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The DevRelX Summit is a community takeover, an opportunity for Developer Marketing and DevRel managers, strategists, practitioners, and enthusiasts to come together. SlashData , which powers DevRelX and the community behind it, is organising a Developer Marketing/DevRel event for the 7th consecutive year, after the record participation of 1,000+ attendees in 2021. DevRelX is a learning and sharing zone, committed to elevating the understanding of developer audiences and industry trends. A space where regardless of their experience level, everyone gets to access and share knowledge. This year’s event is an interactive experience of knowledge and expertise sharing, which puts the DevRelX community at its centre. The DevRelX Summit will take place on October 12 & 13 2022, with: Panels Community-led sessions Lightning talks Exclusive sessions and leadership workshops Developer-focused professionals are invited to join the 2-day schedule Full agenda follows: October 12 | Milestone Day | 8 am PT. The first day, “Milestone Day” is invite-only. It is addressed to DevRel strategists, senior managers, seasoned DevRels, and CXOs. Anyone who wants to participate can request an invite via this link. The Milestone day will offer participants strategic conversations, master classes, and workshops presented by industry pioneers and experts. October 13 | Community Day | 8 am PT. The second day, “Community Day”, is open to community advocates at heart. Anyone who believes that a community-centric mindset is the foundation of developer relations can get their ticket via this link. The Community day will be full of developer community conversations, learning and connecting with peers. Join the DevRelX Summit, for its 7th consecutive year – the best one yet! Here is the full agenda: #devrel #devrelevent #devrelx #devrelxsummit

In this slightly up close and personal post, I outline 4 things I’ve learned with a major work and life change. This post is aimed to walk through a few main points of reflection or possible recommendations when the time comes for anyone to take on a new and challenging opportunity. Now, this is based on my own experience 9 months in as the CEO of SlashData . It’s a few things I recommend someone to consider when changing roles, maybe you are becoming a first-time manager, taking on a larger team, and/or becoming a parent.  If you prefer the executive summary, the gist is: Whatever change you may be planning to make in your personal life and career, it’s my personal experience that you should start preparing early, but be ready for surprises along the way. You shouldn’t start a new role on day one – think about what you can do ahead of time to make the transition smoother. Especially in leadership roles, you might have become the manager, good for you! But, on the flip side, everyone has to have you as a manager now. For more context, keep reading. 🙂 #1 Plan everything but be ready for surprises. Some sayings are cliche for a reason. You know what they say, how life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans? Well, I felt the irony of that one when I found out I was pregnant 1 week after taking over as CEO. Travelling to my first board meeting, sick as a dog and not able to say anything because it was too early and the doctor’s advice is to keep it between you and your partner for a while. Obviously I want a family, so this was great, but we have to admit, the timing is also funny. I mean, I didn’t even get a headstart before the nausea sunk in. That said, having seen other women have children and come back from pregnancy leave and continue to grow in their roles successfully, gave me a lot of encouragement. I look up to the women both at SlashData and not, that have done this before me, especially before the era of remote working having to wear business suits and pumps. I can only imagine what it would have been like to be up at 7am and get panty hose on with the belly and swollen feet. Even in the world of remote working though, having a family and working full-time is really an accomplishment for any working parent. Fingers crossed I do it well. #2. Don’t wait till day one. I was very lucky to have a founder that was open to me “soft-launching” the role 3 months early. Taking over a leadership role should always have some overlap or shadowing. Since I was already part of the Leadership Team I was very attuned to the ins and outs, but the relationship dynamic changed with me and my colleagues. If you are moving into a new management role, you need to understand and comprehend, there is a relationship shift between you and everyone you will be working with. I hope you expect this before you take the role. Actually let me say things a bit differently. If you really want to be liked by everyone you work with, don’t take the job, it’s going to be very disappointing. Not everyone will be happy you have been promoted and that’s ok. If you are lucky someone will be excited, but people need time to adjust and you will need to give it to them. Changes like this need to happen in steps. If you can, advocate to allow some time to shadow, be present in your predecessor’s 1-2-1s with your future reports and in cross team meetings. Be aware of what’s being discussed within the leadership team (or the team you will be taking on) and how things are being addressed. Decide what you care about keeping within the agenda and if you might change something, prepare your thoughts as early as possible. Once you take over, have open discussions with your direct reports on what they also think about what they would like to keep, change, or what’s missing for them. On the one hand, people needed time to adjust, while others had nearly immediate expectations. Be aware, people will not be as open with you once they know you will be the new boss. They won’t tell you directly things you might have discussed openly just a few days earlier. This was something I didn’t consider ahead of time, from the day colleagues were notified, some saw me in a different light. There was an immediate expectation that I would be a different person, take a different approach as to how I communicate, even if they had known me for years. They weren’t as candid any more, they may have been more protective of their opinions, which also meant I needed now to be more careful how I spoke about the future of the company or a new project. Was I speaking hypothetically or sharing a plan that they should expect and take action on? Things change when you take over. It may take some time for you to adjust to this new reality. I took the honest approach, which I recommend. Open communication to explain that the adjustment is on both sides, you also need time to adjust to the new expectations from your new direct reports. Ask for that time from those that may have immediate expectations from you. You probably won’t fit their expectations anyway, your leadership style will be different from your predecessor and the leadership style of others on your team. Ask for that time to find your bearings. #3. Let your team tell you what to do Even more importantly for me before I took over, was taking over a strategic workshop we run a couple times a year. This would be a type of all hands meeting for the Leadership team. If you can, take this over early and design it to fit what you need it to achieve. I took over the last one in Q4 of the previous year. Even though I hadn’t officially started, I was able to re-design the structure of the meeting to fit what we needed for everyone to feel aligned. They needed not just to be aware of where we are going in my first year as CEO, they needed to own the direction. You’ve taken over, but everything is not about you or what you think should happen right now. Create the opportunity and the safe space for your new team to build your next steps together. You should have an opinion, but let them bring up the issues, and jointly decide on a plan to address them. Let them suggest what your priorities are, chances are you will agree with them too. Was it perfect? No of course not, I’m a newbie afterall. But, the time was extremely well spent. I planned a workshop that would set the pace for the next year. Everyone gave feedback for improvement, but also said they felt we were more aligned than ever and they knew what to expect in the next year. What everyone seemed to feel at the end of it was above all clarity about what’s next. For a new CEO, I couldn’t ask for more than that. Doing this BEFORE I took over, was 100% the right move. We all brought up the issues, we collaboratively came up with the plan with actions on what to do about them for the next year. We are still executing things we decided in that meeting, 9 months later. #4 Life happens to everyone, even you Now it’s possible you may be reading this while I’m off on my maternity leave. Yes, I took the job and 9 months in, I’m taking some time to have a baby. I plan to be in touch and have created a schedule for my leave to allow for time off and check-ins with the team, but I will be 100% off for some time and I know the leadership team has things covered in my absence. After that, we’ve planned a schedule to manage all the major events of Q4 and annual strategic planning to allow me to be on a half time schedule. That said, this is not a model I am advocating for others. This is simply what I felt would work for me at this moment. I have the help and support from my partner and family to allow me to have a flexi-schedule. All parents should have the opportunity and the right to take as much leave as they need while building their families. It’s up to us to define what leadership and mother-hood looks like. As a first-time mother, and CEO I know I won’t have it all figured out the first time round, but looking at all the women that have done it before me and watching everyone at SlashData take their place in moving the company forward, it gives me the comfort and confidence that I can take the time I need. I always thought I would step back from career progression when I had a family, as it turns out I’m pressing the gas pedal instead. #ceo #culture

