Where Have All the Coders Gone?

To code or not to code? Are companies missing the DevX train?

You know you have someone who spent some times in Texas when she/he can quote a country song in the title. (Where Have All the Cowboys Gone? by Paula Cole)

On a serious note, I was reading the recent article in Business Insider about “How Mastercard Is Revamping Its Culture to Attract Top Tech Talent”

It was a bittersweet read as at a point of time, Mastercard was at the top of the world regarding attracting developers/coders/techies.

From 2014 to 2016, I was part of the team who ran the Masters of Code Series. We were competing for developers’ attention against the “Battlehack” series from PayPal led by my good friend John Lunn (Swiss connection, yeah!). It was orchestrated in cooperation with Angelhack who had a 600K+ list of developers around the world.

The Mastercard Masters of Code competition was a global series of hackathons organized by Mastercard. The competition began around 2015 and was held in various cities around the world. The purpose was to bring together top developers, designers, and entrepreneurs to take on real-world challenges, particularly focusing on the innovative use of Mastercard's payment, data, and security services via the new Developer Experience and APIs.

Teams were challenged to create innovative, industry-changing applications and solutions. The hackathon series included regional events, each of which sent a winning team to the final global event. The global Masters of Code finale took place in Silicon Valley, where the regional winners competed for the grand prize. Team Singapore was our first global winning team. Jean-Louis Gassee, the legendary tech executive and author of “Grateful Geek” even presided and judged the US and Global events.

Each team had 24 hours to code a solution to the given challenge, and at the end of the hackathon, they had to present their projects to a panel of judges. Prizes were often awarded to teams or individuals who came up with the most innovative, practical, and impactful solutions using Mastercard's APIs.

The satisfaction to see some of the teams going to create real companies and be successful is hard to describe. It’s the feeling to have truly help someone.

The other positive aspect from these series was to be able to truly understand what developers expect from a technology provider. With Open Banking putting the dime square on the API, it became evident that API will be the new critical cornerstone of any decent and well-thought developer program.

A successful developer program often includes several key elements. These are crucial in ensuring that the program offers value to the developers, encourages engagement, and nurtures a vibrant and innovative community. How do you quantify this?

As a starter, ANY developer program must be focused on the 3 main pillars: Portal, API/Tool, Documentation/Tutorial. Miss any of these and you will fail.

Secondly, do NOT let the finance team dictates your KPI/OKR. Most developers program do not generate massive revenues. However, they do generate significant operational savings as well as indirect revenues (always ask for the soft credit of a deal signed because the developer integration was rapid and easy).

Beyond these 3 pillars, it is important to dig one layer below to properly understand what must be done at a minimum.

Below are some of the main complementary elements:

1. Comprehensive Documentation: This includes APIs, SDKs, sample code, and other technical resources. Good documentation is essential for developers to understand how to use the tools and technologies offered by the program. This information should be easy to find, follow, and understand. And in the expected industry best practice format.

2. Developer Tools: This can include IDEs, debuggers, testing tools, and other software necessary for developers to effectively create their applications or solutions. Providing tools that streamline the development process can make the platform more attractive to developers. Tools have drastically changed since my time at Metrowerks Codewarrior. In some instances, there is the no coding/no tools rules. But this is the extreme. The best you can do is at least get a nice Postman Collection or any other tools a developer would expect to find on Github.

3. Accessible APIs: Developers need APIs to interact with your software or service. They should be well-documented, easy to use, and reliable. And by accessible, it also means a proper API contract, a coherent naming convention and of course, the magic end-of-life versioning continuity.

4. Community: An active community where developers can share knowledge, ask questions, and provide support to each other is vital. This can be facilitated through forums, Slack/Discord channels, Stack Overflow, or other platforms. This is one aspect the Banking industry needs to embrace. Most of the time, Slack is not authorized for internal or external communication. This should be a priority to at least authorized it as one way to gather feedback from the outside. Compartmentalized it if you want but allow it.

5. Training and Learning Resources: Offering resources like tutorials, guides, webinars, courses, or certifications can help developers improve their skills and increase their understanding of your platform or tools.

6. Technical Support: Access to timely, reliable technical support is important to address any issues or roadblocks developers may encounter. See Slack. More importantly, when you look at the tickets filed by developers, if these are mundane request about API first call or clarification about an endpoint function, this  clearly gives you an indication of where to improve your products by answering these questions upfront and reducing your tickets list.

