by David I | Mar 20, 2018 | Conference, Developer Outreach, Developer Relations, Evans Data |
There’s less than a week until the start of the 14th Annual Evans Data Developer Relations Conference in Palo Alto California (March 25-27). With 6 keynote speakers, break out sessions, workshops, a Sunday boot camp, round table discussions and loads of time for networking, this year’s conference will be a spectacular opportunity to move your developer program to higher levels of success. There are only a few seats left for this one of a kind conference focused on developer relations best practices, developer program excellence and optimal developer outreach.
Here are a few of the “can’t miss” things that are happening during the conference.
Keynote Speakers
Janel Garvin, Evans Data Corp – Founder and CEO
Hot Topics in Software Development 2018
Janel will draw on multiple recent Evans Data development surveys to give a broad overview of the current development landscape spanning Cloud, Big Data, AI, Machine Learning, Mobile and IoT.
Paul Cutsinger, Amazon – Head of Alexa Voice Design Education
Anatomy of an Amazon Alexa Evangelist
Who are they? What makes them tick? What do they accomplish? In this session, you’ll get a behind the scenes look at how the Alexa evangelism team operates and what we strive to achieve.
Jonas Jacobi, IBM – Head of Developer Advocacy, Worldwide
IBM and The Developer Economy
Jonas will discuss how IBM has, in less than 12 months, changed its developer engagement strategy, changed the senior executive teams perspective of the developer economy, and rallied the entire company behind the mission to become the most trusted and respected technology company in the World.
Guy Kawasaki, Canva – Chief Evangelist
Developer Relations “Fireside” Chat
David Intersimone (“David I”), Evans Data’s Vice President of Developer Communities, will host a conversation with Guy Kawasaki covering developer relations best practice and experiences. They’ll also take questions from conference attendees. Kawasaki was chief evangelist of Apple and David was chief evangelist for Borland/Embarcadero Technologies’ Developer Tools Group.
Roger Chandler, Intel – Vice President & General Manager, Developer Programs & Initiatives
Co-Designing the Future with the Developer Ecosystem
For decades Intel has partnered with software developers around the world to define, deliver, and improve their products. Learn how Intel co-designs user-focused platforms with the software ecosystem, makes it easier for developers to better harness the capabilities of Intel products, and helps ISVs to better sell their software products. This talk will provide specific examples from IOT, Artificial Intelligence, PC Gaming, and Virtual Reality to make it all fit together so that end-users are delighted and developers can grow their business.
Sam Ramji, Google – Vice President of Product Management for Google Cloud Platform
Open, cloudy, platform-shaped: developer relations for a new normal
Open source is ascendant. Digital platforms are shaking up the Fortune 500. Cloud is eating the glass house. As stewards of the profession, we share an awesome responsibility to define new best practices for developer relations in a changing world. This presentation shares what we’ve learned at Google on the journey we all are on to the future of Dev Rel.
Expert Panel, Round Table Discussions, Live On-Stage Developer Focus Group
Future Directions for Developer Relations and Developer Technologies
Our panel of experts will discuss the future of developer programs and how new technologies are reshaping the features, conversations and deliverables for every developer community.
Moderator: David Intersimone (“David I”), Evans Data – Vice President of Developer Communities
Panelists:
Michael Aglietti, ThingWorx – VP of Developer Relations
Mithun Dhar, HERE – General Manager Developer Relations (Evangelism, Marketing, Engineering, and Product Management)
JJ Kass, Dropbox – Head of Developer Programs
Andrew Lee, Airbnb – Business Development and Developer Relations
Lothar Schubert, GE Digital – Director, Developer Relations
Hot Topic Round Table Discussions
Join your colleagues for in-depth roundtable discussions on topics that matter in Developer Relations, including: Measuring ROI and Metrics, Utilizing Social Media to Attract and Engage Developers, Scaling a DevRel Team, Running Hackathons and Events, Effectively Communicating with Developers, API success factors, Educating and Training Developer Communities, and the Art of Internal Evangelism.
Live Onstage Developer Focus Group – This is your chance to ask developers what you want to know – a panel of developers answer the questions you submit.
Moderator: David Intersimone (“David I”), Evans Data – Vice President of Developer Communities
Workshops
Kristen Scheven, AngelHack – Chief Marketing Officer
Sustainable Growth Marketing: Building a Developer Ecosystem that Lasts
People throw around the term growth hacking often, but very rarely does it lead to community growth that lasts. During this workshop, we’ll build a marketing action plan that focuses on creating a sustainable and diverse developer foundation through content marketing, email drip campaigns, developer outreach and complementary innovation programs.
