"Year of the Developer"

For the past couple of months, I’ve been engaged in the

annual Tucows tradition of drafting my portion of the strategic plan

for the department in which I work, Research and Innovation. This time,

we decided to go big and say that I’d make 2006 “The Year of the

Developer”. It may sound a little bit on the hokey side — perhaps it’s

a bit too much like those feel-good-but-do-nothing “mission statements”

that some companies are fond of posting in their waiting rooms — but I

think it’s a pretty good catch-all for all our plans for developers for

the coming year.

Developer

Resources

A development platform like ours is only

as good as the resources available for it. Without giving you what you

need to develop on our platform, it’s just a big lump of inert code.

Some of the new developer resources we’re working on

are:

• Tucows

  Developer: The go-to site for

  developers who are writing code that either builds upon or integrates

  with the Tucows platform. You’ll be able to get documentation, client

  code, examples, how-tos, tips and tricks and news and announcements

  from this site.

  Tucows Developer is at developers.tucows.com.

• Hacking: A developer

  wiki where developers can find and share information about developing

  for the Tucows platform and development in general. It is meant to

  supplement the documentation and allow people to share knowledge that

  would otherwise be lost. All sorts of people will be contributing to

  this wiki, from me to Tucows sales engineers to developers who build

  upon or integrate with the Tucows platform.

  Hacking is at hacking.developers.tucows.com.

• API Helpdesk: We’re working to

  resurrect the old “API Helpdesk” site, which allowed developers to test

  calls to the Tucows API and see what the XML looked like. It was an

  independent project of one of our former sales engineers, and it was a

  useful tool for those trying to debug their client code or write new

  clients from scratch. We’ve got the old code now and we’re putting

  together an official version that we expect to have online in the next

  few days.

We’ll also be making fixes to

current resources, including:

• Developer

  Documentation: I’ll be working with the

  documentation department to ensure that documentation is easily

  accessible, available in the formats that you want, complete and

  useful. We’re also working on ways to make it easy for you to know when

  the documentation has been updated.

  Developer

  documentation can be found at Tucows Developer’s

  “Documentation”

  page.

• Discussion Forums: We’ll be working on

  a number of improvement to the Tucows Discuss forums, including better

  navigation, an improved RSS feed, a search function and keeping the

  discussions going.

  Tucows Discuss, our discussion forums site, is

  at

  discuss.tucows.com.

• The

  Farm: The Farm is our blog devoted to software

  development in general. In addition to fixing up the layout, we’ll also

  have more book reviews, interviews with developers, downloadable

  goodies and new series on topics that you find interesting such as Ruby

  and Rails, JavaScript and AJAX, security and using web

  services.

  The Farm is at farm.tucows.com.

More

Outreach

We’ll be doing a lot more outreach this

year too. Among our plans:

• Meeting You: You’re going to

  see me attending as many developer gathering as I can, such as the

  monthly BarCamp meetings

  in Toronto (where Tucows’ head office is). I’m also working on plans to

  hold developer meetups from local ones such as last

  year’s OPML meetup to out-of-town gatherings at various

  conferences such as the ISPcons in Baltimore (May)

  and Santa Clara (November), South by Southwest (March), the EDC Developer Relations

  Conference (February) and at least one of the upcoming Ruby

  on Rails conferences.

• Promoting You: We’ll be

  posting interviews with developers doing interesting work — whether

  it’s on the Tucows platform, or something completely unrelated. Another

  idea we’re working on is providing free banner ads on The Farm to developers with

  weblogs or sites that link to us or who develop applications that build

  on or integrate with the Tucows

  platform.

• Rewarding You: Last year, we

  started giving small gifts — not just Tucows merch, but Amazon.com

  gift certificates and such — to developers who went “above and beyond

  the call of duty” in developing applications or libraries or writing

  documentation or tips for the Tucows platform. We’ll be doing more of

  that this year, as well as sponsoring development contests with even

  bigger prizes.

When is All This Taking

Place?

We’re going to borrow some tricks from the

Agile Development crowd and start right now, implementing “Year of the

Developer” as an ongoing initiative. Over the next few weeks, you

should see the start of this year-long process and we hope you’ll like

the results.

If you have any comments or suggestions

for “Year of the Developer”, we’d love to hear them. Leave a note in

the comments, or send me

e-mail!