Tag: developers

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Community

Let the survey feedback begin

survey feedback

The Developer Economics Survey Q4 2019 has just closed and we couldn’t be more excited to see what our community has to tell us, not only through the survey but also through its valuable feedback comments.

Οur mission is to help the world understand developers and developers explore current trends in their industry. In order to get there, we run global surveys twice a year to explore trends across different areas of development, such as mobile, industrial IoT, ARVR, web and many more. We include hobbyists, professionals and students making sure our sample is as inclusive and diverse as possible wave on wave.

In total, we had 7,316 feedback comments from survey participants. Once more, our team took the time to read each and every comment! We have to admit, there are some pretty good ideas in there. We are currently assessing and evaluating the suggestions we received, hoping to include as many improvements as we can during our next survey wave.

Bottom line is we really appreciated every comment we received. The suggestions help us evolve, the positive comments really boost our mood, the negative ones make us work harder and the funny ones… let’s just say they are the highlights of our day.

Feedback from Developer Economics Q4 2019 Survey

Some were great suggestions:

  • Add keyboard controls to the survey to let me fill it out quicker.
  • As a follow up on my last survey suggestion, in which I suggested making your survey less visually bland by adding some backgrounds in place of stark white; I would like to add, making them seasonal background designs. Aesthetics is the key to development.
  • There used to be jokes in these, you should add them back. You also used to add a profile with a character in these, would love if that were back too.
  • Ask about ethics/privacy stuff, e.g. how are you feeling about the way the company you work for treats its user’s data.

Some were great to read:

  • I love you
  • Amazing experience! sharing it.
  • Great survey! Fun and educational
  • This was the most thorough survey I’ve ever completed. To the point and crisp questions. Wonderful job!!
  • I might sound blunt and rude but I had never heard of developer economics, previously. But I’m impressed by the smart selection of questions for this survey and the overall experience on your site has been awesome. Surely gonna remember developer economics
  • “console.log(“that was a great time.. I enjoyed answering.. Thank you!!”);”
  • The survey is one of the ways to reach millions of people and hear diversify opinions. Kudos to the organizers

And some just made us laugh:

  • Ale, you understand the ending of Evangelion? 
  • I’m sorry but I will not be able to pay 
  • as I said, fluffy support kittens. 
  • Delicious survey^^

During each survey wave, there are a few recurring comments we receive. The more prevailing have to do with the survey length – it’s long – and with our purpose. It’s not always easy to address each one separately, so we went ahead and created a blog post answering all these questions. We asked our Director of Research to create this with special care for our developer community. You can find it here.

Finally, now that the survey is closed, we’d like to thank everyone who took the time to complete the survey and share their comments with us. We promise to use all this insightful feedback to improve our future surveys.

Stay tuned for our upcoming State of the Developer’s Nation Report 18th edition which will be published by the end of this month. You will find it here as for our previous reports too.

Did you think of anything post-survey? Please do feel free to share with us.

 

P.S. For more developer news, tools, resources, events and fun, why not sign up to our newsletter.

Categories
Community

How developers see themselves?

developers

For the first time in our Q2 2019 Developer Economics survey,  we tried to introduce developers in their own words by asking them about how they see themselves.

We provided a set of 21 words and asked them to choose up to five to form a word sketch of their personality. We also gave them the opportunity to provide their own text description.

Here’s what we got:

developers

Over half of the developers say they are logical

Perhaps unsurprisingly, nearly six out of ten developers say they are logical. And as it turns out this is the most popular choice of description across all software development sectors, except in games development.  Next in line, but some way behind, are the descriptors team player and introvert at 37% each. By comparison, just 10% label themselves as an extrovert. But can you guess which programmers consider themselves less introvert? Those involved in AR/VR and IoT sector. Interesting, right?


Moving on to a slightly more unusual pair of labels: there are slightly more dog lovers than cat people in the developer population, although the numbers are close at 15% and 13% respectively. A much greater difference seems to exist though between developers working at night (night owls, 29%) and those who prefer the fresh morning breeze (early birds, 14%).  

 

developer

What about hobbies and spare time?

A third (33%) of developers say they are a reader, which makes it the most popular choice of description related to spare-time activities. It is closely followed by 31% who say they are a gamer. Our data shows that developers tend to perceive themselves differently as they grow older. More than one in three developers up to the age of 34 years consider themselves to be a gamer, compared to fewer than one in four of the 35-44 age group, and fewer than one in five of the 45-54-years.  Older programmers are more likely to describe themselves as readers.

 

“What’s this “real life” you’re talking about like? Is it similar to WoW? Does it run on a 64 bit OS?”


