top-line payouts for these exploits.”
Microsoft – June 1, 2017 – Microsoft’s high-performance, open source, deep learning toolkit VErsion 2.0 is now generally available – “Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit version 2.0 is now in full release with general availability. Cognitive Toolkit enables enterprise-ready, production-grade AI by allowing users to create, train, and evaluate their own neural networks that can then scale efficiently across multiple GPUs and multiple machines on massive data sets.”
Apple – June 1, 2017 – Developer Earnings from the App Store Top $70 Billion – “Apple today announced that its global developer community has earned over $70 billion since the App Store launched in 2008. The App Store is home to the most innovative apps in the world and in the past 12 months alone, downloads have grown over 70 percent.”
Kleiner Perkins – May 31, 2017 – Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends 2017 Report – “Global Internet Trends = Solid User Growth… Slowing SmartPhone Growth. Online Advertising (+ Commerce) = Increasingly Measurable + Actionable. Interactive Games = Motherlode of Tech Product Innovation + Modern Learning. Media = Distribution Disruption @ Torrid Pace. The Cloud = Accelerating Change Across Enterprises.”
Cisco, IBM – May 31, 2017 – Cisco and IBM Join Forces to Tackle Cybercrime – “Cisco and IBM Security today announced they are working together to address the growing global threat of cybercrime. In a new collaboration, Cisco and IBM Security will work closely together across products, services and threat intelligence for the benefit of customers. Cisco® security solutions will integrate with IBM’s QRadar to protect organizations across networks, endpoints and cloud.”
nodejs.org – May 30, 2017 – Node v8.0.0 – “The next major release of Node.js brings a range of significant changes and additions.” Includes: npm v5.0.0, JavaScript runtime V8 5.8, asynch hooks, WHATWG URL parser, Buffer changes, Improved support for Promises and more.
Oracle – May 30, 2017 – Proposed schedule change for JDK 9 – “As you probably know by now, the JCP Executive Committee (EC) recently voted not to approve JSR 376, the Java Platform Module System, for the next stage of the process. This vote does not mean that JSR 376 is dead, nor that Jigsaw has been rejected. It only means that the EC raised a number of concerns that it wanted the JSR 376 Expert Group (EG) to address…To be specific, I propose that we move the GA date out by eight weeks, from 27 July to 21 September.”
Red Hat, Codenvy – May 25, 2017 – Red Hat to Acquire Codenvy, Provider of Agile and Cloud-Native Development Tools – “Red Hat, Inc. announces that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Codenvy, provider of cloud-native development tools that enable developers to more easily create modern container-based and cloud-native applications. By adding Codenvy to its existing portfolio of developer tools and application platforms, including Red Hat JBoss Middleware and Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat continues its efforts to provide solutions that enable developers to create applications for hybrid cloud environments.”
Send me your Developer Programs News!
If you have news about your Developer Relations Program, send me an email about the news.
David Intersimone “David I”
Vice President of Developer Communities
Evans Data Corporation
davidi@evansdata.com
Blog: https://www.devrelate.com/blog/
Skype: davidi99
Twitter: @davidi99
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidi99/