About DevOps More and more developers are getting involved in DevOps, with an eye on the ultimate DevOps end goal – to streamline the software delivery process. Although lacking a widely-accepted, universal definition, DevOps is in essence a set of practices that enable developers to release small but frequent software updates, reliably and safely. These practices are supported by a broader DevOps culture: activities, technologies, and dedicated platforms which work together to achieve the overarching DevOps goal: to streamline the software delivery process. In this short blog post, we’ll be sharing some key highlights from our latest global survey wave and the answers of 14,000 developers who responded to questions related to DevOps between December 2021 and February 2022. Also, we’ll be looking at findings from the “Who is into DevOps?” chapter of our 19th Edition State of the Developer Nation free report. If reading this leaves you wanting to dive deeper into our DevOps insights, we are happy to let you know that we have extended our DevOps research to provide answers to questions like: The DevOps technologies and new tools developers have evaluated, including the top vendors: Atlassian, AWS, Azure, GitHub, GitLab, Google Cloud, Heroku, JFrog, Oracle The specific DevOps products or plans developers are using How application security is handled across organisations Which vendors’ application security tools they are using The processes developers use to secure their cloud-native applications and Developers’ top security challenges If you or your team are working on answering these DevOps questions, we will be happy to help you. Just get in touch. What are the latest insights on DevOps? In our latest report “Landscape and trends in DevOps” we look at the current landscape and trends within DevOps from the developers’ perspective. We aim to understand who these developers are, look at what DevOps activities they’re involved in, and whether increased DevOps adoption really leads to higher software delivery process performance. Here are the main highlights from the analysis: 77% of the surveyed developers are involved in DevOps Involvement in multiple DevOps activities/technologies is predictive of higher software delivery performance The average number of DevOps technologies used by DevOps practitioners has increased from 4.2 to 4.6 from Q3 2021 to Q1 2022. The last highlight means that the number of technologies used by DevOps practitioners has increased by nearly 10%. But DevOps practitioners are gradually exposed to a greater depth of activities too. Looking at each DevOps activity separately, we can see a significant increase in involvement across the board over the past 6 months: You can download the full preview of this report here or contact us to access all insights. Who is into DevOps? To answer this question and the ones that followed it, we asked developers whether they are involved in any of the activities that commonly fall under the DevOps spectrum, ranging from continuous integration and deployment to application and infrastructure monitoring. For the purposes of this blog post, we only consider developers who are professionals in at least one of the software areas they are active in. All the insights in this section come from our State of the Developer Nation 19th edition which was published on Q3 2020. You can contact us for all the latest insights. The first thing to note is that the adoption of DevOps practices is widespread among professionals, perhaps even more so than one might expect, given that the DevOps movement is relatively new. According to our data, the vast majority of professional developers (82%) are involved in DevOps in one way or another. For perspective, just over half (52%) of non-professionals are involved in any of the DevOps activities on our list. The vast majority of professional developers are involved in DevOps, but do not necessarily consider themselves DevOps practitioners On a separate view of engagement with DevOps in our survey, only one in five developers reported working on DevOps when they were explicitly asked about their involvement in several emerging areas, including blockchain applications and quantum computing, among others. Even if we include those who said that they are learning about or are interested in DevOps, no more than 65% consider themselves to be engaged with the area. This signals that a large portion of the developer population has already adopted DevOps practices but does not necessarily self-identify with the term. Focussing on the individual steps of the DevOps lifecycle, we find that developers are first and foremost involved in the fundamental activity of releasing frequent but small software updates. The most popular development process related to DevOps is continuous integration (CI), practised by 40% of respondents. Another 37% use continuous delivery or deployment (CD), which expands upon CI by automatically deploying all code changes to staging or production environments. However, full automation of the software release process – and therefore true commitment to the DevOps culture – is far from a reality. While more than half (52%) of developers use CI or CD to streamline parts of their workflow, only 25% use both practices to automate all steps between integrating code changes into a central repository through to production deployment. As it turns out, developers are still sceptical about fully automated CI/CD pipelines. This is evident by the fact that nearly 40% of them manually give the green light for code deployments to be promoted to production. Application and infrastructure monitoring, performed by 39% of developers, is one of the most common development practices, but not so much infrastructure provisioning and management (27%), which is still the realm of IT managers and system administrators. Similarly, creating automated tests (25%) and building CI/CD pipelines (23%) are rather specialised tasks, carried out predominantly by quality assurance professionals and solution architects, respectively. Talking about organisational roles; our research reveals noticeable differences in the level of DevOps adoption, i.e. involvement in any DevOps-related activity, depending on the title that developers hold. First of all, technical company leaders – CIOs, CTOs, IT managers, and engineering team leads – report the highest level of involvement in DevOps activities. Not only do almost all developers with a technical leadership function, about 95% of them, have at least some participation in the DevOps lifecycle, but they are also simultaneously involved in a higher than the average number of DevOps activities (three vs two). Programmers have largely adopted CI/CD processes, but not so much other DevOps practices The next tier of the DevOps adoption ranking is mainly occupied by specialist roles, such as network security engineers, QA developers, and system administrators. Between 86% and 91% of developers holding these positions are in some way associated with the DevOps culture. We should note, however, that only architects – system, solution, software etc. – appear to be heavily involved in all phases of the DevOps lifecycle. All other specialists are primarily focused on activities relevant to their expertise. For example, system administrators are naturally focused on infrastructure provisioning and monitoring, whereas QA engineers create automated tests for CI/CD pipelines more than anything else. Front-line coders and software developers, who represent the majority of respondents in our survey (61%), are also highly likely to be involved in DevOps activities – 81% of them are although not more often than the average professional (82%). Our data suggest that software developers are keen to adopt CI/CD processes, but not so much operational practices such as monitoring applications in production environments. Again, this indicates that the complete shift to the DevOps culture has not yet been achieved. Apart from responsibilities central to their role, programmers are not accountable for additional product lifecycle phases. Another important indicator of the level of engagement with DevOps practices is the software sectors that developers are involved in. As with roles, we see some interesting variations in DevOps adoption across sectors. For example, close to 90% of developers who create extensions for third-party ecosystems or backend services are into DevOps, as opposed to less than 80% of game developers. That is partly explained by the extensive coding experience required to implement the DevOps model. We know from our data that DevOps practitioners are far more experienced coders than developers who are not involved in any DevOps-related activity. And developers working on apps for third-party ecosystems, backend services, or industrial IoT projects are among the most experienced in the software economy: up to 85% of them have three or more years of coding experience. In comparison, no more than 73% of game developers have the same level of expertise. Nonetheless, we find that desktop app developers report relatively low adoption of DevOps practices, even though they are highly experienced professionals – 82% of them have at least three years of experience in software development. This points to limited alignment with the key benefits of DevOps more than anything else. Desktop applications typically receive updates at a lower frequency than applications running on other environments, e.g. servers. Therefore, the fundamental DevOps strategy of releasing small software updates at high velocity is not entirely applicable to desktop application projects. In conclusion, DevOps signifies a cultural shift whereby developers from different teams work closely together with an aim to deliver software faster and more reliably. The practices of the DevOps model are already widely adopted among professional developers across software sectors and organisational roles, although with some significant variations in the focus on specific activities. These variations reveal, in some cases, that true commitment to the DevOps culture is not yet achieved; many developers are still focused on the core aspects of their role instead of assuming responsibility for additional phases of the product life cycle. Want more DevOps insights? Get in touch and we can work together on all the questions you need to answer to optimise your strategy. #devops #oracle #AWS #devopscicd #GitLab #Heroku #Atlassian #GitHub #GoogleCloud #JFrog #Azure #continuousintegration