7. Developer Events: Hackathons, workshops, webinars, and developer conferences can provide a platform for developers to learn, network, and showcase their work. These can also be a great way to introduce new features or products. The Mastercard Masters of Code were the perfect example of how it should be done. And it was NOT that expensive on the grand scale of what it generated in partnerships, media coverage, tech community building and street creds and, yes, revenues.

8. Recognition and Rewards: Acknowledging developers' contributions and successes can help motivate and engage them. This can be done through things like developer recognition programs, contests, or other incentives. Developers love swag and it was one of the nice aspects of the Mastercard Masters of Code, we had great swag.

9. Clear Communication: Regular updates on new features, changes, deprecations, and other important news should be provided through blog posts, newsletters, social media, and other channels.

10. Feedback Mechanisms: Opportunities for developers to provide feedback can help you understand what's working well and what can be improved. Regularly gathering and acting on feedback can help build a program that better meets developers' needs.

Remember, the success of a developer program is often measured by the activity level of the community, the quality of the applications developed, and the feedback received from the participants. It requires a constant and positive engagement with the community. You can report on the number of sign-ups, the number of active users, the percentage of usage on the platform, the service availability, etc. Notice how “revenues” is never the main driver? Revenues are a side benefit of a great developer program which will create stickiness from the users especially if they feel as a community to be treated as rockstars. Anyone remember Jack Dorsey pleading for developers to forgive Twitter and how they changed the rules on API usage? It took Twitter 3 years to recover a semi-level of trust.

As I always say (and not as a joke), if you want the true feedback about your products, organize a 24h hackathon and ask a fully Red-Bull loaded, sleep deprived developer at 3AM “how is it going?”.

So looking back, there was a time when great developers events were the norm. The pandemic put an halt to it and with budgets still being locked by finance, it seems developers programs are not going to be at the scale we knew and need them to be. Mastercard announcement was nice but it will be important to see if they put the money where the impact is the most notable.

Below is the list of all these great events which defined the early era of APIs and developers experience. That the list could be expanded upon, and the "greatest" events are somewhat subjective.

Here are some notable mentions:

1. Google I/O: Google's annual developer conference, where they usually announce new products and updates.

2. Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC): This is where Apple reveals new software and technologies for its ecosystem.

3. Microsoft Build: An annual conference event held by Microsoft, aimed towards software engineers and web developers using Windows, Azure, and other Microsoft technologies.

4. Facebook F8: Facebook's annual developer conference, where they often reveal new products and updates.

5. Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent: Annual conference hosted by Amazon Web Services for the global cloud computing community.

6. GitHub Universe: This conference brings together a community connected by the values of open source, innovation, and remote work.

7. KubeCon + CloudNativeCon: These events gather adopters and technologists from leading open source and cloud native communities.

8. TechCrunch Disrupt: Not strictly a developer event, but it includes hackathons and is a major start-up conference where new technologies and companies are launched.

9. DockerCon: The Docker community comes together to learn, belong, and collaborate.

10. PyCon: A community-driven convention for developers of the Python programming language.

Here are some hackathons:

1. Global Game Jam: An annual international hackathon for video game development.

2. NASA International Space Apps Challenge: An international hackathon that occurs over 48 hours in cities around the world.

3. AngelHack: A global series of hackathons that has corporate partners set challenges for teams of developers.

4. MLH (Major League Hacking) Hackathons: Major League Hacking is the official student hackathon league.

5. ETHGlobal Hackathons: A series of Ethereum-based hackathons.

6. TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon: A major component of the TechCrunch Disrupt conference.

7. HackZurich: Europe’s largest hackathon event, attracting participants from around the world.

8. Junction: A massive hackathon event held in Helsinki, Finland.

9. LA Hacks: One of the largest student hackathons in the United States, based in UCLA.

10. PennApps: A well-known student-run college hackathon, organized by students at the University of Pennsylvania.

So which ones do you remember? Which ones did you attend? It is really sad to have seen so many disappear while the world is requiring more and more talents that these events helped surface. In my book “The Delivery Man”, I talk about hackathon sharks. In these days and times, with investors trying to see who can scrap by with little new investment, hackathon shark teams were the ultimate start-up team you wanted. But to see them, they need the environment to strive.