Building Stronger Relationship with the Developer Community

During our recent Customer Advisory Board (CAB) in Prague, we held our first customer developers meetup to share our product plans and vision with the developers who actually implement the platform. The meetup came about as part of our desire to develop a stronger relationship with the developer community, because their opinions and feedback on our platform and tooling, like SDKs and documentation, help us deliver a developer experience that’s ultimately more valuable to them.

The first day of the two-day meetup was devoted to coding and working through our new GoodData.UI SDK. After an opening talk outlining the ways that developers can use it, we switched gears to a working session. We went over the three ways of building visualizations: creating the visualizations using the Analytical Designer (AD), embed it from AD to the dashboard, then recreate the same visualization using bucket-interface and last, re-create the visualization using a 3rd-party library with our Execute component.

If a developer was having trouble, we came together to help them figure out what kind of code they needed to use or what kind of documentation to reference. The second day involved a demo to show how the SDK was used to build a functional and advanced application. We provided best practices, tips, and tricks to use the SDK most effectively, then we asked the developers to share their own use cases. This was one of the best, most interesting feedback sessions of the meetup, and it was exciting to see how engaged the developers were.

Overall, we’ve received overwhelmingly positive feedback since the meetup, with developers specifically mentioning that they appreciated the deep dive that we took into the technical side of GoodData. On our end, we gathered feedback on how to improve our developer experience and dedicated tooling, and we discovered more about what developers would like to see in the future in terms of more advanced demo cases.

Based on the success of this first meetup, we’re planning on holding our second annual customer developers meetup during our next CAB. Between now and then, we’ll continue innovating our platform, improving our developer portal, and organizing other meetups.

Originally published at www.gooddata.com.