Michael Rasalan, Evans Data – Director of Research
Benchmarking Developer Program Offerings and Quantifying User Satisfaction
To accurately target the developer market for your tools and services, segmentation is vital. This is commonly done by classifying developers by the types of applications they create. This typology is valuable and delivers results focused on developer targets, but sometimes you might want to look at developers by other segments. This interactive workshop looks at how various ways to segment the developer population and provides a jumping off point for examining developers that will allow you to expand your reach.
Yolanda Fintschenko, Ph.D., Fixate IO – Co-Founder and Chris Riley, Fixate IO – Co-Founder
The A to Z of Practitioner Content Marketing
In this workshop, we will define practitioner content marketing and how it compares to public relations, demand gen, and influencer marketing. We will then build a practitioner content marketing strategy with workshop participants.
Matt Schmidt, DZone – President
Building the Ideal Developer Community
A key component of a mature developer relations strategy is the effective use of community. How do devs on your team communicate and collaborate? What is the average amount of time it takes them to get answers? What if you could reduce the amount to time your team spends hunting down resources and resolving issues? A productive and engaged developer community can help your company reach its goals faster and cheaper, but it doesn’t happen overnight. Attend our workshop for a hands-on planning workshop that walks attendees through the process of launching an online developer community that is sure to be a success.
Breakout Sessions
Cliff Simpkins, Microsoft – Director, Azure Developer Marketing
Virtual Event ROI: Experiments and Learnings
Larry McDonough, VMware – Director, Product Management
Beyond the Portal: An Innovative Developer Engagement Approach
Desiree Motamedi, Facebook – Head of Developer Product Marketing
Developers and the Future of Technology
Mike Guerette, Red Hat – Global Developer Program Manager
Starting a Developer Program Begins with Data
Lothar Schubert, GE Digital – Director, Developer Relations / Product Marketing
Building Sticky Relationships with Developer Experiences
Marie Huwe, DocuSign – VP, Developer Programs and Evangelism
Developer Market Segmentation: Who are developers and what do they want?
Kris Chant, Salesforce – Developer Relations Director
Using Community to Grow your Developer Program
Scott Burnell, Ford Motor Company – Global Lead, Business Development & Partner Management
WIIFM?
Michelle Little, Evans Data Corp – Analyst
Digging Deeper: Understanding Developer Motivations.
Julie Anderson, HP Inc. – Developer Outreach Program Manager
Outreach in the Enterprise: Using Hackathons to Create Culture Change at HP Inc.
Sunday Boot Camp
The Evans Data Corporation’s Developer Relations Boot Camp provides a solid foundation on which you can build or enhance your developer program. Concentrated sessions in this one-day instructional program provide the insight and actionable information you can use to build your brand and establish strong relationships with your developer community.
After each session Boot Camp attendees will break into teams to work on projects related to each topic. Each team will report back to all attendees and discuss their findings and solicit feedback.
Boot Camp Faculty:
David Intersimone “David I” – Evans Data Corp – Vice President of Developer Communities
Michael Rasalan – Evans Data Corp – Director of Research
Scott Burnell – Ford Motor Company – Global Lead, Business Development & Partner Management
Michael Aglietti – ThingWorx – VP Developer Programs
Date: Sunday March 25, 2018
Time: 9am – 5:00pm
https://evansdata.com/drc/2018/bootcamp.php
by David I | Mar 10, 2017 | APIs, Developer News, Developer Programs News |
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 – Mar 9 – Reuters: Apple’s Siri learns Shanghainese as voice assistants race to cover languages – “Siri is the oldest of the bunch, and researchers including Oren Etzioni, chief executive officer of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Seattle, said Apple has squandered its lead when it comes to understanding speech and answering questions. But there is at least one thing Siri can do that the other assistants cannot: speak 21 languages localized for 36 countries, a very important capability in a smartphone market where most sales are outside the United States.”
Didi Chuxing – Mar 8 – TechCrunch: China’s Didi Chuxing opens U.S. lab to develop AI and self-driving car tech – “China’s Uber rival Didi Chuxing has officially opened its U.S.-based research lab. The new center is part of a move to suck up talent beyond Didi’s current catchment pool in China, particularly in the areas of AI and self-driving vehicles, but it doesn’t signal an expansion of its service into North America.”
Google – Mar 8 – Announcing Google Cloud Video Intelligence API, and more Cloud Machine Learning updates – “Cloud Video Intelligence API (now in Private Beta) uses powerful deep-learning models, built using frameworks like TensorFlow and applied on large-scale media platforms like YouTube. The API is the first of its kind, enabling developers to easily search and discover video content by providing information about entities (nouns such as “dog,” “flower” or “human” or verbs such as “run,” “swim” or “fly”) inside video content. It can even provide contextual understanding of when those entities appear; for example, searching for “Tiger” would find all precise shots containing tigers across a video collection in Google Cloud Storage.”
