Meet Miro Engineering: Elena Ignatik and the evolution of the Developer Platform
The Miro Developer Platform complements Miro — the visual collaboration workspace — by empowering developers, customers, and partners to build their own apps and integrations on Miro. In this blog series, we spotlight the people of Miro Engineering, so you can get to know the faces behind the platform. Our distributed team spans the globe across 12 regional hubs and 8 time zones, including offices in Amsterdam, Austin, Tokyo, and Berlin.
In this post, we’re featuring software engineer Elena Ignatik, based in Amsterdam, who helps ensure app developers get the best experience when using the Miro Developer Platform.
What drew you to engineering as a career?
I don’t remember the time when I was not in engineering. I think I was 11 or 12 when I started playing around with some simple scripts. Since I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of automating everything I could, programming became a part of my life from early on. Naturally, I continued my education in the same direction as well.
However, at university, my hobby became something that I had to do regularly, even when I didn’t want to, and by the rules other people set. Like many students, I was in doubt if this was something I’d like to do as a career. I want to say something motivational about how I found my passion for programming, but in reality I just wanted to eat and that was the only thing I could do well enough to get people to pay for it. Passion and love for my work came much later, when I started working with very talented people, and we made some very exciting ideas a reality.
Tell me more about your role and your team at Miro.
I joined Miro to work on the Developer Platform a bit more than two years ago. The first year and a half, I was working on the REST API — exposing endpoints to allow external developers to automate operations and build integrations. When I joined, we started building version 2.0 from scratch. When it was launched a year later, I moved on to my next challenge and joined the team that is responsible for the developer experience.
The aim of my new team is to make the process of building apps on Miro not only simple but also fun, motivating developers to use our platform more. It is a very cool task to work on because we constantly ask ourselves and our community what would make a developer happy. We work on things like recognizing their achievements, encouraging developers to learn and use new features, and helping them succeed within our ecosystem.
What is the Miro Developer Platform?
The Developer Platform is a way to automate Miro! Of course, it’s not the only capability of the platform, but for me, one of the most exciting ones. Our developers can use the REST API to synchronize items on the board, the Web SDK to work with board content directly, or embed a Miro board in any other place. The Developer Platform is also responsible for some in-house integrations with very popular services, like Slack, Google Meet, and many others.
Why should developers use the Developer Platform?
We launched our platform a year ago, and we’ve made a lot of progress in delivering a big range of features. We’re still in the early days of our journey, but we already have a marketplace and a fully automated app distribution system. There’s a fantastic opportunity here for developers to tap into our 50 million user base in a marketplace that isn’t overly competitive yet. By getting involved now, developers can enjoy the benefits of being among the first movers.
One of our most popular apps, Spellchecker, was created by a colleague just because… well, there was no spellchecker app, and now it has become very popular. Building something simple at this time may very well be a road to success and recognition for many developers.
How has the Developer Platform evolved over time?
The first version of the developer platform was truly revolutionary for Miro. It allowed external developers to build really exciting apps, and it unlocked a lot of use cases for our users. But the first version was very difficult to test and maintain, partially because it was created before Miro became what it is today.
The second version, v2.0, also started roughly. We had ideas, but not a lot of ways to validate them. Sometimes we made the right guesses. Sometimes we could catch the problems with early feedback and change the API. And sometimes, especially for less popular features, we didn’t get enough feedback during beta. The requests for changes came way later, after a new API was published, and we had to get creative — due to the nature of API, we cannot simply change an endpoint without breaking existing apps.
But now the platform is becoming more and more mature. We have more active developers, more feedback, more feature requests and use cases. We also learned a lot from working on the platform itself. Recently, we switched to a design-first approach for the APIs, and are now working on making our Open API Specification (OAS) publicly available, so that external developers can generate API client libraries and leverage all the tools that come with it. We also added interactivity to our onboarding guides to help everyone start using the platform in no time, without even creating a Miro account!. Plus, many other exciting changes are on the way. We even launched our first Scavenger Hunt!
What is one thing that has surprised you about working at Miro?
I am constantly surprised by the number of Miro capabilities, and how big the Miro Developer Platform is. I’ve been using Miro every working day for years, I am keeping an eye on all the important announcements and reading the engineering documents about upcoming features, and yet I keep finding something new that I haven’t seen before. Just some time ago, I learned that the results of voting sessions are actually saved and can be accessed at any time later.
And it’s not only about the main product. On the developer experience team, we take turns taking care of questions from the community, to get to know our developers and their needs better. I’ve been working on the platform for a while, and yet sometimes I see questions that make me think and ask colleagues for help. It is especially true for questions regarding embedding a Miro board — I still cannot wrap my mind around how many features and possibilities there are, from using a board picker in external projects to creating an anonymous temporary board.
Do you have any interesting stories to share about your experience on the team or a project you worked on?
During the development of the platform, we regularly hold internal and external hackathons to validate our ideas and get additional feedback. For one of the hackathons, we prepared a Postman collection. It was a public collection, but we only put it on our hackathon page announcement. It was just an experiment, and not many people used it during the hackathon, so we decided to not improve it.
Imagine our surprise a few months later, when we saw thousands of usages for this Postman collection. Turns out, it was indexed by Google, and people were searching for it and actively using it. That was very exciting to see, but also scary because we hadn’t updated the collection in a while.
Now we’re investigating how to automate updating a Postman collection with our pipeline of continuous delivery of the documentation and API updates — all because of the small experiment during a hackathon.
What’s next for the Miro Developer Platform?
Now that we’ve covered some basic use cases, things are getting really interesting. Our goal has shifted from giving external developers the tools to manipulate items on the board to involving them in building an ecosystem with us. It includes giving developers more creative freedom and the ability to influence the board, and also recognizing external developers as an important part of Miro.
One of the examples of the latter is the Developer Hub. This is a new addition to the tools we offer developers, and its goal is to provide a “home” for developing Miro apps. Now it has guides, app examples, and the list of apps a developer has created. My favorite part is Miro Developer badges: our tokens of appreciation for various achievements on the platform. Read more about the Developer Hub and how it helps improve the developer experience. You can also read a summary of everything we’ve launched on the Developer Platform 2.0 since last year.
We’ll continue to feature Miro Engineering employees on our blog, so you can get a glimpse into their roles and the impact they have on the Developer Platform. Be sure to follow us to get reminders in your inbox when we post about engineering culture, technology issues, and product developments.
