I attended the Qlik Sense Viz Your World event today in Melbourne. It was great to see the bevy of fellow Qlik folk and potentially future Qlik folk in the room as well as see what's in store with the new roadmap.
I work in a small startup in the finance space and I mention small because it's given me the freedom of movement as a developer to continually push the boundaries of what we're doing with our BI tools and how we use it to provide services to our customers. To that point, I get the feeling that in many organisations (many larger ones) the ability to push those boundaries is limited and that 'experimenting' with new features is tried but not very well tested. For example, the latest thing we're doing is using the Sense 3.0 dev-hub to build our own mashups. That is to embed the Qlik charts we create into a website that looks nothing like Qlik Sense native apps and can be styled using javascript, html and css to suit our needs. Now I'm what you would call a cut and paste developer. Many here are and to get my app up to a level that was ready for customer usage took some long nights and many hours over the course of 3 weeks. Many of these were dedicated to reading how to guides on HTML, CSS, Bootstrap and these were located either in the Qlik Community, in Qlik related blogs and many times outside of that. I think I've visited at least 50 - 60 different discussion forums on various issues that I faced in building my site and whilst that time was valuable for me, I think it would be wasteful if it weren't shared with others for whom mashups may be the next frontier which they need to cross in order to start using Qlik Sense.
Maybe there is already something online and in the help section on how to do mashups but I feel like it should have a dedicated section where the community can continue to add feature/discussions/ideas to it. If it is just relegated to the help section then it becomes harder to expand upon. If I write it as just another helpful post or in a separate blog, then it is lost amongst all the noise. What I am keen to see done is to have a section in the community discussions dedicated purely to mashups. Being able to create mashups in the way we wanted was not something I felt comfortable doing until Sense 3.0 and perhaps others out there are holding off on purchasing until they see that they can do it. I mean heck, if a cut and paste guy like me can do it, anyone can.
So if the moderators could help me, I'd like to see if there is a way that mashups can become a discussion thread of its own. I'll share the various sites and css styles and a bit of the how to on how we designed our site and it would be great to see others add to this so that collectively we can push the boundaries of Qlik. I am hopeful to hear that next time I go to a Qlik conference, i'm not the only one in the room doing the innovative things (amongst customers of course).