Microsoft – Mar 8 – ZDNet: Microsoft’s HoloLens: How these surgeons can now voyage around patients’ organs – “Using Microsoft’s HoloLens platform, researchers in Oslo have developed a way of turning traditional two-dimensional medical images into 3D augmented-reality models for planning surgery and navigating around organs during operations. The project by researchers at the Intervention Centre at Oslo University Hospital, working with developers at IT consultancy Sopra Steria, was recently awarded a Microsoft Health Innovation Award.”
Kaggle, Google – Mar 8 – Kaggle Joins Google Cloud – “I’m proud and excited to share that Kaggle is joining Google Cloud! The Kaggle team will remain together and will continue Kaggle as a distinct brand within Google Cloud. We will continue to grow our competitions and open data platforms, and we will remain open to all data scientists, companies, techniques and technologies. Kaggle Kernels will continue to support a diverse ecosystem of machine learning libraries and packages supported by Google as well as those outside of Google’s toolkit.”
NVIDIA – Mar 7 – PC World: Nvidia’s Pascal-powered Jetson TX2 computer blows away Raspberry Pi – “The Raspberry Pi may be the most widely known board computer being sold, but Nvidia’s Jetson TX2 is one of the fastest. The Jetson TX2, unveiled Tuesday, is a full Linux computer on a tiny board the size of a Raspberry Pi. It’s designed to help make robots, drones and other devices that rely on computer vision applications.”
IBM – Mar 7 – Forbes: LendIt Conference 2017 – IBM’s Brian Walter Talks AI And Financial Solutions – “Brian Walter is the Global Leader of Watson Client Insights and Cognitive Experience for the newly formed Watson Financial Services Solutions organization.” Discusses how AI is changing the financial world.
Lyft – Mar 7 – Announcing the Dispatch Developer Program – “Since the inception of our Developer Platform last year, we’ve worked to provide the best APIs and SDKs to uplift external developers to leverage our on-demand transportation network. Building upon this success, we’re very excited to announce the launch of our new Dispatch Developer Program. This program is centered around providing developers greater flexibility in integrating with Lyft by giving them the ability to request on-demand and scheduled rides without their customers requiring a smartphone or a Lyft account.”
IBM, Salesforce – Mar 6 – IBM and Salesforce Announce Landmark Global Strategic Partnership – “IBM and Salesforce today announced a global strategic partnership to deliver joint solutions designed to leverage artificial intelligence and enable companies to make smarter decisions, faster than ever before. With the partnership, IBM Watson, the leading AI platform for business, and Salesforce Einstein, AI that powers the world’s #1 CRM, will seamlessly connect to enable an entirely new level of intelligent customer engagement across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more.”
Maersk, IBM – Mar 5 – Maersk and IBM Unveil First Industry-Wide Cross-Border Supply Chain Solution on Blockchain – “IBM and Maersk announced today a new collaboration to use blockchain technology to help transform the global, cross-border supply chain. The blockchain solution based on the Hyperledger Fabric and built by IBM and Maersk, the global leader in transport and logistics, will be made available to the shipping and logistics industry. The solution will help manage and track the paper trail of tens of millions of shipping containers across the world by digitizing the supply chain process from end-to-end to enhance transparency and the highly secure sharing of information among trading partners.”
Mozilla – Mar 3 – The Story of Firefox OS – Ben Francis’ “version of the story of Firefox OS, from the birth of the Boot to Gecko open source software project as a mailing list post and an empty GitHub repository in 2011, through its commercial launch as the Firefox OS mobile operating system, right up until the ‘transition’ of millions of lines of code to the community in 2016.”
Amazon – Mar 3 – Announcing Lock Control and Query for Smart Home Skills – “Today we are happy to announce lock control and query, a new feature in the Smart Home Skill API now available in the US, with support for the UK and Germany coming soon. This feature is supported with locks from August, Yale, and Schlage as well as hub support from SmartThings and Wink. Now any developer targeting devices with locking behavior can enable customers to issue a voice command …”
Ozlo – Mar 2 – Our Platform Is Open For Business – “Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of our platform. Intelligent systems powered by Ozlo are able to have longer, more meaningful conversations that convert more frequently and increase customer engagement. Ozlo’s knowledge index is the first to offer probabilistic assertions alongside accepted facts — creating a fundamentally better model that reflects the nuances of everyday life. The index forms the foundational layer of our platform, which is a powerful suite of APIs that can be used to build an intelligent assistant from the ground up, increase the knowledge and understanding of an existing assistant technology, or power any system requiring deeper knowledge.”
Dotloop – Mar 2 – Dotloop Launches Improved Developer Platform – “Dotloop, simplifies the real estate buying and selling process, today announced the launch of a new dotloop application program interface (API) platform for developers. The update makes it easier for developers to more seamlessly create new integrations for external real estate technology and transaction services with dotloop’s platform. The improved dotloop API features an expanded and robust feature set, including the ability to create a new transaction (“Loop It”) within an external application as well as to enable two-way communication and flow of transaction between an application and dotloop.”