This is a chapter from our latest State of the Developer Nation 22nd Edition, which is free to download. You can watch our Lightning Session on the key findings and also read below for the whole report and insights on low-code / no-code tools. Low-code/no-code (LCNC) tools provide a visual approach to software development, abstracting and automating parts of the application development process. This allows those without prior software development experience to create custom applications and provides potential time- and cost-saving for professional developers. In this chapter, we investigate the extent to which developers are using LCNC tools, showing differences according to professional status, geographical regions, and experience levels. When it comes to reducing development overheads, addressing the challenge of finding skilled developers, and accelerating taking software to market, LCNC tools are becoming increasingly attractive. The sophistication of these tools is increasing rapidly, providing the potential to significantly disrupt the software industry. This begs the question, to what extent are developers1 using LCNC tools for their development projects? We begin by separating developers according to their professional status – differentiating professionals from non-professionals, who are hobbyists and/or students. We excluded from our sample those who indicated that they were unsure about what share of their development work was done using LCNC tools. Just over half (54-55%) of developers in each group report that they are not using LCNC tools at all for their development work. This proportion is marginally lower for non-professionals who are students (55% of those who are exclusively students and 53% who are students and hobbyists) than non-professionals who identify as exclusively hobbyists (57%). 46% of professional developers use low-code/no-code tools for some portion of their development work State of the Developer Nation 22nd Edition The proportion of developers who do use LCNC tools does not differ across groups (46% of professionals vs 45% of non-professionals). This highlights that LCNC tools are finding traction among those less likely to be familiar with coding and that use-cases within professional software development are also common. As experience increases, developers are less likely to use LCNC tools at all. This is particularly true among those with more than ten years of experience. These tools are often framed as being best suited for simple programming tasks. Hence, the complexity of development work assigned to more experienced developers may be less appropriate for LCNC approaches. Furthermore, experienced developers are likely to have mastery over simpler coding tasks, which leaves little room for the efficiency gains that LCNC tools are often heralded for. Using LCNC tools without a degree of accompanying manual coding is highly uncommon across all experience levels. The proportion of developers who use LCNC tools for a small amount (up to a quarter) of their development work remains relatively constant (between 17-24%) across the experience spectrum. Therefore, LCNC’s most likely role is as an occasional adjunct to existing coding tools, regardless of developers’ experience. Experienced developers, particularly those with more than 10 years of experience, are the least likely to use LCNC tools State of the Developer Nation 22nd Edition More extensive use of LCNC tools, i.e. for between one-quarter and three-quarters of all development activity, peaks slightly for those with around three to ten years of experience, revealing that it is early to mid-experience developers, rather than newcomers who are most likely to elevate LCNC tools’ status to essential. This is perhaps due to the recognised career importance of gaining traditional development experience, before reducing reliance on writing code. Only 2-4% of developers across all experience levels use LCNC tools for 75% or more of their development tasks, indicating that it is highly uncommon to shift the balance heavily towards LCNC-driven development. Our data reveal notable differences in adoption and engagement with LCNC tools across different geographic regions. The Greater China area emerges as the region in which developers are most likely to be using LCNC approaches. 69% of developers in this region report using LCNC tools, compared to the global average of 46%. This suggests that the Chinese LCNC tool market has transitioned from an introduction phase to a growth phase. According to Mendix’s State of Low-Code report, IT professionals in China are the most likely to suggest that low-code is a trend their organisation can’t afford to miss (84% compared to 72% globally). Non-developer, or citizen developer, audiences also likely account for a large part of LCNC’s growth. However, as in all regions, the majority of bona fide software developers in the Greater China area currently use LCNC tools for less than half of their overall development work. It remains to be seen whether their reliance on such tools will also expand as the market and tools mature. 19% of developers in North America use Low-Code/No-Code tools for more than half of their coding work – almost twice the global average of 10% North America has the second-highest LCNC tool adoption rate and stands out for the proportion of developers using LCNC tools to conduct more than half of their overall development work – 19% of developers here report that their use of LCNC tools outweighs their manual coding (comprising 13% using them for half to three-quarters of development work and 6% using them for more than three-quarters); almost double the global average of 10%. Hence, North America appears to be at the forefront of the LCNC movement, providing the strongest evidence that these tools can supplant traditional development approaches – even in a region where 81% of developers identify as professionals. South Asia, the Middle East and Africa, and East Asia excluding Greater China are all above the global average in terms of LCNC tool adoption. Despite considerable uptake in these regions, LCNC products have not matured to the point where their use is a dominating feature of developers’ processes. Regions such as Western Europe and Israel, Oceania, Eastern Europe, and South America are all below the global average in terms of LCNC tool adoption. The shortfall in these regions is particularly linked to smaller than average proportions using LCNC tools for more than 25% of their development work. The proportion using them for less than a quarter of their work is more comparable to the global average, suggesting that the market is still in its introductory phase in these regions – developers are evaluating the tools but are yet to rely on them for a substantial portion of their work. Access the full free report to dive into insights on: Language Communities Understanding Developer Personalities Who is using low-code / no-code tools Spotlight on China and the Rest of East Asia How developers generate revenue Emerging technologies If you have questions about the data above, want more or want to explore other topic areas we cover, talk to us. #stateofthedevelopernation22ndedition #developerresearch #nocode #lowcodenocode #son22 #developertrends #stateofthedevelopernation #lowcode

In this article, we share a chapter from the latest State of the Developer Nation report, which anyone can access. We focus our attention on some of the key differences between developers in East Asia, including the Greater China region, and the rest of the world. Understanding these differences provides valuable insights that can help shape the strategy for developer engagement programs. For this analysis, we split the Greater China area from the rest of East Asia to provide more regional granularity. In terms of relative size, we find that almost a fifth (18%) of the global developer population is located in either the Greater China region (9%) or the rest of East Asia (9%). Breaking down East Asia into countries, we see that more than half of the developers here are spread across two countries: Indonesia (32%) and Japan (21%). When comparing developers across regions, we can see that just over a third (34%) of developers in the Greater China region have six or more years of experience, which is notably less than developers globally (43%). Furthermore, the Greater China region has a much smaller concentration (4% vs 22% globally) of highly-experienced developers (16+ years). With generally lower levels of experience in the Greater China area, aspiring developers may find starting a career here less competitive than developers in regions with higher levels of experience. The Greater China area has a comparatively low concentration of highly experienced developers State of the Developer Nation Q1 2022 East Asian developers outside China have similar levels of experience to the rest of the global developer population. Both groups have a little more than a third (34%) of their developers with 11+ years of software development experience. However, East Asia’s data are largely propped up by Japan. The developer community in Japan tends to be highly experienced, with almost six in ten developers (59%) having 16+ years of experience. No other country has a higher concentration of developers with this level of experience. With such a high concentration of highly skilled developers, we can expect some differences in behaviour, which we’ll highlight in the last section of this chapter. More than 50% of Chinese Developers have learned how to code via undergraduate degrees in computing State of the Developer Nation Q1 2022 The journey to coding mastery lacks a clearly defined path. Developers typically state they’ve used more than two learning methods on average to learn how to code. In general, the self-taught method is the most popular among developers globally, with more than 60% using this method. However, our data shows that the proportion of self-taught developers fluctuates significantly across regions. In the Greater China area, the most popular method for developers to learn how to code is via an undergraduate degree in computing, with 50% having used this method. This is significantly higher than developers in other regions (41% – 42%). We generally see a higher concentration of professional developers in Greater China (83%) than we do in the rest of the world (70%). It could be that the job market in Greater China more often requires a degree in computing or engineering, which would also explain why self-teaching is used less often in this region. Developers in the rest of East Asia, however, tend to follow the learning trends of developers in other regions. Here, we see the self-taught method is the most popular method (61%), followed by an undergraduate degree in software engineering (41%). Analysing the data at a country level, we see developers in Indonesia are more diverse learners. Developers in this country stated that they used three methods on average when learning to code. Indonesian developers are more likely to learn via self-teaching, online courses, and developer boot camps than any other developers in East Asia. This is quite different from their peers in Japan who are the least likely to use online courses and bootcamps to learn how to code. Instead, developers in Japan are most likely to use the self-taught (63%) and on-the-job training (45%) methods when learning to code. Developers in the Greater China area are half as likely to have a Stack Overflow account than developers globally State of the Developer Nation Q1 2022 Next, we explore how developers interact with the popular online community, Stack Overflow, to understand their engagement levels with programming support. Stack Overflow has become a standard support community for many developers, with more than eight in ten (85%) of the general developer population reporting they’ve used or visited this popular question and answer site. Our focus on developers in East Asia and the Greater China area shows Stack Overflow’s popularity falls below the global average. Developers in these regions are around three times less likely to visit Stack Overflow than developers in other regions. Developers in the Greater China area are the least engaged, with only 19% having an account, and only 11% having earned at least one badge. Developers in this region have other home-grown Q&A site alternatives, such as segmentfault.com, which could be contributing to the lower adoption of Stack Overflow. When looking closely at the rest of East Asia, we again see that developers in Japan are skewing the perception of this region. Developers in Japan have even less activity on Stack Overflow than developers in the Greater China area. Here, only a little more than a third (36%) stated they use Stack Overflow. Furthermore, only about 5% have an account. Like developers in the Greater China area, Our data does show usage of Stack Overflow increases among Japanese developers who have gained experience in software development, indicating that less experienced developers are using other platforms for support. Like China, Japan has other home-grown options like teratail.com where developers can field programming support from their peers, which may be the place new Japanese programmers visit more often to get answers to their questions. That’s just one chapter from the State of the Developer Nation report. There are 5 more chapters you can access. Want more? Download the full report! #developermarket #china #developermarketchinaandeastasia #stateofthedevelopernation #eastasiaandchinadevelopers #developersinchina #eastasiadevelopers

