At /Data, we pride ourselves on being the analysts of the developer economy. Developer marketing and developer relations (or DevRel for industry insiders) are in our DNA. In our annual Future Developer Summit event, we bring together some of the champions of the industry and ask them how they do it. In September 2018 we published the output of the insights from those events,   a walkthrough guide to successful developer marketing, essential to new professionals in the field and still relevant even to the most seasoned veterans. Still, we felt that we had so many more topics to cover and many more professionals we wanted to be heard. So, in March 2019, we launched our podcast series Under the Hood of Developer Marketing , where we invited professionals to share their success and failure stories in 40-minute interviews. After 6 episodes, we’re ready to wrap up our first season. Here’s a collage of some of the best parts from our first episodes, but we encourage listening for yourself so you don’t miss anything! Developer marketing and developer relations (DevRel) are not the same. They are interlinked. Jo Stichbury, our podcast host, tackled that topic specifically in a previous blog post . Yet, if we were to sum it up here, we’d use Andreas Constantinou words from episode 1: “I’ve been grappling with that distinction for a while. For me, it maps roughly as marketing vs client relations map in any other field. Marketing is about defining target audience, marketing plans, engagement channels, how to reach developers, product marketing and communications. Relations is about all the fieldwork, working with developers to help them understand how to use your tools to build better apps. Going from the company to the developer and then from the developer to the company. Some companies call that Developer Advocates.” What skills should a DevRel professional possess? Passion. Curiosity. Empathy. Inclusion. Passion By Mary Thengvall “They [DevRel professionals] are passionate about their community. They want to enable the developers and community they are working with, to do their best possible work. […] That passion leads them to give talks about best practices or connect more people because they’re interested in digging those relationships within the community. And that passion for their community really drives it and you can see it on the technical work they’re doing, and the community work they’re doing.” By Jeremy Meiss “I love building relationships. I think it is just exciting and brings a lot of a purpose to do what I do. It is what really drives me to be a part of [DevRel] and spend this as my career. It’s something I’ve I really passionate about.” Inclusion By Katherine Miller “The events that have been done really effectively are the ones that really understand the different audiences and craft experiences and content that match the needs of those audiences. Whether you are there as an attendee, as press, as an analyst, as a partner, as a practitioner, there’s a place for you at the event and you know how to find it. And when you walk away from an event, you feel that you have gotten out of the event that what you’re looking for.” By Adam FitzGerald “With Diversity, the most important thing is to make sure the internal culture has the sorts of tools and mechanisms that make for better understanding.” By Arabella David “We have the online component and the in-person component. The in-person component helps me measurably in increasing the diversity and inclusion. There is always a venue and a reason for people to come and hang out together and do something together. Once you boil these basic human needs to get together and make things together, you have unlocked a whole new level of inclusion.” By Jeremy Meiss: “You have to know, what’s your audience like and why are they coming there, what are the things they enjoy the most. So that you can help craft an experience that meets that.” Empathy By Arabella David: “What helps me get the best out of everybody and produce the best for developers, is always keeping their needs and what they want prioritised.” By Jeremy Meiss: “Developers don’t care that you know, until they know that you care. That embodies that empathy and developer advocacy so much.[…] It’s important to have a good code of conduct, you can’t deal in just black and white. There’s the importance of understanding that each situation is different and keeping community trajectory and health at the forefront of your decisions ” By Adam Fitzgerald: “You really need to understand that talking to developers is a critical part of what means business success. A developer actually means something to you and might even drive your [product] success.” Curiosity By Adam Speyer “[For me] I think what happened is…I just jumped in. You need some technical acumen or an interest and really a good dose of curiosity. I think understanding of the things that matter, just jumping in and learning in that way.” By Adam FitzGerald “Curiosity I would say is the one thing [on how to extend yourself.] I like keep being curious. It’s the one thing that I would keep reinforcing to my younger self. What do developers think of marketing? Fasten your seatbelts because Adrian Speyer sums it in a great way “Most of the time the answer I got from them [developers] is that they want frictionless experiences. They just want to get the answers, they need to move the project forward. They really enjoy seeing how people are ingenious and doing things and solving problems. And of course they’re very, very allergic to obvious marketing ploys. So I think authenticity is really important. I think really it was hard with marketing messages and is probably not the way to go. And certainly focus on showcasing people that are creating crazy or cool things with your project.” You can find Part 2, which further highlights season 1 of our podcast series here . In the meantime, why not listen for yourself and let us know about the common themes you spotted in the interviews. We noticed more than a few! You can listen to all our episodes and get in touch at developermarketingpodcast.com #developermarketing

The technology industry often takes credit for the changing world of work. One example is the model of remote employees working as digital nomads in their favourite coffee shop, connected via Slack and collaborating via the cloud to create products and services for consumption over the internet or on smartphones and tablets. But what about work within the technology industry itself? We take a look at the profile of women in technology and compare it with the profile of their male counterparts. If we exclude those who preferred not to share their gender with us, and those who skipped this optional question, female developers responding to our survey were outnumbered by males by a ratio of 1 to 10 (9% women and 91% men). This suggests a global population of 1.7 million women developers and 17 million men. The technology industry is dominated by men and the imbalance in numbers is such that we cannot make numerical comparisons between men and women. Instead, in the rest of this chapter, we will look at relative differences in terms of experience, age and roles adopted, and the most common company sectors and development areas for men and women. What are their ages? Looking at the comparative ages of male and female developers, we find a higher percentage of women are under the age of 35. The 25-34 age group accounts for the largest number of developers of both genders (36% of women, 33% of men), yet male developers are more likely to be older: we found 37% of male developers are over 35 years, compared to 29% of women developers. There are (at least) two different ways of interpreting this observation. One is to say that women are being increasingly drawn to software development; the comparatively young profile of women compared to men illustrates recent gains made in attracting girls and young women into technology. Analysis of college data for entrants to computer science courses, in North America at least, suggests that this is indeed a plausible explanation, as women are increasingly studying courses in the subjects that lead to a career in technology. An alternative, or additional, explanation is that women may have always been involved, but tend to leave software development as they get older, either by choice or necessity. And here’s a preview of the roles they undertake: What is their educational background? When we looked into the education levels of the genders, we noted that women developers are equally likely to have been educated to degree level in computing/software engineering when compared to men. Likewise for other classroom training that doesn’t lead to specific degrees, and for attendance at developer bootcamps. Women are slightly more likely than men to have learned their craft using online course materials and slightly less likely to have learned on-the-job. Women are significantly less likely to be self-taught (57% of women compared to 75% of men) but it is still the most popular way of learning about development for both genders. The relatively older profile of men probably explains why more have become self-taught: they have engaged in continuous education throughout their longer career because of the rapidly changing nature of the industry. As women developers mature, we would expect the level of “self-taught” women to rise as they also teach themselves new skills to advance their career. For more details on the Gender Wars, you can download our State of the Developer Nation 16th Edition report. It’s free and full of insights. #developers #men #women #womendevelopers

