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Developer Nation Survey for Developer Nation

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Why are we running global developer surveys?

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 Nation surveys are our means of doing just that.

Yes, we sell part of 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.

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 Nation website for all the data goodies we have to offer.

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

During all surveys and for every qualified response that developers have ever provided us, we have been donating $0.10 to a good cause within the developer world. In each wave that sums up to $1,700-$2,000 USD.

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 Nation Survey: We know it is long.

Taking in your past feedback on the matter, we have put effort in making it shorter, but as 80% of developers are working in more than 1 development areas, tracking these overlaps is not possible if we ran separate shorter surveys.

This is just an outline of who we are, what we do, and why. 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.

Start here.

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