Reflecting on the year 2021: Qlik Developer community

[Dipankar_Mazumdar]

The year 2021 has been a challenging year for all of us without a question. And with this challenge of not being able to be in person for work, business or education, emerged a new opportunity — relying on our community. As a team dedicated to supporting development and innovation, we feel thrilled to create possibilities that drive value for our worldwide Qlik developer community & organizations enabling them to take data & visual-analytics-led decisions. We are wrapping up the year with some key milestones that we achieved as part of the DevRel team in Qlik R&D.

Rebranding

First, we focused on rebranding our various developer platforms. We realized that it was imperative to be able to communicate & reach out to our developer community through certain specific platforms so the discussions are focused. As a starting step, we relaunched our Twitter. This platform is effectively used to share updates about any new blog posts, videos, experiments, etc., and serves as a primary scene of our presence.

Twitter Page

 

We also have an active community presence in our developer-focused Slack channel “Qlik Dev”, and we decided to keep that going so the community can benefit from it by getting direct help from fellow members, Qlik-insiders, and the DevRel team. One of the primary goals of the DevRel team is to set a two-way communication process between our developers and the R&D team. The Slack channel helps us in this process by getting direct feedback back to Qlik R&D about our suite of products and APIs. This feedbacks are a great way to understand what our users think, any pain points & suggestions. The openness is something we really value at Qlik.

Slack channel — Developer community

Content

The Qlik community consists of a wide array of developers with varying roles & levels of expertise (Data Analysts, BI Engineers, Embedded Analytics developers, etc.). While we started with a focus on developers leveraging Qlik APIs for embedding analytics, we also wanted to expand our horizon and support different developer needs. Therefore, it was crucial to identify role-specific developer contents that could cater to each category of the developer. With this in mind & the interest of our community, we focused on certain specific areas:

• Embedded Analytics — Qlik Sense APIs, open-source libraries(Nebula, Picasso, Enigma, etc.), Automations
• Descriptive Analytics — Data analysis, dashboards, visualization
• Predictive Analytics — Machine Learning within QS (supervised/unsupervised), Qlik AutoML

 

Mediums

We also realized that there was a lot of content out there in the community but they needed to be streamlined so the developers could just rely on these primary sources to start their Qlik development journey. With this in mind, we set qlik.dev as our base for all things related to Embedded Analytics. qlik.dev is comprehensive & lists out tutorials, API specifications & various ways to use our libraries.

qlik.dev

To target the other two categories(Descriptive & Predictive Analytics), we leveraged the Qlik Design blog which is again an excellent platform for any Qlik developer to be and understand the best practices, innovative solutions, etc.

Qlik Design Blog- Community

Our motive has always been to simplify the journey for the developer community and we understand that everyone has their own preferences in terms of tutorial mediums. Some may just like to open up a tutorial, look at a code snippet and take things from there and some may like to follow an end-to-end coding video. This led to launching our own Developer playlist on the official Qlik YouTube channel.

Developer Playlist

We also kept in mind the various categories of developers mentioned before and so irrespective of whether you are just getting started or you are looking at implementing an advanced-level use case, this playlist is going to have it all. Since its release last month, we have productionized 4 videos in the form of 3 series.

Videos released

Here’s a high-level overview of the various series we have launched.

Various YouTube series in Developer playlist

We are going to focus a lot in the next year on the already launched series & plan to additionally introduce a few to address the various aspects within the Qlik developer journey. So stay tuned!

 

Takeaways

Although it’s been less than a year since we started revamping our platforms and setting the goals(as a team), we wanted to understand how the community responded to the released content.

Here is the count of articles for each category released in the Qlik Design blog.

Count of articles per category

And here is a breakdown of the number of views for the two categories.

The articles in the Predictive Analytics category have a very consistent & high number of viewers. And things around building visualization extension using Nebula, migrating from Capability APIs to Nebula, chatbot had great interests in the Embedded Analytics part. This allows us to pay heed to what the developers are interested in.

We also created a Control chart to understand how the views change over time and look like there are no special cause variations and things look consistent.

Finally, we aim to assist & guide developers in bringing the best of the Qlik ecosystem so they can adapt to new & existing technologies to solve critical business problems. Our communities play a pivotal role in this process and we can’t wait to unfold what lies the next year. Together we can bring the best of Qlik. Happy Holidays!

~Dipankar, Qlik R&D