Have you ever wondered what the difference is between developer marketing and developer relations? And what is the difference between  an advocate and evangelist? Just who is behind those developer portals you use for the developer documentation and who answers your queries on official forums? Read on to find out! In this blog post, I’ll set out to disambiguate the roles within a company’s developer outreach team and explain what each person does and where they focus their attention. If you are a developer, you have likely visited a number of portals and joined communities over the years, some successful and some less so. You’ll find it interesting to know the inside story on how they are put together and what happens behind the scenes. If you work with developers, or are planning to, you’ll also find this post useful, particularly if you are considering building a developer community, or funding one. It’s also likely to be something that you need to consider if you already have a nascent community running already but want to push into the next level of the developer community maturity model. Here at /Data, our Developer Program Benchmarking reports track how developers perceive individual developer programs. Twice per year, we measure developer adoption, engagement, and satisfaction across the industry, reaching over 40,000 developers in more than 165 countries. Our data shows that developers visit the top developer portals at least once per week and, on average, developers report to be involved with 3.1 different developer communities. These days, development uptake revolves around community, and your outreach team is likely to have a huge bearing on your success. So, without further digression, let’s dive in to the structure of a typical developer outreach team. Developer product engineering What is a company’s developer product? Well, it could be a Github repo that you clone, or an installable tool. it could be a zip file that you download, maybe it’s an API, maybe it’s a library or a package. It’s something you use if you are a developer — and somebody made it. That person, or group of people, sit in the developer product team. The developer product team can range from a handful of developers to hundreds of people in big organisations. This team is responsible for setting out their product strategy & roadmap, for developing the product and its supporting documentation & sample code, plus tooling, and libraries and IDE integration where relevant. They will be the know how behind the technical support provided when you need it. Their goal is to develop the best product for you, the audience, in terms of its usability and relevance. They will want to know how to improve their offering to you, and also want to be able to demonstrate to their company that they are worthy of what has been invested in them. Many product teams would agree that the marketing metrics of “who read our blog?” or “ how many twitter followers do we have?” don’t really apply to them. In our recent book, Developer Marketing: The Essential Guide,  Pablo & Rex of Arm’s developer ecosystem team, made the point that their goal is to help developers’ code run better on Arm products, and their efforts in this direction is what they need to measure. Their approach is to educate themselves on their developer audience so well that they find a unique way to serve them and make their lives better, thus raising their awareness of the company. In the book, they describe how they spent time meeting developers and listening to woes about a particular development workflow. They set out to build a tool to smooth out the experience for developers, and set themselves a target for the installation process to get a developer up and running in under 5 minutes. Developer relations Now we’ve seen into the team building the developer product, let’s turn to the main interface between that team and developers using their output: those working in developer relations. Their goal is to build credibility, trust and influence with developers for the company they represent. Many people struggle with working out exactly how to pin down the role of developer relations, and those working in it may alternatively be labelled community manager, developer evangelists or advocate. The role incorporates some marketing, but it also fits alongside the product group and within engineering. We’ve described previously that developers don’t trust always marketing, so developer relations is often seen as the bridge or connector between the two. Developer relations is about field work: working with developers to help them understand how to use the developer product. Some of the activities you may find developer relations working on include: – public speaking – attending hackathons and contests – writing sample code and running demos – social media (including technical blogging) – attending events and meetups – hosting office hours A role in two parts The developer relations team has two distinct ways of working. Part of their responsibility is evangelism: to communicate the company’s message to external developers. They may find themselves explaining which features are available and which are not, yet. Conversely, the other part of their job is advocacy: to convey the developers’ views back to the product team. Developer relations practitioners are familiar with saying “I’m getting very strong feedback from people who use X that we should actually include feature Y and not Z”, and defend specific feature requests to the product team. It’s a very important role, advocating on behalf of the developers to the company and evangelising the company to the developers. It’s also something of a balancing act at times. In our recent podcast with Mary Thengvall, author of a recent book about developer relations and well-established community builder, she said: “… you’re constantly going back to the company with feedback from the community or turning around and explaining to the community why a product roadmap looks the way that it does and why those are the decisions you’ve made. You find that you’re explaining why we’ve made decisions or what best practices we have decided to follow. There’s a lot of storytelling in there, fitting your knowledge to the perspective of the person that you are talking to. Taking the feedback from the developer audience and the technical audience and communicating that in a way that the product team and the stakeholders and the company are going to understand and vice versa, taking the business speak from your stakeholders and communicating that back out into the community in a way that they understand…”. Developer relations people are responsible for building connections, then stepping back and letting other people do their jobs. For example, they make an introduction between a community member and a recruiter, or they connect an active community member to someone at the marketing team, to write a blog post. The developer relations team are not responsible for hiring the person or publishing the blog, and it may or may not happen. But the connection was made and it can bring value to the company, ultimately, so that’s the job. It isn’t measurable in terms of sales numbers or marketing numbers or traditional business metrics. Developer marketing Working in developer marketing, the focus is to encourage developers to learn about, try out, adopt, use and contribute to a software product. This is the team that defines the target audience by building a model of developer segmentation and personas. They also create the developer marketing strategy and product go-to-market plans, and work on outreach channels of social media, content marketing, email campaigns and blogs. Some developer marketeers will be in teams that establish developer rewards programs and early access programs for software or hardware; other, smaller teams, will be focussed on growing an audience via sponsored events and meetups. There’s a great chapter in Developer Marketing: The Essential Guide, by Ana and Christine of Qualcomm, who talk about building a developer community around hardware. They describe the process of narrowing down the target audience for the community around their Snapdragon 410E processor. It was ‘…to let a thousand flowers bloom: to make it as easy as possible to use, to build up a broad community and channel, then see where biggest leads came from and tune the business approach along the way. That’s a difficult place for developer marketing to work. “Who is our target audience?” we asked. “Lots of people,” the product team told us. “What will they make with the board?” “Lots of things. You know, for the Internet of Things.” “Can you identify a few key vertical segments to focus on for our initial campaigns?” “Why would we do that? We need to position the product as broadly as possible.”…’ As they say in the book, it wasn’t exactly a well-defined target audience and clear direction, but that is as succinct a description of the place that a developer marketing team finds itself as I’ve ever seen! And finally… The following table illustrates the subdivision between roles as I’ve described them above. Please let me know in the comments if you think I missed anything about the roles, or if you have good (or bad!) examples of how they work together to allow the developer outreach team to engage with its community. #developermarketing #developerrelations

Machine learning (ML) / Artificial Intelligence (AI) is currently one of the hottest topics in most organisations as it continues to expand across many sectors. In the past ten years, various data science third-party platforms have emerged and evolved, gaining widespread success among developers and catering to data scientists’ increased needs for developing, scaling and deploying ML models. In the 15th edition of our Developer Economics survey, we asked 8,600+ machine learning developers which data science platforms they use, how satisfied they are and how likely they are to recommend each of these platforms. As you would expect, there is generally a strong positive relationship between developers’ satisfaction and usage for a given platform – the more satisfaction a platform gathers, the more mindshare and recommendation it gets. In this post, we explore the implications of this relationship as well as some of its nuances for third-party platform vendors. Taking a step back The majority of developers use more than two data science platforms. ML developers leverage the specialisation of various platforms to manage different tasks, such as end-to-end model development, data sourcing, algorithm development and model deployment. “Loyalty” is not yet a concept that applies to data science platform users as the product offering is still evolving and there is no single product that answers all the needs of developers and data scientists. This fragmentation is reflected in the usage of and satisfaction with machine learning platforms. Mindshare goes hand-in-hand with satisfaction and NPS The higher the satisfaction and the NPS, the more mindshare a platform gathers from developers. The two polar opposites best illustrating this point are Anaconda and SAS Enterprise Miner. Anaconda is the undisputed leader across mindshare, satisfaction, and NPS while SAS ranks last for both satisfaction and NPS which in turn translates to a mindshare ten times lower than Anaconda’s. Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio is Anaconda’s closest competitor for both mindshare and satisfaction, even though it follows at some distance. Title: Data science/machine learning platforms Benchmarking For some players high specialization translates in high satisfaction Niche or specialised products do not get as many users as the top players do but are deemed highly satisfactory by their more limited audiences. For instance, ML developers using Cloudera Data Science Workbench platform show higher levels of satisfaction and NPS than users of MATLAB, even though MATLAB’s mindshare is six times higher than Cloudera’s. This is good news for specialised platforms – as they already compete head-to-head with the leading platforms in terms of level of satisfaction with platform features, they have significant potential to increase their mindshare. For these platforms, it would be worth looking into different strategies that could lead to increased mindshare – from the right marketing message to adding more widely used features or providing more documentation and support. A landscape full of opportunities Mindshare for data science platforms is poised to change in the near future. Indeed, awareness for the top data science platforms remains relatively low with more than half of developers not being aware of most offerings. Furthermore, awareness does not always translate to usage. For example, IBM Watson Machine Learning and Anaconda have similar level of awareness (around 35% of ML developers), and yet Anaconda’s mindshare is three times higher than IBM Watson’s. This gap in usage stems, to a large extent, from developers who are aware of Watson ML but have never tried it. In summary, data science platform providers need to work on turning awareness into usage. If you enjoyed this post, our data science and machine learning Developer Satisfaction Tracker provides a more detailed deep dive into usage, awareness, reasons to adopt or reject a platform, satisfaction, and recommendation for the top data science platforms. #usage #developersatisfaction #NPS #machinelearning #datascience

Have you ever visited a website with a ‘ghost’ developer zone? You know the type I mean? Where the blog posts are over a year old, nobody has posted on the forums in months and there haven’t been any new releases on GitHub for quite some time. I think we’ve all seen these portals, and maybe even worked on one (I know I have!). Image source: Konrad Forstner on Flickr [CC BY 2.0] They come about when a company has ambitious plans for engaging with developers, but somehow, things don’t quite come together. Perhaps there wasn’t the appetite to provide the staff to build a convincing developer product and support it? Or maybe the product just wasn’t great, or as good as the competition. There are many reasons why developer marketing goes wrong. This blog post is how to tip the scales in the balance of success, and take your developer program from strength to strength. A maturity model for developer marketing You may be familiar with maturity models for assessing the “ability of an organization for continuous improvement in a particular discipline” (Wikipedia). Formal or informal evaluation of particular characteristics, such as processes and structures within a system, against agreed stages or levels are used to determine maturity. A number of  models have been developed by practitioners and academics over the past years, if you are interested, there is a thorough academic review here; the capability maturity model and ISO/IEC 15504 (SPICE) are probably the most familiar formal models within the software industry. In marketing circles, there are various ways to assessing the maturity of your digital marketing, such as Boston Consulting Group’s approach for digital marketing maturity based on organizational structure. Image source: Boston Consulting Group However, when it comes to measuring software developer marketing, metrics and maturity models are not yet part of a common toolset. As we’ve previously observed, developer marketing is still a young and fragmented industry, with pockets of best practice locked within the companies that master it. We have recently answered the lack of recorded thought leadership on the subject, by publishing a book about the essentials of developer marketing. But we’ve yet to see a discussion about the way to measure the maturity of your developer marketing efforts. Why market to developers? Perhaps the first question should be – why market to software developers? Increasingly, we are seeing developers make technology adoption decisions and take control of the process by which software enters their organisations. In much the same way that IT departments, which were a rarity 20 years ago, have become standard in most companies today, it seems likely that, in the near future, companies will need to become conversant with developer marketing. Good software developer marketing is rather different from consumer marketing; it consists of technical outreach and education, such as software documentation and example code, tools and downloads, knowledge bases and contact points both online and in real life, through focussed events. A developer marketing program has a number of aspects and channels and the maturity of such a program can be measured, in part, by their uptake. Let’s take a look at some details by working through the phases of developer marketing from the least to the most mature. Newbie Image source: FreakingNews.com Newbie developer programs are the entry-level for companies wishing to engage with developers. They are limited in scope and provide just a few APIs or SDKs, with limited documentation or hands-on support. The developer liaison team is of a small size (2-3 engineers focused on API product and documentation) and runs on a small budget. A developer portal to attract and encourage registered developers will be on the list of must-haves, and the team will endeavour to engage with potential developers in other online channels, such as StackOverflow and Reddit, but they will have limited visibility and few external advocates. Developer programs at this stage of maturity should be asking how to build momentum to encourage engagement with their program. They should be looking at building developer interest that can be retained and built into a larger program. Examples include Memgraph, OutSystems and Zebra Technologies. Challenger Image source: wetwebwork on Flickr [CC BY-SA 2.0] Challenger developer programs are Newbies that are taking root and growing. They have matured to the point of offering a range of APIs or SDKs.  The portal provides solid levels of documentation plus hands-on support. The audience is typically focussed in one area, and has grown from Newbie levels to about 10,000 developers. Engagement is mostly online through the developer portal and typical third-party channels, but there is some face to face outreach via hackathons and meetups, typically within a single region. There is a overall developer marketing budget of up to $1M in place, and a team to provide product management and product engineering plus developer outreach and support engineering. Challenger programs are asking questions about marketing strategy, such as the best activities for RoI, reaching an audience, and best practices for the marketing team to follow to justify their budget. Examples include Pivotal and Mastercard. Authority Image source: Camera Eye Photography on Flickr CC BY 2.0 Authority developer programs are well established and offer a portfolio of developer products for their audience. There will be a range of APIs or SDKs available for a disparate developer audience of up to several hundred thousand that is located in multiple global regions. The total developer marketing program is staffed and funded at a level appropriate to its size, typically up to $5M. There will be a need for a number of product managers and product engineers, plus a separate team for developer relations and developer marketing, plus a level of developer product business development. Developer marketing will be able to present a range of events, and provide a solid online presence via a mature developer portal that has suitably high levels of documentation and technical support, as well as engagement external via third-party channels. Authority developer programs are sufficiently established to run a number of developer facing events per year across different regions, including hackathons, conferences and sponsored events. They may also provide training and developer certification. The Authority programs are looking for validation for their marketing spend, and want to develop a strategy to target the right segments, extend their reach and build upon their established audience. Examples include Mozilla and Unity. Unicorn Image source: Wikimedia Commons Unicorn developer programs are well-established, providing a number of different APIs and/or SDKS to a range of different developer profiles across a broad audience that numbers in the millions. The program is well staffed and funded with a budget of over $5M, which is used to provide a wide level of engagement online and in person at events, hackathons and training. The Unicorns need to focus on the competition to stay ahead, and look to build up regional audiences where these do not currently exist. Examples include Google and Microsoft. How to evolve your developer marketing program Having set out the characteristics and levels of maturity for typical developer programs, the natural question is how a program makes transitions between them. It’s dependent on the core platform or product, of course, since regardless of the size and skill of your developer marketing team, it’s not possible for them to deliver unless developers see value in it. And that comes down to your place in the market and how you deliver on your roadmaps and vision. Investment in the right elements of the developer program is also key; if you do not provide what your audience needs and values, you will not reach it. SlashData’s Developer Program Benchmark reports tracks the leading developer programs through twice-yearly surveys that that assess developer satisfaction across 20+ developer program features and services, including marketing. The reports show the levels of importance that developers place upon each feature, which can be used to guide the focus of marketing spend within a program of any stage of maturity. Ultimately, building reputation among developers comes down to the quality and nature of the communication you have with them, and in this, your developer marketing and relations team are crucial. As we explain in Selling it Softly, developers possess a healthy level of cynicism towards anything that could be interpreted as marketing. Anyone venturing into developer marketing swiftly becomes aware of the developer’s disdain for the hard sell. Our book sets out some best practice in some of the many aspects of developer marketing, but a central message runs through it: respect the unique character of your audience! If you’re setting up a developer program as a Newbie, or already up and running and aiming to ‘cross the chasm’ to the next level in the maturity model, we have data to help you focus your efforts and budget in the areas that matter most to your developer audience. Our mission is to help the world understand developers. We help the top 100 technology firms understand the profile of developer communities and measure the ROI of their developer strategies. As an analyst firm, we survey 40,000+ developers annually and analyse that data to help our clients target the right developers, prioritise the right features for their products, and optimise their marketing budget to drive developer engagement and satisfaction. If you’ve any questions about what we do, or want to find out more, please do get in touch! PS: While you’re here. if you want to find out more about the subject of developer marketing, check out our book, Developer Marketing: The Essential Guide. #developermarketing #developerprogram

