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 | Feb 13, 2018 | Cloud Computing, Developer Community, Developer Relations, DevRelate |
It’s commonly thought that IT professionals and MIS Managers make the decisions when it comes to Cloud purchases, but a recent worldwide survey of software developers who are actively developing in and/or deploying to the Cloud shows that it is the software developer who is most likely to call the shots when it comes to Cloud infrastructure or tools. When asked about this, 58% said they are the primary decision makers, while another 22% are on a committee that makes those decisions. Only 20% have little or no influence.
When it comes to finding out about IaaS offerings, developers are most likely to go to search engines and search engine ads, however they most likely to gather information about PaaS offerings directly from vendors via websites, white papers, advertisements, etc.
“Developers absolutely have a great deal of influence in which Cloud platforms and technologies are being adopted,” said Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data Corp, “After all, they are the ones that will be using the tools and infrastructure and they always have strong opinions about what will work best for their circumstances.”
The biggest obstacle cited by 38% of these developers in their hunt for information to guide their Cloud purchases is that the technical information available assumes they already have Cloud knowledge. The next most often cited obstacle is that the technical content is often buried in marketing material (33% cite this).
The new Cloud Development survey is exclusively focused on developers who develop in and/or deploy to the Cloud. The 205 page reference covers topics such as; Motivations for Using Cloud, Building an Environment for cloud, Understanding Terms and Services, Approaches to Building in the Cloud, Cloud Services Evaluation and Implementation, Containers and Containerization, BlockChain, and other topics. Margin of error is 4.5%
See the complete Table of Contents and Methodology here: Table of Contents
Lessons Learned for your Developer Program
Using the results of the recent Cloud Development Survey report and other Evans Data developer focused research, you’ll know what to focus on for your developer program deliverables, “The Four T’s”, Technical Support, Technical Information, Training, and Tools & SDKs. Developers tell Evans Data that they stay in a developer program for the same reasons they joined. This also means that you need to ensure that you provide multiple entry points, based on experience level, for developers to learn how to use your tools, SDKs, APIs, devices, platforms and services.
About Evans Data Corporation
Evans Data Corporation provides regularly updated IT industry market intelligence based on in-depth surveys of the global developer population. Evans’ syndicated research includes surveys focused on developers in a wide variety of subjects.
Copyright 2018 Evans Data Corporation. All other company names, products and services mentioned in this document are the trademarks and property of their respective owners.
by David I | Aug 10, 2017 | APIs, Developer Community, Developer Relations, DevRelate, Programming, Tools |
More than 80 percent of developers tell Evans Data, in the Developer Relations Program Survey 2017, that they belong to one or more developer programs (free and/or paid). A majority of developers have consistently told Evans Data that they won’t use a product, service, platform, API, device, framework, library and other technologies if there isn’t an associated active developer community. The top reasons for joining and staying with a technology and a developer community are included in “The Four T’s”: technical support, technical information, training and tools. Being a part of a thriving developer community, developers tell Evans Data that there are three primary benefits that they report to their executives and managers: time saved, increased productivity and improved quality.
Time Saved
When your developer program provides great documentation, getting started guides, step by step tutorials, sample template projects, pre-built client and server libraries, videos, and code snippets programmers can save time learning your APIs, building applications and reusing code. In the Evans Data Developer Relations Survey 2017, more than three quarters of developers report that they save time because of their membership. The savings amount to being able to get more work done each week. Being able to access latest updates, bug fixes, and workarounds allows developers to avoid wasting time trying to track down a known problem. Talking with other developers in program forums and newsgroups can also save hours of wasted time that others have already incurred.
Increased Productivity
Using great tools, SDKs and content helps developers streamline their design, development, testing and deployment work. Leveraging the work done by your R&D team and developer advocates to help community members results in increased productivity for themselves and their teams. In my years of experience and with feedback from community members, it always helps to have someone show you the best practices and how to(s) for a technology allowing you to focus on what makes your solution unique to your company’s business. Copying sample code and reusing libraries and frameworks also saves time that can be used to work on other development projects.
Improved Quality
One of the best measures of developer program membership, according to developers in the recent Evans Data Developer Relations Program survey, is the improvement in the quality of their code. We know that developers write code. At the same time, developers also read code. Being a part of a developer program allows developers to avoid worst practices, talk with other developers about how to performance tune code, find and create workarounds for issues, write unit and system tests, use audits and metrics tools to identify code smells, and more. Hearing about development problems and solutions from other developers in community forums, in articles and on webinars helps another developer avoid the same problems, traps and pitfalls. Being able to access a bug tracking database on a developer program site will lead to better quality products being built by your customers and your own R&D teams.
Additional Benefits Heard from your Community Members?
Do you have additional developer benefits that you’ve heard from your developer community members? Send me an email with your list.
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 6, 2017 | Developer Community, Developer Population, Developer Relations, DevRelate, Webinar |
The value of segmenting your target audience is well known to marketers across industries. Populations don’t exist as a homogeneous group but always have variations that color their perceptions and their adoption of product offerings. The same is true for developers.
Software developers can be divided in segments based on many factors. These might include technologies they use, where they work, what gets their synapses firing, what programming languages they use, what motivates them, etc. Once developer segments are defined, you can start organizing your existing developer community and attracting additional developers to your developer program.
Creating developer personas is one of the first steps to applying more modern developer marketing techniques in a technology world that is more and more individualized. This DevRelate webinar will introduce you to different types of developers.