NASA – Mar 1 – NASA Releases Software Catalog, Granting the Public Free Access to Technologies for Earthly Applications – “NASA has released its 2017-2018 software catalog, which offers an extensive portfolio of software products for a wide variety of technical applications, all free of charge to the public, without any royalty or copyright fees. Available in both hard copy and online, this third edition of the publication has contributions from all the agency’s centers on data processing/storage, business systems, operations, propulsion and aeronautics. It includes many of the tools NASA uses to explore space and broaden our understanding of the universe. A number of software packages are being presented for release for the first time. Each catalog entry is accompanied with a plain language description of what it does.”
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 | Jan 23, 2017 | Developer Outreach, Developer Relations, Education |
Developers tell Evans Data that to be successful in their jobs they need learn about new tools, technologies and techniques that can facilitate their career growth and help their company. Some companies use Online Training MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), Learning Management Systems (LMS), training frameworks and online learning companies to provide continuing education for their software engineers. Companies also leverage these same educational systems to train their customers about their products, services, frameworks, SDKs and APIs. There are many ways that a company can provide training for their customers by providing how-to videos, tutorials, webinars, Wikis, white papers, development guides, and online conferences. In recent years, we’ve also seen the rise of developer focused companies leveraging course offerings by online training companies, universities and MOOCs.
Udacity, for example, has created “Nanodegree” education programs in partnerships with Google, Amazon, IBM Watson, Vive, Nvidia, Mercedes Benz, AT&T, Facebook and others. Universities, including MIT and Stanford, have put some of their degree program courses online. There are also several free, open source MOOC platforms you can use to create your own online developer university including edX and Moodle. At Khan Academy, anyone can create a new course and invite students to participate. Last December, Stephen Wolfram announced “Wolfram|Alpha Open Code” saying “Every day, millions of students around the world use Wolfram|Alpha to compute answers. With Wolfram|Alpha Open Code they’ll now not just be able to get answers, but also be able to get code that lets them explore further and immediately apply computational thinking.”
Does your Developer Relations Program offer Education Courses for developers? Should you partner with a university, online education company or build your own? Here are a few of the many companies, services, and software that can help you keep your developer community learning and thriving.
Free MOOC Software You Can Use for your University/Academy/Company
You can set up your own training university/academy for your customers using free software. Here are a couple of choices to explore.
Open edX – The open-source edX platform that is used for http://edx.org. Open edX was created by Harvard and MIT for their use. It is now used by universities around the world as part of the xConsortium. You can self host Open edX and there are also a community maintained list of service providers who support the hosting of Open edX. Note: Open edX uses both the AGPL and the Apache licenses. There is a blog post about using edX and Open edX for corporations.
Moodle – open source under the GNU General Public License and can be used for commercial and non-commercial use. From the Moodle.org site: “Moodle is a learning platform designed to provide educators, administrators and learners with a single robust, secure and integrated system to create personalised learning environments. You can download the software onto your own web server or ask one of our knowledgeable Moodle Partners to assist you. Moodle is built by the Moodle project which is led and coordinated by Moodle HQ, an Australian company of 30 developers which is financially supported by a network of over 60 Moodle Partner service companies worldwide.”
Online Training Companies
Over the past several years, there has been an explosion of developer related online training companies. The following is just a few of many available companies that you can partner with.
- Udacity – an online university spun out of Stanford University. Udacity offers courses and nanodegrees in partnership with technology companies including Google, Amazon, IBM, Mercedes Benz, NVIDIA, Salesforce, AT&T, Facebook, Cloudera and others. There is also a Udacity for Business page that describes how you can use Udacity for your employees and customers.
- Coursera – universal access to courses partnering with top universities and organizations. Coursera also provides “Coursera for Business“, online courses for a company’s employees and customers. Coursera also has a developer program with APIs that allow you to search for courses and also integrate into courses and tests.
- Udemy – online learning courses. From the About Udemy page: “Udemy is a global marketplace for learning and teaching online where students are mastering new skills and achieving their goals by learning from an extensive library of over 42,000 courses taught by expert instructors.” Udemy also has a “Udemy for Business” corporate learning platform with a list of corporate customers. The Udemy developer program and API allows programmers to create integrations and client applications.
There are many other learning companies that provide online and in-person courses for developers. Make sure you also check out General Assembly, Pluralsight, Codecademy, Treehouse, LinkedIn Learning (formerly known as Lynda), Open Learning, etc.
Companies Offering Online Education for Developers and Students
Here is a short list of examples where technology companies are providing online education programs directly or in partnership with online learning academies.
What is Your Developer Relations Program Doing to Educate Developers?
Send me an email and tell me what your developer relations program is doing to educate developers on your products, services, platforms, software, hardware, devices, etc.
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/