When developers evaluate new technologies, one of the elements they often look at is the size and strength of the community surrounding that technology. “Can I get help and support from peers when needed?” It’s one of the reasons why open source technologies tend to be so popular. Conversely, technology vendors regularly signal their virtue with community numbers: “Our product is used by millions of developers, choose us!” However, there is reason to be critical of this line of thinking. The activity of a core group, or indeed the vendor itself, may matter more to get great support than the sheer number of users. Most technologies are not subject to network effects: they don’t become inherently more valuable when more developers adopt them. Even in open source projects, there is often only a small number of core contributors. Furthermore, vendors may bloat the numbers they report: deliberately, or simply because they don’t have good data available. At /Data, we’ve been maintaining and publishing estimates on the global developer community for a few years now. Our biannual survey also gives us a solid idea of how those developers are spread across various communities. So let’s see where some of the largest developer communities can be found and how powerful those communities may really be. What do you mean by “community”? The largest regions in terms of developer population are North America, with an estimated 4 million active software developers in mid 2018, and Europe (3.8M in the EU28). However, calling these communities is a bit of a stretch. Developers in these regions are fragmented across countries and cities, as well as technologies and languages. North America includes the relatively homogenous USA, but also various Latin American countries. Europe includes software powerhouses like the United Kingdom, but also smaller Eastern European countries. From the perspective of finding peers to support you (or talent to recruit), looking at small groups gathered in cities around specific technologies is more useful than considering the wider geography. The largest developer program in our research, with over 10 million active users globally, is Google. Google is great at empowering and supporting their community through forums and the likes. This said, they also have excellent developer satisfaction scores when it comes to vendor-driven support of developers with documentation, tutorials and training, tooling, and so on. Google is the default choice for many developers; it’s not clear whether that is due to the strength of their community or due to the value they provide themselves. They of course offer a multitude of technologies, where experience in one product doesn’t necessarily translate into another. Perhaps it’s more correct to view them as a collection of communities. What about different sectors of the software industry? More than 14 million developers are involved in creating web apps. Once again, we can wonder about the fragmentation in this community across technologies. A sector view may not be the right level of analysis. Finally, we can look at a technology. There are over 10 million active Javascript developers, making it the most popular programming language in the world today. Here we may see a stronger sense of community, with forums, real-life groups, learning institutions and more being organised specifically around the language. In short, when we say “community”, it’s not trivially clear what we mean by that. (Neither is “developer” for that matter, but that’s a story for another blog post). Community size is not necessarily an indicator of homogeneity, coherence or level of activity. That makes it less than straightforward to assess the value of a developer community. How (not) to count developers If you’re interested in estimates of developer communities, you will have no doubt seen very high numbers being floated. Developer tools routinely reports user numbers in the millions; communities who claim a broad reach, like Stack Overflow or Github, will report tens of millions of developers. At /Data, we are skeptical of such numbers, in particular if you intend to use them to make adoption decisions. First, because it is not clear where each source draws the line in what they consider to be an (active) developer. Are IT professionals, DevOps, or sysadmins included? What about people who once made an account, but never actively used the product? However, the bigger issue seems to be where such numbers are sourced. Most estimates floating around the internet are based on (unique) pageviews, downloads, IP addresses, and the likes. All of these are susceptible to a multiplier effect, not in the least due to multi-machine and multi-browser software testing, frequent cleaning of caches and cookies for testing, repeat downloads of developer tools, and development automation (e.g. build servers). Abandoned accounts may significantly skew the estimates as well. Sometimes, numbers we’ve come across seem to be based on nothing at all. Measurements like that are only a vague indication of the number of actual active developers and therefore of the strength of the community. They tend to be not comparable across vendors. Not to mention that it is in the self-interest of the vendor to report the biggest number they can find. Indicators that indicate actual developer activity, like Monthly Active Users, are exceedingly rare. Conclusion Whether you’re a developer thinking about the direction of your career, or someone who is deciding on which technology to adopt, the question of how strong the supporting community is, is perfectly legitimate. To asses the true benefit of community, however, make sure to use the right scope and reliable, meaningful numbers. On our part, we will continue to provide you with our best estimates of active software developers, using sources that are direct evidence of recent coding activity. If you are interested in having a look at a list of the largest developer communities in terms of active users have a look at the 1 Million Developer Club .

In this article, I’m going to talk about how I perceive the mainstream consumer audience to have rejected virtual reality, and suggest that its child, augmented reality, may be the Slope of Enlightenment that convinces us to buy in. While these are my views alone, towards the end of the piece, I’ve dug out some data from software developers around the world who are working with AR and VR.  Tomorrow’s world, today I worked in the smartphone industry before it came of age. Our mission was “a smartphone in every pocket” at a time when simple feature phones like the Motorola RAZR were the must-have communications device. Within a few years of our early projects, the competitor, Apple, launched the iPhone. The rest is history. The App Store opened its doors, the stars aligned, the technology dream was realised and smartphones went on to rule the world. I grew up in a time of change. We had a BBC microcomputer before I was ten years old. As a teenager, I sashayed along to the sounds of the eighties on a tape Walkman, and later mobile CD players and minidiscs. Then Napster, now Spotify. Change. The cadence of technological evolution was a rapid heartbeat, sounded out by the Internet, mobile phones and a maturing software development industry, which I joined enthusiastically. Maybe I just got used to an unrealistic pace of change? But whatever happened to virtual reality (VR)? Its heartbeat seems to have flatlined. Nothing much has changed in the years that have passed since the “year of VR” (pick your year, we’ve had a few of them), which turned out to be nothing much of the sort. When I look at my mobile phone of a few years ago, or my website developed in 2004, I think how clunky and quaint they look compared to the sleek form factor and execution possible today. But when I look at the VR headsets of yesteryear and today and compare what they deliver? Not so much. Take a look at this  slideshow  of legacy VR hardware. Sure, we’ve come some way since the Sensorama, but the Sega VR of 1993 wasn’t significantly more dorky than today’s HTC Vive Cosmos, was it? Does anybody really want to strap a heavy, nerdy headset on that makes you suffer motion sickness after a few minutes use, tethers you to a PC, dulls your senses to the real world outside the headset and causes you to trip over your furniture? Sure, expensive and shiny, next generation VR devices, are coming. But much of the hardware available is unchanged from when it came to the stores two or more years ago, which means hard-core early adopter audiences aren’t shelling out again.  