When asked about why we do what we do, there’s always one response: we love solving problems for the industry and our clients. Our mission is to help our clients understand what the market looks like, what developers need, what excites developers and what doesn’t and what they expect from our clients’ products and the developer programs that go along with them. So, when we are approached with a request for some custom work, we roll up our sleeves and dive deep into the data. In this blog post, we’ll look together into such a request and: What the client asked How we approached it What we offered How the client solved the problem. Let’s see how this client, a household name we’ll call “Client”, which is a company among the Top 5 in tech and one of the largest in the world, worked with us to improve their Developer Experience. Knock knock – The Question The client chose to work with us to address developer experience. They already had access to our research showing how their satisfaction level compares against their competitors, but what they wanted was to understand what drives developer satisfaction with their product and what they can do to improve it. What was the goal/challenge you were looking to accomplish? The product we wanted was a custom project. We’re always really interested in the health of the developer experience. And so we use the Developer Program Benchmarking report as one of the indicators of the health of the Client developer experience. Within that, we are also interested in the adoption and engagement [of our product]. But within my team, we mostly focus on satisfaction as a proxy metric for developer experience. When we decided to do this custom project last year, it really was to understand “what is moving our satisfaction up or down?” and “what are some of the levers that we can adjust in order to improve our developer experience?” Some of this data is confirming things that we already know. And some of it is providing new insights. Both of those are valuable use cases for us. This report helped us not look at developer experience in a vacuum, but benchmark it against the industry. Client representative Why did you choose SlashData? Part of that is the sample size. And I think the trusted relationship we already have. Also, I think this ties back into why do we choose the Developer Programs Benchmarking report. The competitive analysis in that report is important to us. While we didn’t focus on that in the deep dive, I do think that is one of the reasons why this data is helpful so that we’re not always looking at Client experience in a vacuum, but we can actually as the report says “benchmark it against the industry experience” as well. The answer After we looked at what questions our client has, we took a step back and looked at the data points that could help us find the answers. There were several data points to choose from, as we survey 30,000+ developers annually on 11 areas of interest. How did our data solve your problem/challenge overall? The area where we found it most useful is getting that cross-section of region, experience level, and product area. So we looked at that data. The place where it becomes a little harder in our process is making those insights actionable within our company. Part of our job is to provide the data and then folks act on it themselves. I think that Client Developer Relations, as a whole, is still thinking about “how do we make this data digestible and more centralised?”. SlashData is a big data source for us. But there’s a lot of information always coming in at us, around developer experience. We’re still trying to navigate how we make that useful and easily actionable for our people. I don’t think we’re there yet. I think we’re at the point where we’re thinking “I want data to do my job better”. And then, we’re at “wow, okay, well, there’s a lot of data. What do we do now?”. What decisions did you make using the data/research? What we wanted to focus more on were the top three things that are important to developers this year. I don’t always have visibility into the TA level on what decisions might be made from this data. That’s also something that we want to do better. It’s also hard though because we don’t always expect that there will be a leader who’s going to take this and say “I now declare, we all must focus on this”. We are equally happy if a single engineer sees this data and then goes and makes a change in the parts that they affect. That alone makes the overall developer experience better. There’s this interesting intersection of leadership use and individual contributor use. We know that there’s value to both sides, but we don’t necessarily track what that value is. Working together Seamless cooperation is key to bringing in good results. That’s why we wanted to know how our client felt about working with us on this project. What did you like about the process of working with SlashData? I think that Slashdata is a good partner. Especially when we focus on discovery. We had a case last year when we didn’t necessarily know what we were looking for. Your response was to try out different things. Even when we asked for a random data table, you did not only deliver it, but you also provided a comprehensive analysis and different ways that we could look at the data. Last year we focused a lot on regional topics but we also broke it down by product area. And then at the end of that, we decided that we didn’t care so much about the region. What we needed to focus on more is the product area. We have that partnership where we can do some exploration, and then have things work out well. Even if they don’t work out well, we continue from there. That’s a really important part of this piece. The flexibility is really important to us, and just as much, your responsiveness. How would you describe the service quality? I think that’s excellent. We’re not always super buttoned up on what we want and that causes a lot more work on your end, but it’s handled well. I feel like you have helped us navigate that a lot. What are the things you found challenging when working with SlashData? We don’t always know what we’re looking for. We are relying on you, the data analysts’ expertise to help guide us. We need the expertise, but you don’t know the business goals. And it’s challenging to try to find that middle ground where I can articulate the business goals well enough for you to provide the expertise and help us decide on the right metrics or analysis that would prove to be useful information for those business goals. This interview is part 2 of the “How we work with our clients” series. The product this client worked with was a custom project, along with Developer Program Benchmarking data. You can also see how Okta managed to broaden its developer network using our Developer Program Benchmarking. Working on a new initiative or want to make sure your product will win developers’ hearts? Talk to us. #developerexperience #slashdatadeepdives #slashdatacustomers #developerprogrambenchmarkingdeepdives #casestudy #deepdives #usecases #developerprohrambenchmarking

The 22nd Developer Nation global survey from SlashData reached more than 20,000 developers in 166 countries. Its findings are bundled in a free “State of the Developer Nation” report. This research report delves into key developer trends for Q1 2022, taking a particular interest in the following: Language communities – An update Understanding developer personalities Who is using low-code/no-code tools? Spotlight on China and the rest of East Asia How developers generate revenues Emerging technologies Here are some highlights from the report, guaranteed to intrigue your curiosity: Language communities – An update JavaScript remains the most popular programming language for the tenth survey in a row, with close to 17.5M developers worldwide using it. Python has remained the second most widely adopted language behind JavaScript. Python now counts 15.7M users. Go and Ruby are important languages in backend development but Go has grown more than twice as fast in the past year in absolute terms. Rust has nearly tripled in size in the past 24 months, from just 0.6M developers in Q1 2020 to 2.2M in Q1 2022. State of the Developer Nation 22nd Edition Spotlight on China and the rest of East Asia More than a quarter of developers in Greater China (26%) and the rest of East Asia (27%) don’t use Stack Overflow, which is more than three times the rate of developers in the rest of the world (8%). The Greater China area has a relatively low concentration of highly- experienced developers (16+ years of development) when compared to developers in the rest of East Asia and the rest of the world. More than half of Chinese developers have learned how to code via undergraduate degrees in computing, which is about 10 percentage points more than developers in the rest of East Asia and the rest of the world. How developers generate revenues Contracted development is the revenue model of choice across all industry verticals, used by nearly a third (31%) of professional developers. Less than one in ten (7%) professional developers are generating revenue from selling data. Usage of the advertising revenue model declines as companies grow in size. Developers working for large enterprises (5K+ employees) tend to use multiple revenue models less often than developers in smaller companies. Below we have included a few graphs that illustrate some of the findings. You can download the full report for free and access all data and insights within. If you need additional information or looking to understand developer preferences’, please get in touch with us and we will dive into it together.