Agenda
- Developers Wear several hats
- Large and small companies/teams
- Today’s developer
- Platforms, languages, frameworks, tools
- Membership and success
- Motivations, aspirations, worries and fears
- First steps to creating developer personas
- Q&A
Dates/Times
Note: This webinar is offered several times. Select the date and time that works best for you using the drop down list on the GoToWebinar registration form. You can also see the webinar times shown in your time zone on the GoToWebinar registration form.
Tuesday, June 20, 2017
- 7am PDT (Santa Cruz) | 9am CDT (Chicago) | 10am EDT (New York) | 2pm GMT | 3pm BST (London) | 4pm CEST (Frankfurt)
- 10am PDT (Santa Cruz) | 12noon CDT (Chicago) | 1pm EDT (New York) | 5pm GMT | 6pm BST (London) | 7pm CEST (Frankfurt)
- 5pm PDT (Santa Cruz) | 8am CST (Beijing Wednesday, June 21) | 10am AEST (Sydney Wednesday June 21)
Thursday, June 22, 2017
- 7am PDT (Santa Cruz) | 9am CDT (Chicago) | 10am EDT (New York) | 2pm GMT | 3pm BST (London) | 4pm CEST (Frankfurt)
- 1pm PDT (Santa Cruz) | 2pm CDT (Chicago) | 3pm EDT (New York)
Register Now to Reserve your Seat: https://register.gotowebinar.com/rt/3599119755299893761
Who Should Attend
- Managers & Directors of Developer Programs
- Technology & Developer Evangelists
- Business Development Managers & Directors
- Product Marketing Managers & Directors
- Marketing Managers
- Product Managers
- Research Managers
- Corporate Communications Managers
- Heads of Developer Marketing
- ANYONE who deals with developers!
Presenter
David Intersimone “David I”, Vice President of Developer Communities, Evans Data Corporation
by David I | Feb 2, 2017 | Developer Community, Developer Outreach, Developer Relations, DevRelate |
I love doing webinars and hearing from attendees in the Q&A part of the event. It’s also great to receive emails after the webinar ends. During the webinar I can give quick answers for the questions and point attendees to additional sources of information. After the webinar I can do additional thinking and research to provide a more expansive response. Last week during my “Developer Relations Best Practices and Tools of the Trade” webinar, I was asked a wonderful question. The question was “If my resources are limited, what priorities should I focus on?”
Limited Resources? Activities that Won’t Take Long
When you have a small developer relations staff and/or budget you should look for the things you can do to communicate and grow your developer membership program. Here are some of my thoughts about the content and activities that you should consider.
- Write short blog posts with technology/product tips, tricks and how to(s). These don’t cost money and if you keep them short, you won’t have to spend a lot of time.
- Tweet news/tips to your developers and to the developer community
- Use Facebook Live/Video to put up short videos where you talk about your products/services/APIs – use your smartphone and just be yourself every day. Developers will love hearing from you, seeing you and also seeing something you are doing – showing a product/demo/solution quickly.
- Have your community members also share their videos, articles, tips/tricks – give them points/discounts if they help you with content.
- Automate as much as you can with programming/systems/tools – very important when you don’t have a large staff – that’s why I use Buffer for my Social media with the plugins it has for Chrome/FireFox/etc browsers -when I see an interesting article or finish a blog post – I can quickly post it everywhere.
- Build automated response systems for questions and emails coming from developers – this might take a little more work/development – to use Machine Leaning, Deep Learning and Bot technologies to handle the volume of email and forum posts from developers and give them answers and tips – leaving your team time to handle the tough inquiries.
- Provide bug tracking and workaround infrastructure – Atlassian Jira for example, allow your members to post bugs, post workarounds, post proposed fixes – they will help share the load to get better quality into your product/service.
- Allow your community members to add comments/content to your online documentation/wiki. Some worry about polluting the documentation – so you may set up the system (something like MediaWiki for example) to allow proposed comments/edits/additions/code/fixes and have someone review before including – make sure to have the member assure you that they are giving you the content and that they haven’t copied if from copyrighted materials (via the submission form).
- When you think you have automated as much as possible – then look at those things that are left and try to automate them as well.
- Create an MVP (Most Valuable Professionals), Community Leaders team to extend the # of devrel team members you have. Intel has their black belt members, Microsoft has their MVP program, Google has advocates, etc.
- When your engineering team is too busy to help, find ways to make it easy for them to help. For example, when I am doing webinars or technical sessions, rather than have the engineers prepare their own presentations, I would buy them lunch (they have to eat) and record a conversation with them and use it in the session or transcribe it into a document/slide deck.
- Have programming contests by your members to build apps using your products/services – give electronic based prizes – you’ll get more sample apps built or at least you’ll have apps stories to write about if members don’t want to give you their apps.
- Engage students/interns to help you – they don’t cost much (sometimes $zero if they get school/college credit) and can help with some of the work you need to get done and they also gain experience working with a company, it’s products/services/APIs.
- Interview your customers to create case studies and success stories. Record the interview and provide it for members. Transcribe the conversations to create documents for your developer/product web site – programmers talking to programmers about what they built, how they built it, what they learned, what more they want to do.
Top 3 Priorities to Focus On
I could say that you should do all of the above and more. But, if pressed to list three top priorities for content to generate for your developer community, here is my list.
- Content – tutorials, quick guides, How To(s), Sample code – “Content is King!”. Ask tyour engineering team to help.
- News – keep them up to date on product, API and company news – email newsletters once or twice a month.
- Videos – short (3-5 minutes) created by you, your team, engineers and leading community members.
Other Ideas and Priorities?
If your Developer Relations program, team and budget are limited, do you have additional advice? Send me an email and I will share them with our DevRelate community of Developer Relations professionals.
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/