While availability of more cost-accessible hardware for casual users has increased, e.g. the Oculus Go, the handsets are still expensive enough to give mainstream consumers pause, and typically compromise on aspects of quality that mean the VR experience is somewhat flawed. Convince people that you’ll change their lives In the consumer world, expectations for VR were raised early and sadly led to disappointment as it became clear that the ambitions went far beyond what was possible given the technology available. Overpromised, VR lost the attention of mainstream audiences, as it simply could not deliver. In part, this was down to  problems with the hardware , such as cumbersome headsets, inadequate processors, poor displays and weak audio. Then there’s the secondary reason: there is no “must-have” killer app that convinces sufficient people that you’ll change their lives. The two issues go hand in hand (the ‘chicken and egg’ situation) since if technology is inadequate, the content creators see no justification for investing heavily in VR. In turn, this means insufficient buyers and revenue to justify the investment in improving the technology. (It’s worth pointing out that secondary uses for VR, such as in industry, education, healthcare, have a very different uptake/content model, and as such, I’m considering just the mainstream here). And, as such, entertainment content is the key to unlocking adoption by persuading consumers that VR devices are a must-have item. Like 3D TV, VR has thus far failed to deliver a sufficiently convincing experience that sends people rushing to shops to buy the hardware, despite its costs and the limitations involved. What’s more, VR content isn’t coming along as fast it used to. Hollywood used it for marketing, e.g. to promote films such as 2016’s  Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them  and TV shows including  Game of Thrones . But this has dropped back as consumer uptake and gratification was found to be negligible. Venture funding for consumer VR software companies may drop by more than half this year, to $265 million from $576 million a year ago, SuperData says. And this isn’t surprising. According to the SiliconANGLE. VR headset sales have dropped nearly 34% since Q2 2017. Even committed hardware manufacturers are showing signs of taking their foot off the gas. Samsung, which was one of the first to market with its Gear VR mobile headset, didn’t say anything about VR in its major announcements at CES this year. Is AR the way out of the trough of despair? Experts predict that new kids on the block, Augmented Reality (AR) on smartphones and Mixed Reality (MR) headsets, such as Microsoft’s HoloLens. will pick up the audience that VR failed to serve. In terms of the  Gartner Hype Cycle , AR and MR — the children of VR — look to serve as the Slope of Enlightenment. AR can be delivered by the hardware already in your pocket. It doesn’t need the level of resolution or processor power demanded by VR. AR is also far less cumbersome than VR and can be used on the go since it doesn’t require total immersion in the experience. The software brings in a virtual element without losing the real world.   Certainly, analysts report adoption of augmented reality and mixed reality to be on the up, with earnings expected to come from mobile AR apps, particularly games. Google and Apple have strongly embraced this market with ARCore and ARKit, enabling developers to access AR services on more than 500 million devices in the wild today. Both Apple and Google envisage third-party apps and services that use AR as valuable additions to their app stores. Successful apps add billions to the top line (Apple was expected to make $3 billion revenue over 2 years from in-app purchases within the best known AR title to date, Pokémon Go) and high-profile AR apps also strengthen the ecosystems of both companies, boosting other revenue streams. The smart money is now shifting to companies working on AR and MR. Apple have a rumoured  research project  to build a headset for delivery next year. Investment in companies working on MR is expected to jump by nearly 50 percent this year, according to SuperData, with sales of MR headsets expected to ramp up significantly and  surpass earnings of VR headsets  within the next two years. The above is purely my opinion, based on observations of the tech industry over a number of years and a healthy degree of skepticism when it comes to inflated expectations. It’s uninformed by experience at the coalface of development however. So, what do software developers working with AR and VR, have to say? Software developers working in VR and AR told us… Here at SlashData we run regular surveys of software developers around the world to uncover valuable insights from those working in mobile, desktop, IoT, cloud, web, game, AR/VR, data science and machine learning. In our  Developer Economics 14th edition report , which is based on a large-scale online developer survey that ran over a period of eight weeks between November and December 2017, we reached over 21,700 respondents in 169 countries. We studied the data returned from developers working in AR/VR and found the following: 25% of professional game developers say they are targeting AR and/or VR. This figure falls slightly to 19% across the entire corpus of developers surveyed. Dedicated VR hardware, such as Oculus Rift, is attractive to games developers (61% report using it), but across all developers working on VR projects, we see a much lower uptake (33%), reflecting its early adopter status in fields other than games. Across all developers working on VR projects, 32% are targeting smartphone hardware using Google’s Cardboard, and 19% are using Daydream View, built into Android Nougat and beyond, reflecting that developers, and consumers, are still experimenting with the technology on their existing hardware. A similar picture emerges for AR, with Android and iOS taking the lead in most popular AR platforms across all developers targeting AR. Of the dedicated AR hardware available, Microsoft HoloLens leads the pack, with Google Glass at Work and MagicLeap trailing behind when the survey ran in late 2017. We are currently running another survey and we would value your input. If you’re a software developer working in the field of AR or VR, or considering doing so, please  consider answering the questions . If you’re not a developer but are working in the AR/VR field, pass the  link  on to your developer friends and colleagues. Every survey completed has a chance to win  Oculus Rift +Touch Virtual Reality System  to test your creations (or simply play around),  Samsung S9 PLus ,  $200 towards the software subscription of your choice, or other prizes from the prize pool worth $12,000 ! Plus, if you refer other developers to take the survey, you may win up to $1,000 in cash. Just don’t forget to sign up before you take the survey, so that we know you want to be included in the prize draw! What do you say, are you in? #augmentedreality #virtualreality

Have you heard this geek joke? Q: How can you tell an extroverted software developer from an introverted one?A: The extrovert looks at YOUR shoes while she’s talking to you. It is something of a cliché that developers (aka hackers, nerds, geeks) are all pale, bespectacled boffins who ache from endless hours spent in dark rooms in front of multiple screens. Not strictly accurate, it might still be fair to say that developers constitute an audience with some noticeable shared characteristics—among them, a healthy level of cynicism towards anything that could be interpreted as marketing. Anyone venturing into developer marketing swiftly becomes aware of the developer’s disdain for the hard sell. So how do you market to developers? During the Future Developer Summit in October 2017, the /Data team realised that developer marketing is still a young and fragmented industry, with pockets of best practice locked within the companies that master it. While countless books, courses and blogs exist for consumer marketing, and for various forms of B2B marketing, developer marketing has been poorly served. What was evident during the summit was that we needed a medium to spread knowledge—currently held behind closed doors—to a broader audience around the world. So the vision for the book was simple and powerful: to become the standard textbook that every new recruit into developer marketing reads to immerse himself into this brave new world. A book whose influence may extend beyond the field of developer marketing. Given that developers are the most marketing-averse audience out there, it could become a toolset for B2B marketers in many more industries. We brainstormed the book concept at the summit, and invited leading practitioners from the best companies in the field to contribute. At this point, if we were in a film, the screen would fade to a blur and we would be brought forward to the 2018 Future Developer Summit, with a caption underneath that read ‘12 months later,’ as we effortlessly launched the book.  Of course, the 12 months between summits brought a number of challenges as Nicolas and Andreas encouraged leading developer marketing practitioners to author chapters in the book, and they were edited together into a whole. But we got there, and the hard work paid off when, finally, we launched Developer Marketing: The Essential Guide last month. What’s in the book? Instead of a step-by-step guide to writing a developer marketing strategy, we present a toolbox of knowledge and practical understanding. Topics covered include: running successful developer events, building and maintaining a solid community of developers, how to get the most out of email marketing, how to nurture IoT / hardware developers, how to encourage experts in your community to advocate for you, and how to create a mindset for content marketing in your organization. In each chapter, our authors have been encouraged to share valuable but non-obvious learnings, including mistakes they’ve made along the way, and a set of actionable best practices. We typically begin each chapter with a problem statement to introduce the topic and make clear why it is important. Then we describe the company’s ‘journey’, with the goal of sharing what does and does not work (and why) so you gain practical insights from the voices of experience. Each chapter was contributed by experienced developer marketing practitioners working at companies with successful and well-established developer marketing programs: /Data: Developers Are a Big Deal. Marketing To Them Shouldn’t Be.Microsoft: Using Developer Personas to Stay Customer-ObsessedFacebook: Successful Developer Email MarketingSalesforce: The Power of CommunityOracle: Repositioning Your Brand to DevelopersSAP: Connecting Developers with ExpertsVMWare: Hands-on Labs for Deeper EngagementAtlassian: Growing Up by Scaling Down: How a Small Developer Event Can Make Big Impacts on Your EcosystemArm: How to Connect with Developers When You Can’t Meet ThemQualcomm: Hardware Is the New Software – Building a Developer Community Around a Chip Instead of an SDKGoogle: Behind the Scenes of Great Developer EventsUnity: Developing the Right Mindset to Create Great ContentAccenture: Closing Thoughts: How to Attract, Engage and Retain Developers There are also some common elements throughout the book. One of the key themes that runs throughout is the increasing influence of software developers within the companies in which they work. How have software