SlashData has come a long way, as has its DNA. It has pivoted and transformed itself several times. It has moved from a tiny consulting shop shedding light into the future of mobile software – to a leading analyst firm helping the world understand developers.  Our reputation reached all corners of DevRel ecosystem thanks to our Future Developer Summit series, podcast , our Developer Marketing and Relations book written by the who’s who in the DevRel scene.  With every transition, and through every phase we‘ve continued to develop as a business, learning from our mistakes and successes, running post-mortems, and always asking “what can we do better”. And now SlashData is changing yet again. We opened up custom research in 2021 which helped our revenues double over the last year. The market opportunity is growing rapidly, as every software firm is asking how to understand and engage developers who influence the purchase of their software. And it will grow even further, as every company under digital transformation needs to understand how to build and train its newborn developer workforce. After 15 years since founding SlashData, the time has come for me to move on. I ‘m passing on the CEO baton to Moschoula Kramvousanou . Moschoula has been at SlashData since 2017. She’s served the company, leading the Client Relations team and more recently Strategic Partnerships. She’s played a pivotal role in leading the company’s growth, not just in terms of sales and the growth of her team, but also catalysing several changes across the company and forging valuable relationships with clients and partners. She understands our clients and our market intimately, and has helped propel forward every team. Moschoula is now taking the team through the next few years of rapid growth, stellar reputation and carrying forward our tradition of innovation, always asking – “what can we do better”. The company could not be in better leadership hands, in a better shape financially, or in a better place for demand and market growth. Here’s to the road ahead! Andreas Constantinou SlashData Founder #companyannouncement #slashdataannouncement #slashdatacompany #ceo #newceo

Developers have a wide variety of support and learning needs that evolve as they progress through their careers. Here, we’ll look at some of the best ways to help developers build on their skills by answering their technical questions, creating a valuable community that they can integrate with, and providing professional certifications as proof of learning. In a highly competitive job market, vendors can demonstrate value to developers by helping them to build on their skills and get an advantage in the job market. Here, we take a look at data from two of our most recent Developer Nation surveys. In our Q1 2021 survey, we asked developers, amongst many other topics, how they prefer to communicate with vendors about technical topics. In our Q3 2021 survey, we took a deeper dive into developers’ views on what makes great technical certifications and what are the key features of a successful community. The data here is only a small sample of what we collect, so if this sparks some interesting questions for you, then please get in touch. It’s a matter of experience Data from our Q3 2021 survey, which was fielded between June and August 2021, shows that overall, there are more early-career developers (those with 0-2 years of experience) than highly-experienced developers (those with 11 or more years of experience). Developers with different levels of experience undoubtedly have different support needs (and we’ll come to this later), but taking a global perspective on experience levels risks missing some interesting regional variations. South Asia and Western Europe sit at opposite ends of the experience spectrum – South Asia has the largest proportion of inexperienced developers, and Western Europe has the smallest. This means that when creating a regional strategy, not only should you think about the cultural and economic differences that exist between regions, but also, due to their experience levels, developers will have very different support needs. Technically correct is the best kind of correct We see here how developers’ support needs evolve as they gain experience. In fact, communicating with vendors about technical questions becomes more important as developers gain experience – more experienced developers are very likely working on more challenging projects and, as such, more often require expert support. What’s interesting is which communication channels become more important. Email is consistently the most important, regardless of experience level. It seems that the power of direct, asynchronous communication is clear to all developers, though it does become more important to more experienced developers, as well as to older developers (and age is, of course, correlated with experience). On the other hand, other direct but synchronous communication methods such as online chat retain their importance to developers of all experience levels (but fall in importance for the oldest), whilst live interactive coding sessions only fall out of favour amongst the most experienced. Not every communication method is created equally, and neither is every technical question. Irrespective of their experience levels, developers want to engage directly to have their technical questions answered and are happy to do synchronously or asynchronously. Issue trackers and code repositories nearly quadruple in importance for the most experienced developers when compared with the least experienced. Here, you have experienced developers asking their technical questions through established open-source channels that may feel inaccessible to less-experienced developers. There’s definitely scope to widen participation amongst inexperienced developers in this fundamental pillar of software development. We also see that Q&A sites steadily increase in importance as developers become more experienced. That’s not to say that inexperienced developers aren’t going to StackOverflow – they’re still using such sites to get information; it’s just that they are more likely to simply consume rather than ask technical questions of vendors. A sense of community Interacting with vendors or peers through a code repository or on a Q&A site is one of the many ways in which developers interact with their community. Community support is a powerful facilitator of learning and development for many developers and is as much a source of inspiration as it is camaraderie. We see that developers of differing experience levels have very different ideas about what they want from a community, but collaboration and support are two of the most stable and important features to developers of all experience levels. But experienced and inexperienced developers lean on their community support network in different ways. A knowledgeable community becomes more important to developers as they gain experience – here, these most experienced developers likely find more value in a community that can help them answer complex questions. On the other hand, inexperienced developers are more likely to look for strong leadership in a community – they are likely looking to more experienced members for guidance and learning opportunities. Certifiably important Vendor support and community are just two of the myriad ways that developers build their skills throughout their careers, but in an increasingly competitive professional environment, many developers study for professional certifications to get an edge. Such certifications are important to developers at different stages of their professional life – early-career developers are likely looking to distinguish themselves from the masses, whilst seasoned professionals may want to protect their lucrative career or even switch specialisation. Regardless, because of certifications’ wide appeal, developers at all experience levels similarly agree on the importance of certifications being suitable for a variety of learning styles. On the other hand, industry recognition, online availability, and affordability are three of the most important features of a professional certification program, and they become more important as developers gain experience. This demonstrates that as developers mature, they become more focused on the core aspects of professional certifications. We also see how their job-seeking habits change. The importance of recognition on job boards rises steadily from zero to five years of experience before falling sharply afterwards. This suggests that after around five years in the industry, developers have built their professional network and are less reliant on job boards, though the professional credibility of a certification is still paramount. What does this all mean? Here, we’ve seen that there is great variation in the experience levels of developers across the world, as well as between different geographical regions. We’ve also learnt that developers of different experience levels have very different views about the type of support they want to receive from vendors and from their communities, whether they are asking technical questions or becoming certified. Therefore, you should look at the experience levels of your user base and use this to figure out how best to support them. However, experience isn’t the whole story; our extensive research shows that a plethora of factors influence developers’ needs and decisions. Developers’ roles, level of decision-making seniority, industry, and technology choices all impact their needs for support. Understanding developers’ needs and behaviour requires not only a rich set of data but also extensive experience and knowledge to build the personas that inform a robust strategy. Don’t know where to start? Well, at SlashData we have a wealth of experience in understanding developer behaviour through our twice-yearly global survey, as well as through numerous custom research projects with our clients and partners. We also have a deep and detailed body of research on developers through our Developer Program Benchmarking research. Get in touch to find out more. You can also go through a case study that shows how Okta and Mozilla used the Developer Program Benchmarking to bring their developer program among the Top 3 in terms of developer satisfaction. #developerexperience #developersupport #developerprograms #developersexpectations #developerresources #developerstrategy #developers