Other activities such as music and sport score lower, at 20% and 17%. A low 7% make LEGO models, although the popularity of LEGO seems to be very much dependent upon age. A respectable 12% of developers under 18 make LEGO models, but the proportion halves to 6% within the age group 18-24. 

What about the artistic ones?

Even though a developer’s work demands a high level of creativity, just 14% use “artistic” to describe themselves. Those involved in games or in augmented reality and virtual reality development are far more likely than others to use this word to describe themselves. 21% of game developers and about 25% of AR/VR developers see themselves as artistic, as compared to 16% or less of desktop, web and backend developers. 

Lastly, in out Q2 2019 Developer Economics survey, a few programmers were confused as to why we were asking the question and pondered if we were trying to set up a dating site. Well, we weren’t! We were collecting the data to create the State of the Developer Nation Report, 17th Edition.

Interested in joining forces with 40,000 developers worldwide in shaping the future of the developer ecosystem? Take our survey.

 

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Community

Dear all taking our Developer Economics surveys – or wondering why you should

developer economics survey

First of all – thank you. Thank you for taking, or even for just considering taking, our Developer Economics Survey. Some of you have given us feedback (yes, we do read all of it!) asking what the survey is about, where we use the data, why we do this, and “who are you people anyway”? Right. About time we provided a comprehensive answer then! Transparency is, after all, one of our core values.

  • “Be more transparent about how you will use the data, who you will sell it to, how much you intend to spam me, and why, exactly, are you offering a range of inducements at later stages”
  • “Explaining a bit more what is this for. :)”
  • “More detailed description of your activities and details of cooperation with you for new users.”
  • “You just started to ask questions w/o sharing why you are asking your questions… Why?”
  • “It’s a little hard to be sure who this data is for. It seemed like it came from Mozilla, but got so many questions about Microsoft it made we wonder!”
  • “It’s cool but needs to be explained in more detail”

Our mission is to help the world understand and support developers.

In this way, we aim to contribute to evolving technology in all the ways that matter to developers and, consequently, to end users too. The Developer Economics surveys are our means of doing just that. Yes, of course we sell the insights and the anonymised aggregate data in the process, as we also need to make a living somehow. But out of all the ways in which we could be making a living, we very consciously choose this one, as we are a team of people who first of all strive to make this world a better place in the infinitesimal ways that we can, and this is our very own geeky way of doing so. We are sworn data geeks, or as our marketing team more elegantly puts it: Data is in our DNA.

Now, as to who our data and insights go to: Our client base includes the leading tech organisations, such as Microsoft, Intel, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Mozilla and many more. We take pride in supporting them to design future technologies around actual developer needs and wants – your own needs and wants. So please be truthful in your answers, or you may lead the decision makers, and therefore your development tools, in a very wrong direction!  

Not all of our data is behind a paywall though. 

As a thank you to all of you who contribute to our life’s work, we release our free State of the Developer Nation report, filled with what we hope is valuable information for all developers out there, whether professionals, hobbyists, or just students on the onset of their exciting journey in the world of software development.

There are also free interactive graphs that aim to help you benchmark yourself (or rather, your technology choices) against the rest of the community. Check out the resources space on our Developer Economics website for all the data goodies we have to offer. 

It’s not just data we give back to the community. 

For the past three surveys and for every qualified response that you provided us, we have been donating $0.10 to a good cause within the developer world. In previous years we supported the Raspberry Pi foundation, and at the same time asked you to tell us where you think our contributions would count the most.

Many of you suggested we should support women in coding, and also developers in Africa. Combining the two suggestions, this time around, and for every qualified response that you provide us, we donate $0.10 to the South African Chapter of Women in Big Data. 

Thank you for making this happen!

  • “How are you supporting female developers?”
  • “Help the developers in west Africa gain the knowledge we desire.”
  • “It would be great if sub-sahara African countries could get more attention and accessibility to internship with all these companies.”
  • “Just want to suggest that you consider investing in Nigeria as the youth are passionate about learning but the constraints are just too much. To give you an idea, compare our achievements with the available resources.”

Onto the key question: what data do we collect? Here are the highlights. 


We track key trends in ten development areas, namely mobile, desktop, web, backend, industrial IoT, games, augmented and virtual reality, consumer electronics, machine learning and data science, and apps/extensions to third party ecosystems (such as voice or CRM platforms). For the areas you tell us you’re involved in we ask you which programming languages, tools and platforms you use, how happy you are with the ones that you use (say, with your selected Cloud PaaS), and what you consider important in tools/platforms of this category (for example, scalability, ease of development, community). We ask you not just about the “how”, but also about the “what” and the “why”: why you got into development to begin with, what type of projects you’re working on, if and how you’re building a business around software development, and more. By understanding your motivations, projects and aspirations the technology builders can design solutions that are better suited to help you achieve your goals. We also ask about your learning interests, methods, and needs. Hopefully, that will lead to learning experiences suited to your style. Last but not least, and in order to help focus efforts on the most promising technologies, we gauge interest in and measure adoption of relatively new or emerging technologies, such as fog/edge computing and self-driving cars.