developers gained their superpowers? In the past, technology selection was determined by system administrators and procurement teams, but the availability of open source code and free-to-trial software development kits now allows developers to evaluate platforms and tools and choose what to use without having to ask for authorisation. Developers are increasingly in control of the process by which software enters their organisations, and as complexity increases, the managers to which they once deferred are now asking them to make technology adoption decisions. This also applies to paid services; let’s take the cloud as an example. It’s easy for a development team to select and adopt a free trial of a cloud platform during the development and testing phases. The team lead can instantly license, provision and use the tools it needs, avoiding delays and paperwork and allowing for rapid experimentation and innovation. Some months later, when the team is ready to scale up its code to production, the costs kick in for its company. And the decision as to which platform to use? The developers have already made it and wrapped it in many layers of code. The “bean counters” are unlikely to be able to reverse it. Your role in developer marketing is to make sure that initial choice is your platform, app or service. But how? When a software developer needs to select a tool for a series of projects over the coming year, he or she often already has an idea of what to use, maybe from reading a blog post, watching a webinar or attending a presentation at a recent event. Our chapter from Matthew Pruitt, who works at Unity, shares insights about Developing the Right Mindset to Create Great Content, and explains a range of techniques to communicate meaningfully about your product: You don’t need to work in a large organization or have multiple teams support you.  I’ve seen great, successful content produced by solo indie developers and that’s because they put themselves in the right mindset. Let’s explore what I mean by developing the right mindset.  Before you start creating content, you should be asking yourself two very important questions: ’What is the one takeaway I want someone to have after viewing my content?’ And ‘Why should they care?’ Developers really value the opinions of others like them, and will look at feedback on your product before committing. To get a good idea of what other developers think, they may look at discussion forums on your developer website. They are also likely to visit sites such as Stack Overflow, to understand just how easy your offering is (or isn’t) to set up and use. They are looking for statistics, such as the number of recent, active discussions, along with the kind of sentiments expressed, and the commonly mentioned pain points. Developers want technology that is supported by a community, and they want a community that is growing and enthusiastic. They want to know that, when things go wrong, there’s a place to ask a question and get a swift response, and a place where answers to common issues are easy to find because the community is well-established. When marketing to them, you need to know how to grow your developer community, and how running a developer program for experts in the field will encourage them to advocate for you and amplify your messaging. If developers are happy, they’ll recommend you to others, who will also sign up to be part of your community and will, in their turn, make recommendations to their fellow developers. You need to understand the dynamic within a developer community and what you can control. Jacob Lehrbaum, of Salesforce, contributed an insightful chapter entitled The Power of Community: Community is fundamentally about people coming together to help each other, and the first step is to create a community that people want to belong to. A big part of that is your product itself, but there are things you can do above and beyond your product to make your community be a place that people want to spend time. One of the ways you can do that is through culture… Why read this book? In much the same way that IT departments, which were a rarity 20 years ago, have become standard in most companies today, it seems likely that, in the near future, companies will need to become increasingly conversant with developer marketing and consider creating departments of people that understand and value developers. Maybe that’s you! Perhaps you are just starting out on your developer marketing career, transitioning from traditional marketing, or from working as a developer yourself. Or perhaps you already have some experience but want to learn from the experts how to build your ecosystem to attract, support and grow your developer base. Whatever your experience, you know, or soon will know, that the developer audience is a tough one to market to. This book will teach you how. Developer Marketing: The Essential Guide is available from mid-September 2018 from Amazon. All profits from the book are to be donated to worthy causes that support software development in vulnerable or minority groups. #developermarketingguide

Now that the dust has settled it’s time to celebrate. And share some data and insights. In September 2018 we ran our third Future Developer Summit in Menlo Park, California. It was an unprecedented success, bringing in a net promoter score of 80. We hosted 60+ leaders in developer marketing and relations, hand-picked at Director level and up, from nearly 40 companies, from Amazon and Arm to Salesforce and Samsung. They gathered to debate best practices in developer marketing, learn, and design better developer strategies. Like all things at /Data, we never sit still. Our 3rd Summit was twice as large as our 2017 event, with more innovations on the format (including an investment session with ‘monopoly’ money!), more interactivity, more companies represented, and a pre-event networking dinner. David Bryant, Fellow at Mozilla, captured the atmosphere of the event as follows: “Future Developer Summit was a fabulous event that managed to combine outstanding speakers, a creative and engaging agenda, and dynamite topics at the leading edge of developer programs and outreach.  So many great opportunities to exchange ideas and learn!” The day was packed with data and insights, with presentations from Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Facebook, Twilio, Mozilla, Wikimedia, Digital Ocean, Pivotal, Twitch, and Arm. Some of the most tantalising insights came from the developer program leader survey which we ran during the Summit. 46 developer program leaders participated, allowing us to capture an up-to-date view of developer program resourcing spend, RoI and priorities, for all major developer programs represented at the Summit (see list of companies represented at the Summit here). Technology-driven developer programs represented at the Summit ranged from small (1-5 headcount in developer marketing/relations) to medium (11-50) and large (250+). The median developer program budget was in the range $2M-$5M. Developer programs have significant budgets and resources, but still small compared to their enterprise counterparts. More importantly, we measured the most popular RoI metrics for developer programs, based on the business function – marketing, relations or tooling – which produced wildly different results. Developer marketing teams prefer page views, unique visitors, or social media mentions as a metric of developer RoI, i.e. metrics directly related to traction and traffic. Relations teams favour developer satisfaction, active users and Net Promoter Scores: their focus is mostly on quality. Finally, developer tooling or engineering teams opt for SDK downloads and telemetry-type data as a measure of RoI, i.e. actual, real-life usage of their products. Less popular metrics were omitted from the graph. At the Summit we also launched our Developer Marketing: The Essential Guide, a book co-authored with the leading practitioners of developer marketing, working for the top platforms, from Accenture and Amazon to Unity and VMWare. The first of its kind, the book is designed to spread knowledge, currently held behind closed doors, to the broader audience of developer marketing practitioners based within thousands of platform companies around the world. We also held our 4th Developers’ Choice Awards, celebrating the leading software platforms, based on the independent and unbiased opinions of over 20,500 developers from 165+ countries. Run twice a year, the Developers’ Choice Awards reflects the results of /Data’s semi-annual global Developer Economics research program. We’d like also thank our partners – Catchy, Accenture, Developer Media and Gerson Lehrman Group who supported the Future Developer Summit with their presence. Until the next Future Developer Summit – watch this space. If you’d like to be considered for next year’s Summit, please let us know by emailing chris@slashdata.co Andreas #futuredevelopersummit

Future Developer Summit is back September 13, Menlo Park, CA, bringing together 60+ VP & director-level champions of developer marketing in an intimate invite-only setting to share knowledge, celebrate innovative thinking and discuss the course for the future. What goes into the creation of an award-winning documentation or live streaming communities that attract thousands of developers? What do developer personas at top tech companies look like? Do open-source developers require different engagement strategies than other dev segments? Where should developer programs invest their money in the next 5 years? These are the kind of questions the leaders in developer marketing are tackling every day. To bring the best practices forward, we’re excited to announce that our annual Future Developer Summit is back September 13, Menlo Park, CA! That’s right, the event falls nicely on the international Programmers’ Day, not by sheer accident. So what better way to celebrate developers than by highlighting the successes and learnings from the top tech firms who live and breathe code? Who is coming to the Future Developer Summit 2018? For the third year in a row, Future Developer Summit brings together 60+ director-level trailblazers in developer marketing (twice more than last year!) to debate best practices, learn and design better developer strategies. Speakers for this year’s Summit include some of the industry’s top experts: Amir Shevat, VP of Developer Experience – Twitch Andrew Clay Shafer, Senior Director of Technology – Pivotal Arabella David, Director Developer Marketing – Salesforce Bryan Davis, Engineering Manager, Technical Engagement – Wikimedia David Bryant, Fellow – Mozilla David McLaughlin, Director Global Developer Ecosystem – Google Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, Director Developer Partnerships & Programs Partnerships – Facebook Nicole Herskowitz, General Manager, Azure Product Marketing – Microsoft Ricky Robinett, Director Developer Network – Twilio Shiven Ramji, VP Product – Digital Ocean Zach Shelby, VP Developers, IoT Service Group – ARM Who else is coming? Attendees include developer marketing champions from the top platforms (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Mozilla), hardware companies (ARM, Intel), enterprise (Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, VMWare, Adobe, Cisco), game companies (Epic Games), cloud software (Digital Ocean), emerging platforms (Twitch), finance companies (Visa, Intuit), open source foundations (Linux Foundation), recruiting (StackOverflow), and more! Also present – our partners who help produce this stellar event: Developer Media, Catchy, Accenture, and GLG. We’ve designed an agenda jam-packed with interactive discussions, keynotes, networking opportunities, Developers’ Choice Awards ceremony and a couple of surprises, all wrapped up in a beautiful sunny setting, with tasty food, wine, and live jazzy tunes.  You can find all the details at www.futuredeveloper.io Want to get a quote or an exclusive scoop about the event? Drop a line to miljana@slashdata.co #developermarketing #futuredevelopersummit