Developers. Decision-makers. Kingmakers? For several years now, at SlashData we have been helping our clients – some of the biggest names in tech – to understand how their developer programs measure against the competition. Twice a year, we run an extensive and wide-ranging global survey to understand who developers are, what tools and resources they use, and where they are going. Developers share with us their experiences with vendors’ resources – which ones they use, how often they use them, and how happy they are with the experience. We also dig a little deeper into what developers value in vendor support, resources, and communities. Our research shows that developers are becoming increasingly involved in all stages of the decision-making process. Not only are they writing specifications for vendors and tooling choices, but they are also influencing decision-makers and budget holders. If software is eating the world, then developers are writing the menu.  To attract developers, many tech companies are actively investing in Developer Relations (DevRel) teams and developer marketing activities. They are creating an abundance of resources, training programs, technical support, events, and community activities. It’s not always clear which activities should be priorities and how resources should be allocated to achieve long-term strategic goals. We are here to help. Our Developer Program Benchmarking research tracks 20+ of the leading developer programs, and captures developer sentiment across more than twenty developer program attributes, ranging from documentation and sample code to mentoring programs and access to experts. In so doing, it helps DevRel and developer marketing practitioners understand how their developer program compares against the rest. Here, we give you a snapshot of the state of play for these developer programs. We use three KPIs to create a 360° overview of how each developer program performs: Adoption – How many developers use a vendor’s resources Engagement – How frequently developers engage with the resources Satisfaction – How developers rate their experience using the resources We can see that the Market Leaders; Google, Microsoft, and Amazon highly engage and satisfy developers. Their market share – or adoption rate, shown by the size of the bubble – reinforces their market-leading position. In fact, when we take a longer-term view of this data, it becomes clear that Google and Microsoft have long been the market leaders, staying at or near the top of the table for all three KPIs.  Recently however, Amazon has made considerable progress. In fact, Amazon’s developer program has been growing faster than the global developer population, which is currently 24.3M (you can explore more in our developer population calculator ), while Google and Microsoft’s share has dropped slightly. When you take into account the large increase in Amazon’s satisfaction score and their aggressive growth strategy, the top table positions don’t seem so assured. Our data also uncovers the Satisfying Specialists – these developer programs are often small and focused. Unity, Red Hat and DigitalOcean sit firmly in this space. Developers don’t need to engage frequently with these vendors’ resources, but when they do, they have an excellent experience. For these vendors, low engagement is not a cause for concern, though it does come with its own challenges – when developers have fewer touchpoints there are fewer opportunities to speak to them or to influence their behaviour. For these (and other) vendors with low engagement, messaging becomes vital.  The Under-realised Value segment contains developer programs that, although having high engagement amongst developers, are being held back by their low satisfaction ratings. These programs are often (though not always) small, and the vendors here have a clear imperative to improve their developers’ experience. Thankfully, with developers engaging frequently with the resources there are ample opportunities to effect positive change. But what, exactly, to change?  This brings us to the true power of our Developer Program Benchmarking research. Not only do we understand how developers engage with vendors’ resources, but we also know which resources are important to developers, and how satisfied they are with the resources that companies provide.  Though developers’ preferences change and evolve, some things stay constant. Of the twenty-plus resources that we ask about, documentation & sample code, tutorials & how-to videos, and development tools, integrations & libraries have consistently been rated as the most important resources that companies should offer. This shows that developers are focused not only on getting things done, using documentation and development tools to speed up the development process, but they also highly value having the opportunity to learn. We can see this repeated further down the list – training courses & hands-on labs provide the learning opportunities, whilst technical support allows them to lean on experts when they need to. In this way, we can tell which resources developers value, and how their experience matches their expectations. This information, when combined with our wealth of survey data on demographics, firmographics, technology choices, motivations, skills, and much more, becomes incredibly powerful for informing strategic planning. We help some of the leading tech companies in the world to understand precisely which resources need improvement, and which developers will benefit most from such improvements. Have you ever wanted to know how to tailor your tutorials to the right level of complexity? Have you ever tried to decide how to localise your content? What about marketing to enterprise developers, what do they care about?  We also go a level deeper. For many developer programs, we specifically ask developers how they use resources relating to different products or disciplines. For example, we help developer programs to understand whether or not they are vulnerable in the cloud compute market, or what are the specific preferences of developers using IoT resources. Once again, coupled with the rest of our rich and diverse data, this information allows you to create a finely tuned strategy that allocates resources efficiently and effectively. With developers having such power in the decision-making process, this is a win-win for everyone involved. By understanding what developers value, you can tailor your offering to suit their needs, increasing retention, growing your audience, and ultimately, adding to your bottom line. SlashData are the analysts of the developer nation, and we can help you understand developers. You can download a preview of the latest Developer Programs Benchmarking here . #slashdataresearch #developerprograms #google #developersatisfaction #developerresearch #developerengagement #developerprogrambenchmarking #developers #microsoft

Over the last 4 years, we’ve spent thousands of hours building the culture at SlashData, one step at a time. There is no better picture of the culture than the values that underpin it. In this article, I strip SlashData bare, describing in great detail our values and the behaviours that underscore them, that is the blueprint for our culture, who we are, and what guides our behaviour. In his book Traction, Gino Wickman describes values as “a small set of vital and timeless principles for your company…These core values define your culture and who you truly are as people”. Values guide a number of important activities at SlashData: – Hiring: Every person that we hire has to be a good fit for our culture. No fit, no hire, even for the highest of performers. We never sacrifice the cultural fit to hire primadonnas. I’ve made many mistakes hiring people based on performance, thinking that their cultural fit will improve over time. – Reviews: Every six months we assess performance and cultural fit for every team member. We offer guidance on where to improve, how to tap into your hidden strengths, and whether you are observing the company values. We used to have a bonus scheme for how closely a team member would observe values, but we’ve made that depend on performance only for a simple reason. If you’re not observing our values, that’s a deal-breaker, our relationship is not going to work out. – Benefits: Among other benefits, we award people for every year they’ve been with us. The list of benefits is informed by our values; awards include ways for team members to contribute to a charitable cause, to take up a new learning course – How we work with customers: we treat our customers with the same respect, dependability and attentiveness as we treat our colleagues. – Business decisions: Our 3-year business strategy is informed primarily from helping people grow, not from returning a profit to the business. People growth comes before profit, and profit comes before revenues. We’re not VC-backed, so we don’t have to return astronomical growth just because a VC partner asked. Profit takes precedence over revenues, making sure that we run a business that can function well and can spend time on developing people and having fun together. And people growth takes precedence over profit. For people to grow, their role has to grow, and as a small company, that means our business needs to grow to create new opportunities for our team members. What are the values and the behaviours that underscore them? Here’s the full, unfiltered list. If you ‘re competing with us, go ahead and copy us. And if you like what you see come and join us. High Performers Behaviours: We ‘re a team of high performers. We pay attention to detail, always striving to deliver top quality work. We are adaptable: as part of a growing team, we try out new things, we create new processes, and we adapt ourselves as the needs of the business change. We focus on what’s important and stick with it. We define our team and individual goals every year and every quarter so that every team and everyone knows what to focus on. Each of us has their own, effective system for organising their work on a daily and weekly basis. We continue raising the bar with every new person joining the team – every person we hire has to be better than the average of the team. We start with the end in mind: to get to the bottom of the issue, we start with what we are trying to accomplish. We