Developer Economics Survey: We know it is long.

Taking in your past feedback on the matter, we have put effort in making it shorter, and when some of you actually noticed I am not (very) ashamed to say I was hopping around the room in excitement. Some of you suggested that we break it down into smaller surveys. I might as well admit it, I am the villain who stubbornly resists that change!

The reason is simple: most of you are involved in more than one development areas, using multiple categories of tools, and the whole point here is to capture your full experience, across all sectors, and to map synergies between tools and platforms. We wouldn’t be able to do that if we were to ask you about each of the areas in a separate survey (plus we would be pestering you to take a survey ten times as much! You’re convinced now, right?). As another of our core values is to be data-driven, here’s the key data point behind this decision: “More than 80% of developers are involved in 2+ of the development areas that we track, and half are into at least four.” 
This is just an outline of who we are, what we do, and why. In case you have any comments or questions, please feel free to drop us a note and let us know of your thoughts. If you have already taken our 18th Developer Economics survey, we hope you enjoyed it and that you’ll spread the word among your friends – we’d love to welcome you all to our community. If you haven’t yet taken the survey we very much hope that you will, and that you won’t forget to say hello under that “Anything we forgot to ask?” open question at the end! There are 20+ pairs of eyes eagerly reading your feedback almost in real time, and virtually waving back to you. See you there.

Take the survey

developer economics survey

Categories
Community

Calling All Developers to Shape the Future of Software Development

shape the future of software development

The latest Developer Economics survey is now live, ready to measure the pulse of the developer ecosystem, helping the world understand developers and vice versa. We are calling all developers to shape the future of software development.

Here are a few facts about our developer surveys:

    • This is the 17th edition of the semi-annual Developer Economics surveys.
    • It is supported by the leading developer communities and technology vendors around the world: Amazon Alexa, Azure, ARM, Connected London, Intuit, Here, Digital Ocean, Nutanix, DZone, Hacker Nest, Heroku, Intel, Microsoft, Mozilla, Pivotal, VMWare, Salesforce, Samsung, SAP, Sitepoint, and more. However, it is run by the independent analyst firm /Data. (https://www.slashdata.co/)
    • We reach over 40,000+ developers in 167 countries annually.

Who is this for? Who will shape the future of software development?

Software developers of all profiles including professionals, hobbyists, and students who work across all major areas: mobile, web, desktop, cloud, IoT, AR/VR, games, machine learning & data science.

What has changed in the survey?

  • We have redesigned our questionnaire to capture all trends & insights related to the developer ecosystem.
  • Developers can now sign-up for a global, independent, ever-growing community.
  • We have a new Point System. Developers can earn points through several actions and unlock exclusive content and prizes.
  • The survey theme. It’s now easier to walk through the questions with minimum distractions. That said, we try to make the survey taking as fun as possible, so that survey participants can enjoy a few fun facts throughout their experience.
  • We want to hear the true developers’ voice so we reward them with amazing prizes, gadgets, licenses, etc.
  • For each completed response to the survey, /Data will donate USD $0.1 to the Raspberry Pi Foundation to support the developers of tomorrow access tools and learning courses.
  • There is a revamped Referral program available for all survey takers. Sharing is caring!

& What has stayed the same?

  • It features questions that cover developers’ level of coding skills, favourite programming languages, technologies used for work/hobby, go-to spaces for learning and resources, as well as preferred tools for specific areas of development: mobile, web, desktop, cloud, IoT, AR/VR, games, machine learning & data science.
  • We still care about learning and giving back, on top of helping devs
  • Available to developers around the world in English, plus 8 other languages: Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Russian, Japanese, Korean.

For any additional information regarding the Developer Economics Survey, feel free to contact the Developer Economics team at community@developereconomics.com.

Developer Economics survey is now open, inviting all developers to take the survey and voice their opinions about platforms, apps, languages, APIs, revenues, dev tools, and more.

Are you a developer? Have your say!

Join us today!

Categories
Business Community Interviews

Developer Heroes: Meet Rachel a.k.a the Wonder Woman

Developer Hero

Who? Developer hero: Rachel Bilski

Where? Brighton, UK.

What? Web developer, agency-side

The new Developer Economics research survey is live – featuring thousands of developers all over the world! Participate now and let us know what your superpower is.