Emerging technologies are often a hype haven for media pundits. All the talk of Augmented Reality has been no exception and as with anyone who’s paid attention to the talk of flying cars or trips to Mars, one wonders if there’s fire to all the smoke. Is there a signal amidst all the noise? If yes, how does one come by that knowledge? Fortunately, there’s a method known to man and it’s feasible: ask the architects of the digital age themselves, developers as we call them, wherever in the world they might be. Augmented Reality: What Are Developers Working on? In our global developer surveys, we’ve asked developers about their involvement in Augmented Reality (and of course it’s siamese twin Virtual Reality), what devices or platforms they use, what market categories they are targeting and several other questions about their development experience. Their responses tell us how they are engaging with this emerging area of tech. Said engagement has given us a window into what their perspective on Augmented Reality might be: let’s take a glimpse. Data from our Q4 2017 survey shows that only 21% of developers are involved in Augmented Reality as professionals. The remaining large majority of developers identifying as hobbyists suggests that most developers are tinkering and experimenting with AR via side projects. They could be doing so in search of use cases that will resonate with the masses of the consumer market or the behemoths of the enterprise world. Once the opportunity in these use cases is realised developers may give the area their full attention. Our data also reveals that 50% of developers involved in Augmented Reality see smartphones & tablets running iOS or Android as the primary device to develop for.  This is far more than the figures for competing devices like the Microsoft Hololens (8%) or Google Glass at Work (2%). One reason could be that developers are going after the mass consumer market that is served by mobile devices today. This is also confirmed by our data: 56% of developers involved in Augmented Reality told us they are targeting consumers as against 25% targeting the enterprise audience. As headset devices haven’t reached critical mass yet developers are using the ubiquitous mobile platforms to test their ideas and prepare for the world of mass-market Augmented Reality headsets as well. These data points show that developers consider Augmented Reality a viable candidate for the next mass market opportunity. Companies looking to engage these developers must dive deeper: knowing the size of the developer community so as to get a hint of the addressable market for Augmented Reality technologies is a good first step. If you are interested in more data points and deep insights from our AR/VR developer research, please see our just-released AR/VR Developer Population Forecast 2018 report or talk to us at sales@slashdata.co #augmentedreality

Google, Mozilla, Unreal, Unity, Amazon, and Microsoft Win SlashData’s Developers’ Choice Awards 2018 Digital Edition We’re excited to announce the winners and finalists of SlashData’s semi-annual Developers’ Choice Awards 2018 Digital Edition !  Google, Mozilla, Unreal, Unity, Amazon, and Microsoft won the highest scores for their developer programs and platforms based on the opinions of over 21,700 developers in 169 countries, who participated in SlashData’s semi-annual Developer Economics survey 14th edition in November-December 2017. SlashData’s CEO, Andreas Constantinou, says: “The Developer Choice Awards is our way of helping developers voice their preferences, which software platforms they love or hate building on. We base the awards not on a panel or jury, but on what 20,000+ developers that take part in our bi-annual research surveys had to say.” Full list of winners and runners-up: Developers’ Choice of Developer Programs WINNER: Google 1st runners-up: Unity, Unreal 2nd runner-up: Microsoft Developers’ Choice of Documentation & Sample Code in Developer Programs WINNER: Mozilla 1st runner-up: Unity 2nd runner-up: Google Developers’ Choice of Development Tools in Developer Programs WINNER: Unreal 1st runner-up: Microsoft 2nd runner-up: Google Developers’ Choice of Tutorials & How-to Videos in Developer Programs WINNER: Unity 1st runner-up: Unreal 2nd runner-up: Google Developers’ Choice of Voice Platforms WINNERS: Google Assistant SDK, Google Cloud Speech 1st runner-up: Actions on Google 2nd runner-up: Amazon Alexa Skills Kit Developers’ Choice of PaaS or Container Management Products WINNER: Microsoft Azure App Service 1st runner-up: AWS ECS 2nd runners-up: Google Container Engine, Heroku Developers’ Choice of Serverless or Cloud Functions Platforms WINNER: AWS Lambda 1st runner-up: Azure Functions 2nd runner-up: Google Cloud Functions About Developers’ Choice Awards Developers’ Choice Awards are entirely focused on capturing the voice of developers. The finalists and winners are determined based on data derived from SlashData’s Developer Economics surveys. The Developer Economics surveys run twice per year and each time capture the sentiment of over 21,700 developers in 160+ countries working on web, cloud, desktop, mobile, IoT, AR, VR, machine learning, and data science. In our surveys we ask developers which technologies they use – such as voice platforms – and the tools or platforms they prefer – such as Unity, and how they rate the tools on a scale from 1 to 5 in terms of how happy they are with the attributes that they consider important – such as documentation or development tools. The per-attribute scores are then combined to arrive at an overall score based on which the competing technologies and vendors are ranked. The winners and finalists are determined based on the highest emerging score.  For a full list of the finalists for each category as well as more information about the awards, you can visit  https://developerschoiceawards.com . The next edition of the Developers’ Choice Awards will take place on September 13, 2018, as a part of the Future Developer Summit , held in Menlo Park, CA , where the awards will be presented in front of an impressive audience of 60+ Director-level attendees from the leading software companies, from Adobe to Salesforce. #developerprograms #paas #serverless #developerawards #voiceplatforms

Developer Marketing – what is it, why is it important, how to develop it successfully? We’ve interviewed Jeff Sandquist, General Manager on the Cloud and Enterprise Team at Microsoft, to share with us his experiences. This interview is part of our Under the Hood of Developer Marketing series where we ask leading practitioners what Developer Marketing and Developer relations mean to them, what they do to make it happen, and how they measure success. Meet Jeff Sanquist, General Manager on the Cloud and Enterprise Team at Microsoft As general manager of Cloud + AI Developer Relations at Microsoft, Jeff leads the team reinventing Microsoft’s relationship with software developers around the globe. This team is maniacal about making the world amazing for developers of all backgrounds. As Developer Advocates, the team is spreading awareness of Azure and enabling developers to do what they love; write, code, and learn. Jeff and team are responsible for creating global developer online experiences for Microsoft like docs.microsoft.com, and Channel 9. They connect with developer communities through their programs including Microsoft MVP, Microsoft Regional Director, our annual Build conference and third-party developer events around the globe. Prior to Microsoft Jeff spent two years at Twitter as Global Director of Developer and Platform, building their Developer and Enterprise business. Prior to that Jeff was a 16-year Microsoft veteran. How long have you been in the role? For well over 20 years I have been helping Developers, but actually, from childhood, I’ve worked in and with technical communities. My first computer was the Commodore 64. I lived in a small town of 100 people, so there were no local user groups. I then got a 300 baud modem and at 12 years old I got interested in the power of online communities. That’s how I learned to program and I’ve been fascinated since then by how you can use the internet to learn. What was your journey to Developer Relations? I went to Microsoft around 1996 starting off answering the phone taking developer questions on Active Server Pages or connecting a database to a server. As a company, Microsoft literally started by offering developer support and tools from an engineering background. I was always inspired by how people could create something, and then through the power of community, go and solve problems. I moved through the ranks and was involved in the popular Channel 9 community. This was all before social media. I learned from those times if you can be your authentic self and allow engineers to talk to engineers peer to peer over a beer, then that’s how you develop relationships. I then left Microsoft for a few years joining Twitter in SF, which provided me with a real focus on mobile, and then came back to Microsoft, because here there’s an opportunity to work with any developer. How are you organized? Is your team in marketing / product / engineering organisation? We