trust each other to be dependable and deliver on our shared goals. We deliver to our clients as we committed so that they continue to trust us. Each of us assumes responsibility and doesn’t blame others or the system. We play like a sports team. If I score and the team loses, I have lost. Always Learning Behaviours: We strive to grow as individuals, both personally and professionally, to realise our full potential. We are restless to take the company to the next level. We invest in our personal development by reading books, attending courses, seminars and conferences. We learn from our projects by running post-mortems and understand what went well, what went wrong and what we can improve next time. Errors and issues are there to help us improve. With each issue that we spot, we fix the process so that the issue doesn’t happen again. We are a diverse team and value the uniqueness of each individual. We like to learn from each others’ experiences and perspectives. We treat every challenge as an opportunity, whether it’s about people or projects. We challenge our assumptions and the way we do things. Play as a team (was fun) Behaviours: We help each other out when in need. We are dependable and accountable. We agree and we commit. Once a year at our team event we spend 2-3 days in strictly no working time together to have fun, create memories and bond. The entire team gets to meet and catch up once a week on video. We strive to maintain a positive, fun and engaging place to work. We hire people that we are proud to work with, people that we can have fun with solving complex challenges together. We take time out to get to know each other, create friendships and enjoy the moment. Humane Behaviours: We are kind to our team members. We are thoughtful. We are compassionate. We support our team members when they come to us for help We welcome and support new team members. We have an extensive onboarding process, helping each new member acclimatise and feel comfortable. We trust & respect each other, even if we have different opinions. We practice flexitime around our core working hours, allowing everyone in the team to manage their work/life balance. We actively listen and practise empathy. We take the time to listen to what someone is trying to say – and understand how they feel – rather than thinking how we will respond. We criticise in private, we praise in public. Always. Transparent Behaviours: We are transparent with every aspect of the company’s operations, except for financial information. That information is available from the day someone joins our company. We are clear in our communication. We make sure everyone has understood, and has been understood. We share feedback for each other immediately – within hours or days, not holding it back for months. When there is a conflict, we are transparent about stating how we feel, good or bad We systematically communicate with the whole team where we stand with respect to our goals and tasks We communicate proactively when things don’t go as planned. If a task is likely to be late we give adequate notice to our colleagues or clients – as much notice as the delay. Data driven (Data driven) Behaviours: Data beats opinions in every argument and in every decision. Any investment that we make is measurable – so that we always know what to do more of and less of. We ask the questions to help us understand what drives the business forward. We measure the efficiency of our major meetings, how well our managers are doing, and through bi-annual staff feedback reviews, we measure how well the company is doing for the team. We listen to our customers’ needs every day and we measure customer needs every six months. Every Voice Matters Behaviours: Everyone in the team has a right to express their opinion on how the company works or should work. We have regular internal reviews where everyone can voice their opinions on our culture, our managers and our performance. We don’t just read them, we act and we feedback to each other We openly debate and we stand up for our opinion. We disagree and commit. We can disagree while a decision is being made, but once a decision has been made, we put our personal opinion to one side and commit to it. Our CEO organises breakfast meetings with each person in the team making sure every voice is heard. Everyone can provide regular feedback about our company and raise issues anytime. #slashdata #culture #management #values #datadriven #leadership

What do developers value in open source? How have their needs changed due to COVID-19? The 19th Developer Economics global survey wave ran from June to August 2020 and reached more than 17,000 developers in 159 countries. Hot off the press “ State of the Developer Nation ” report presents developer trends for Q3 2020 and beyond. The report is free  to access and focuses on six major topics, providing answers to questions like these: Developers’ extra needs due to COVID-19 Programming language communities – an update Why do developers adopt or reject cloud technologies? Who is into DevOps? What do developers value in open source? Emerging technologies Some highlights to spark your curiosity: Developers’ extra needs due to COVID-19 Four in ten developers report that they need more flexibility in working hours/workload as a consequence of COVID-19. Developers responsible for tooling specifications and for approving budgets and expenses are in the greatest need of increased security, performance, and cloud space. What do developers value in open source? Developers appreciate collaborating and interacting with the open-source community more than contributing to open-source projects. South Asian developers highly value contributing to open-source projects, positioning this region to drive the next wave of open-source development. Developers who are building apps and extensions for third party ecosystems, on average, value contributing and forking more than developers in other sectors. Who is into DevOps?  DevOps has reached mainstream adoption. The vast majority of professional developers (more than 80%) are involved in DevOps in one way or another. Continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) are two of the most common DevOps practices, but only one in four developers use both to fully automate their workflow. Download the full report here . The report is free to download for all community members including developers and industry enthusiasts. #devops #covid #opensource #languages #developers

Too many challenges with corporate culture are down to accountability. Let’s say you work in a medium-sized firm. A colleague you depend on has disappeared for the last week and won’t answer your emails. Then a VP from another team comes to you with a request you had no idea about. And your boss is too busy and can only book you in, in two weeks’ time. Have you “been there, done that”? I used to once run a company like this. But I was doggedly determined to improve things. Over the last 4 years we ‘ve built a culture of accountability at SlashData. I ‘d like to share the lessons we ‘ve learned along the way, hoping that more business leaders can learn from it. We ‘ve built a culture that treats people as adults, and expects people to behave as adults. So where do you start to build a culture of accountability? Right seats first I started by setting clear expectations of where one person’s role ends, and another person’s role starts – an accountability chart. Before the accountability chart, our roles and responsibilities were people-centric. We would first choose the right people, and then allocate them the right seats i.e. responsibilities. I realised how this was the wrong way round, after reading Gino Wickman’s Traction book, which was recommended to me by a fellow entrepreneur at EO. In what it terms the Entrepreneur Operating System, Wickman proposes a strategy of “first right seats then right people”. That change introduced much-needed structure and clarity around people’s roles. We no longer had role overlaps, or multiple people talking to the same customer. I also found that several important roles within the company had no single person taking responsibility, and that meant that while many people were responsible for e.g. marketing, no one was accountable for it. That led to miscommunication, frustration, missed deadlines and confused customers. With fixed seats in the accountability chart, we also started to see how people could evolve in the organisation, and what career path we could offer to new people coming in. It also meant people felt much safer about their roles and responsibilities. For the history books, this is the first rendition of our accountability chart: Today we have a clear accountability chart, where we start with the seats and then select how people will evolve from seat to seat. We also leave seats empty for future hires. Based on the top layer of that chart, soon after I put together the leadership team, consisting of the people leading the individual teams – marketing, product, tech, and so on. Today, we have a leadership team made up of seven people, including myself, and the individuals leading partnerships, product, marketing, sales, technology and people/finance. The leadership team is solely responsible for making decisions on the company’s 3-year strategy all the way to the 3-month team goals. And my role in the leadership team is not to manage (I hate that word) , but to integrate and enable them to make timely, aligned decisions and stay true to their commitments. I prefer to “lead from behind”, helping ask the right questions, rather than lead from the front, pointing the way forward. At the leadership team, our role as leaders is to bring the best out of our people. And shine the light onto their hidden strengths and help them grow. Image source. OMG, no pool tables? When VC-backed tech companies talk about culture, they advertise pool tables, dog biscuits, and gourmet coffee. Yet this is only at the very top of the pyramid or hierarchy of our needs at work. At the base of that pyramid are the safety and clarity of everyone’s individual role, their shared goals, and how their role contributes to the company’s short term and long term objectives. Goal setting and alignment is core not just to a well functioning remote team, but also to a sense of direction and purpose for everyone in the company. Having set the record straight with the right