 Hello! Tell us about your role and what you do:

 I mainly work as a web developer, both front- and back-end. I do a lot of CMS work, with existing CMS platforms, and I also build content management systems from scratch, mainly working with PHP.

What kind of languages do you work with?

In the front-end, I use the standards – HTML, CSS, JavaScript. I also dabble with things like Python, Ruby on Rails. And of course PHP.

How did you get started?

Well the real story is that, when I was 13, I liked going to fan sites for Buffy the Vampire Slayer – so I learned how to build my own fan site through Lissa Explains it All. Which some developers may remember from back in the olden days!

Can we see that site on the Wayback Machine?

Can you see it? No, you cannot! But, the legit explanation of how I became a web developer is that I originally worked games development, then in QA which I didn’t really enjoy, so I moved to web development.

You’re agency-side. How do you think that compares with in-house development?

I like to say in-house is a little more straightforward, only because you get to work on a project for a long time, for years potentially. But in agencies, there’s usually a wider variety of work, and you have to be pretty flexible.  

What are clients asking for right now?

We get a lot of requests for emerging technologies now, but clients are not necessarily sure what to do with them. They’ll say: “we want to do something with VR or AR” or “we want to do 3D, 360 video or 3D worlds” or whatever. We have to guide them through the options.

How helpful do you find developer surveys?

If you’re a developer who works in an agency or a freelance developer, it’s easy to forget about the business side of things. And maybe you’re not a natural sales person. I mean it’s taken me a number of years to become more commercially minded, which helps me get involved in more business-related decisions about the tech we use and why.

Do you think developers sometimes undersell themselves?

Yeah, I would say so.

Have you found any challenges working in a male-dominated industry?

I’ve had both good and bad experiences. I work in a predominantly female developer team, which has been nothing but positive.

I also go to events for women in technology, because I like to talk to other women who are in my field. But, I’ve also experienced some negative things. Not always outright, but you do pick up on – to use a buzzword – microaggressions.

People can be dismissive. You know, sometimes if I go to a meeting with a male colleague, people will talk to him and ignore me even though on a technical front we’re at the same level. Which is another reason why I like to go to women’s groups because they don’t automatically assume you don’t know what you’re talking about.

You think things are changing?

I think some things are changing. There’s a lot more diversity programmes, not just for women but for LGBT groups and other minority groups.  

But, I think that until there’s a bigger culture change… it’s not that women don’t want to go into tech, it’s just they don’t want to go into this tech environment. They don’t want to go somewhere where they’re not wanted.

So where do you go to get tech-related news?

Well, Twitter. But there are also loads of developers on Reddit, though I rarely comment. But I do have a male-sounding handle on Reddit for when I do comment.

Has that actually helped?

Yeah, people take you far more seriously. In fact, a lot of women do the same thing. That’s sadly the way it has to be sometimes!

Get involved! The new Developer Economics research wave is live – featuring thousands of developers worldwide, from San Francisco to Singapore. Add your voice.

What’s going up and what’s going down in the software industry?

There’s been a lot of focus on how people are using messaging applications more at the moment and generalised open social media is a bit more in the decline, which is leading to a lot more of things such as chatbots which are really interesting, and artificial intelligence (or ‘fake’ artificial intelligence) which I personally find really interesting. From finance, to health, to learning, I think it’s a great way to make these products and campaigns more helpful and user-friendly, keeping up with how our use of technology is changing.

And there’s VR of course, that’s had a real surge over the last year or so as the kits become more affordable and more widespread, especially as use in business seems to be increasing.

Personally I think the use of (and requests for) mobile apps has really declined, as people have realised how much can be done with just the web alone, and more things are done using messaging platforms, people are realising you don’t need an app for every little thing – which is great, because it makes the web a little more open, you aren’t locked away in an app for each activity or company. Similarly, a couple of years ago, everyone wanted a Facebook application – you don’t see those anymore at all!

Are you working on the projects you would like to work on?

I am, I get to work on a real variety of projects which is great. I love the power of the web and what we can do with it now, so I love working on the more cutting edge projects we get to do sometimes, but even something as simple as building a website up from scratch – from just an idea and a goal to a fully formed website that helps people find what they need or helps get a message out there is wonderful. I love seeing our projects go from a quickly sketched wireframe to a real website.

I would definitely like to work with more artificial intelligence type stuff though – so I’m hoping we get some projects like that in soon!

Join the new Developer Economics survey – featuring thousands of developers worldwide. 

What super power  would you like to have and  what’s your favourite super hero ?

I don’t know!! I guess if I was a superhero I would like to have the ability to consume and understand huge amounts of information at a time…like a computer.

But it’s not a very good superpower.

My favourite superhero is Wonder Woman of course!

If you would like to feature in our Meet the Devs series, let us know.