are in engineering. I love when developer relations teams are right alongside product engineering. My team of engineers is within the Cloud + AI Engineering Team. I lead developer relations across products like Azure. We see Developer Relations as a discipline, rooted in engineering. Across my team, in addition to Developer Advocates, we have Product Manager, Technical Writers, Software Engineers and Solution Architects all working to make the world better for developers. Our global developer advocates are engineers that connect with developer communities via content, public speaking, local meetups and online around the world. We actually stopped using the word “evangelism” as it implies it is a one-way communication channel. It is very important that our team works with developers to understand how best to use Azure, but also how can we make Azure easier to use as well. Whether its Linux, Node, .NET, Kubernetes, Windows, Cosmos DB or mySQL we want our cloud to be for all Developers. That’s really interesting –  how do you make that feedback transparent back to your community in an organisation as large as Microsoft? Microsoft’s founding moment was in building developer tools – BASIC for the Altair. We are rooted in doing things for developers. We prioritize feedback in our workstacks, and Microsoft does more open source projects than any other publicly traded company. Our software is built in Github, as is our documentation. Anyone can do a pull request. We use Github tracking right on our content pages and feedback on progress. A lot of teams (like ASP.NET) lay out their roadmaps in public. Many teams also public standups, live coding on Twitch, and in person meetups too. You have been doing this a long time. How do you approach metrics? First, it is about measuring adoption – everything is measurable – everything from the take up of free trials to conversion into signups. We are able to link most of our advocacy efforts to downstream results: does it result in more consumption of our online content (docs, Solutions, videos, etc)? Does it result in more trial sign-ups? Does it result in more service consumption and revenue? We do this not to stack rank developer advocacy, but to understand which levers are most effective: which events, which activities in which countries, which third-party sites to place our content, and so on. We have a Power BI dashboard that gives us all insight into these things so that everyone is empowered to analyze and act. And, of course, we also examine traditional customer satisfaction metrics. We look at the number of companies in the ecosystem, do we have traction? We ask, are the people using our products being successful? Are our customers happy with our products, and are we seen as thought leaders? What has been your biggest challenge? Hiring really great people and building the overall team. We are constantly recruiting around the globe. We need people who are deeply technical, have the ability to communicate and have empathy with their communities. On top of that challenging criteria, I’m really proud we have 50% diversity across all metrics on the team. I’m extremely proud of the team – it’s like a developer advocacy dream team. If you want to learn more about our openings and the team, visit http://aka.ms/awesomejobs That’s really impressive. How do you retain and grow such great people? I have seen a lot of burn out and unclear career paths for Developer Evangelists in some companies? Having the team embedded in engineering is a big factor, and we have a big focus on development. As I mentioned we are an open source company and often my team is doing pull requests against the main product code bases. We also empower our team to create and deliver their own talks – our people don’t just deliver corporate decks. I think good planning helps avoid burnout. We plan the year and when the team is not on the road they are getting involved in development sprints. Recruiting curious lifelong learners also ensures people are always striving to develop themselves and not stand still. What do you love about Developer Relations? It touches every aspect of the company – tech, marketing, sales, everything. It’s so diverse. You have the privilege of seeing developers do amazing things, and you get to see our products in the hands of customers. It gives you a unique perspective. Ultimately it’s about making developers successful, then getting out of their way so they can build something amazing. Developer relations is a wonderful discipline and something I am very proud to work on with the community. Liked this article? Read also our interviews with Grace Francisco from Roblox, Intel’s Scott Apeland, and Amazon’s Adam Fitzgerald to learn more about Developer Marketing best practices. SlashData measures developer satisfaction twice per year, across the industry’s 20+ leading developer programs. Want to find out more about our Developer Program Benchmarking research? Contact Chris at chris@slashdata.co #developermarketing #developerrelations #microsoft

Breakthroughs and advancement in machine learning (ML) models, techniques, frameworks, and applications are having a growing influence on the developer ecosystem. Machine learning is enabling new experiences that allow computers to tackle more complex tasks that once only humans were able to. In the 14th edition of SlashData’s Developer Economics survey, the influence of machine learning can be observed throughout the collected data and analysis. Both the growth of new platforms and experiences as well changing infrastructure and programming languages are being driven by innovations in machine learning. The State of the Developer Nation report 14th Edition summarizes some of the key findings from the survey and provides a snapshot of today’s developer ecosystem. Underlying these findings is the importance of machine learning is in driving future trends. As the capabilities of machines and humans begin to converge, implications extend well beyond the developer community. To be well positioned for future technology shifts, it is important to understand where and how machine learning is influencing the direction of the software industry. ML is revolutionizing how we get around 52% percent of developers believe that advances in self-driving cars will have the most impact in the next five years. Machine learning is at the core of advancements in this area. The pivotal role that machine learning is playing in these projects is an indication of the power such advancements have in changing how people live their lives. Machine learning not only teaches cars to drive themselves but supports computer vision that can identify objects such as stop signs and pedestrians. The tremendous economics of this segment is attracting boatloads of capital that is leading to new advancements and new opportunities. Machine Learning impacts AR The growth of augmented reality is another area where ML will have an important impact. Deep learning is improving the simulation, localization, and mapping (SLAM) capabilities of leading AR platforms. SLAM enables AR platforms to identify objects and to overlay augmentations. It also recognizes and tracks features within a scene. These advancements are directly impacting the 15% of the developer community who are working on AR projects by supporting more advanced tools to create more fluid experiences. This takes the AR space beyond the Snapchat dogface mask. Given that mobile is the most popular platform for AR developers, 53% are targeting Android and 37% are targeting iOS, the developers in this space are also seeing a significant impact. Image classification models are the #1 project that machine learning developers are working on so we expect continued advancement in this space to support driverless cars and AR. 22% percent of ML developers were working on image classification and object recognition. Another area where machine learning developers are working is conversational interfaces or natural language processing (NLP). 20% of ML developers were working on NLP/chatbots, ranking third in our survey of ML developers. Chatbots are already all the rage and NLP models have made significant advances. The next challenge is creating even more sophisticated models to make chatbots smarter. ML drives Python and Serverless growth While the work that machine learning developers are doing to create new experiences is having a profound effect on what developers can create, ML is also having a big influence on infrastructure and programming languages. Python rose to the third most popular language in our latest survey reaching 6.3 million developers behind JavaScript (9.7 million developers) and Java (7.3 million developers). Python supports many ML libraries and is easy to prototype and experiment with making it very popular with machine learning developers. The growth of serverless architectures is also being fueled by new machine learning models. While the development of models requires dedicated compute resources, serverless architectures can make implementing these models much easier. Not only can models easily be executed closest to the application but models can be tied together via functions that can span different languages and platforms, making applications even faster and smarter. Today the vast majority of workloads handled by serverless are web and mobile API calls but developers plan on using serverless for machine learning and conversational experiences more in the future. The advancement and impact of ML is no news to developers. In our survey, 37% of developers believed that advancements in ML models would have the greatest impact over the next five years. Specifically, models that won’t require large training datasets, for example, using transfer learning or capsule networks. With less reliance on huge datasets, barriers to the exposition of new machine learning models are lowered and developers can create more models and smarter applications. As the prevalence of machine learning grows, developers will need new skills that go beyond coding and computer science but incorporate, advanced mathematics, probability, statistics, and data modeling. Developers at the top of the food chain will be able to bring together skills, knowledge, and understanding from all these areas and apply them to next generation of problems. Explore the data pointing to the influence of ML as well as data and analysis around additional developer trends by downloading the State of the Developer Nation 14th Edition report for more data and graphs depicting top developer trends. #developeconomicssurvey #machinelearning #python #stateofdevelopernation