seats, then the right people, I set out to create alignment. I’ ll never forget when four years ago we published a paper that was destined to be a flop; it was led by two different leaders in the company, who each had very different perceptions of what the research paper set out to do. Their individual goals were pointing in very different directions, and they hadn’t realised until I pulled them into the same room. By that time the work was wasted, but an important lesson was learned. If the goals of the people are not aligned, you ‘ll end up like a boat with oars moving out of sync, and going nowhere. We started by getting all the leadership team in the same room and debating what we should achieve in the next year. We used Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), in what I thought was a major innovation at the time. That was four years ago. Today, our goals setting process stretches from 3-year goals for the company to 3 month goals for individual team members. I ‘ve talked a bit about how that process works here. One important aspect of goal setting and alignment is avoiding conflicts and negative surprises along the way. For example, if the partnerships team depends on a piece of tech integration to be built, it can say so, but unless the tech team commits to building it, that is a recipe for failure. Today, every team lead in the company needs to explicitly state for which OKRs it depends on other teams, and secure that team leader’s commitment in reciprocal OKRs. That ensures we don’t have any phenomena like “I ‘m too busy with my goals and I can’t help you” type of response. Goal setting creates alignment across the company, in a top-down fashion and is a key ingredient of an accountability culture. We treat everyone as adults, including the leadership team, expecting each member to propose and then commit to shared goals. And see these goals to fruition. We still use OKRs to transcribe our goals, but only as a form of notation. OKRs are not a process, they are the syntax of setting goals, making sure that you know where you are going, you can check if you ‘ve taken the right steps towards that direction, and that you are transparent about it. We also track OKRs every week at the leadership team level, expecting every team lead to be transparent about whether a goal is on track, falling behind, or at risk of failing. Early warnings are always better than late surprises. In fact, the very reason I’m writing this blog post is that I ‘ve committed to it in the eyes of the leadership team, and I don’t want to let them down. Oh, and I love working on our culture, and helping other entrepreneurs build theirs. Which country are you working from today? One of my colleagues is a traveller. She could be visiting friends in Poland this week, and then seeing her family in Lithuania next week, before returning to her home in Athens. While most tech companies would expect her to be working from a fixed seat at a fixed desk, in a glamorous building made of steel, concrete, glass and sprawling with teak furniture, we expect her to be accountable to her goals and work from wherever she feels comfortable. Another colleague often works from Antiparos, a greek island where her husband runs a coffee shop. We used to be skeptical when people asked to work from home, but now we actually prefer that people work from wherever they feel most comfortable, as long as they are accountable to their goals, and are available at a time zone that their colleagues can communicate with them. We trust and respect our team, they are here because they want to be, not because they have to be – and we trust them to be capable of managing their own time and place of work. Photo by Neil Soni @ Unsplash I know where you were last week Not too long ago I used to rely on ad-hoc, infrequent meetings with my direct reports. It was the time before my divorce, when I spent practically every night waking up to attend to my younger son who hated sleeping in his own bed. Those sleepless nights, over several years, ended up destroying my memory, a causal effect I only discovered much later in life. At work, I was often teased for not remembering what we had agreed only the week before. Thankfully, at EO, I served on the board of a friend entrepreneur who was passionate with structured meetings (admittedly, in an OCD kind of way). Soon after I saw the benefits of turning all my work meetings into a variant of the level-10 meeting agenda, with clear accountability for past actions, and put those meetings in motion at a fixed time and date of the week. A fixed day/time of the week has numerous benefits as described in the Effective Manager book, notably accountability, predictability, but also a sense of safety that your team’s concerns and issues are being addressed in a timely manner. Today, almost every meeting we run at SlashData is recorded in a Google Doc, where we can easily scroll down to track past actions, and hold people accountable for what they committed to in the previous week. A key component of that agenda is the Parked Issues, where, during the days leading up to the meeting any participant can raise an issue to be discussed. That means, instead of interrupting their colleagues for important but non-urgent issues, those issues will get the quality time they deserve, and the attention they need to be resolved and translated into actions. With level-10-like meetings, accountability happens as a natural byproduct of the meeting process. We expect people to behave like adults and deliver on the commitments they ‘ve made, and we treat people as adults, checking in once a week, and getting the hell out of their way all other times. The first 182 days As the company was growing, we had to put a lot of thought and planning into onboarding new employees. To start, we had to learn from our mistakes. I “fondly” remember one of my colleagues recall how she found her “new” laptop having breadcrumbs the day she joined. Thankfully, we ‘ve come a long way since then. It’s not just the equipment, the IT setup, the induction tour, or the personalised welcome pack that each new starter at /Data receives. Each person that joins is immersed into our culture one step at a time. The first 6 months, or 182 days, is the introductory period. A new starter is assigned a buddy, a person who will guide them through how things work here, and help them find the right person, or the right information. In addition to the standard weekly 1-2-1’s, the manager will also check-in with the person at the end of the first month, then at 3 months, and then at the end of six months, to see how they are doing, whether their initial expectations matched up with the role in practice, and any additional support they may need to meet the expectations that were set out in the job description (borrowing from the TopGrading methodology). That way, the new starter is introduced to the culture of accountability, while the hiring team makes sure we can take out any obstacles, and help the new hire succeed. Treating people as adults Treating people as adults is making them responsible for their own goals, where they work, giving them the tools to succeed, and taking all the obstacles out of the way is part of our culture at /Data. We ‘re on a long journey to build a role model of a culture, one brick at a time. Join us. #accountability #culture #slashdata

SlashData to join the Fellowship19 initiative As a developer economy analyst firm, SlashData is a mediator between the developer population and the network of thought leaders in developer marketing and developer relations. Our primary aim is to help the world understand developers and developers understand the world. Such a role enables us to see the immense value in communities, and what power the tech industry as a community can generate to continuously drive itself forward. Industry answer to COVID-19 – Fellowship19 In light of current events caused by the global outbreak of COVID-19, we, along with many others, have to make hard business decisions from postponing events and suspending field client visits, to shifting our annual strategy. While we’re forced to stock up with patience and resistance to not be taken away by the circumstance, SlashData’s team remains determined to give back to our community and clients, as well as, extend our effort to support others in the industry. That is why SlashData is joining a kind initiative called Fellowship19 with a clear mission: “Tech is our family. We help our family overcome the Covid-19 crisis, for free.” Together with other tech professionals, we will offer our help for free to support tech companies of all sizes stay afloat during the global crisis we are experiencing. SlashData will support the tech community by offering advice on content marketing, event planning (shifting from offline to online) and thought leadership. “We rise by lifting others.” — Robert G. Ingersoll This is a great reminder of how community members can empower one other in the most unpredictable circumstances, and hold on together even in the face of a global crisis. Whether your business already has its own content to share with their community or not, there are many ways to give a hand to your industry peers digitally. Here’s how we do it: While our Future Developer Summit has been postponed to October, we provide additional resourceful online content for our community of professionals in developer relations, experience and marketing in the format of newsletters and webinars. We combined our expertise and love for developer marketing into a DevRelx, a hub for professionals and enthusiasts in developer relations, experience and marketing, with multiple free resources for your professional growth such as podcast with experts in the field, industry news, job openings, the latest trends of the developer ecosystem and more. As remote-first techie team, we have built a strong organisational culture and have valuable insights to share on how to manage a remote team while nurturing not only the productivity but a human element as well. Tips, tools and tricks – all disclosed in a write-up and video by SlashData’s CEO Andreas Constantinou. Submit your question, find more experts who are ready to help, or offer your expertise on Fellowship19 website: https://www.fellowship19.com You can also send your inquiries directly to Viktorija – Events & PR Lead at SlashData. #coronavirus #COVID19 #techindustry