Happy New Year from BC's DevRel team!

#bigcommerce #devrel #greetings #community

Hey devs & Happy New Year 🥳

This Community has grown so much over the past year!
We wanted to take a moment to celebrate you all and how far we've come. We couldn't have done any of this with out all of you, so cheers to the new year -- we're so glad you're with us. 💙

We've been calling 2022 a "Year of Firsts" for the Developer Community and for DevRel here at BigCommerce. We're not done though, in fact -- we think 2023 will have many 'firsts' of it's own. Not only did we see a huge increase in new members for the BigCommerceDevs Slack in 2022, but we also gained a few team members on the BigCommerce DevRel team. These are people you've seen around the Community writing blogs, engaging with you all in Slack and Twitter, joining you in events and even throwing some events of our own!

This recap of 2022 will cover the growth we've seen on Slack, the events we've been involved with, and some other opportunities we've had over this past year.

BigCommerce Developer Community Spaces

Over the past few years our Slack instance, BigCommerceDevs, has taken off 🚀

Year over year, we've seen this space become the best option for peer-to-peer connection and support. It's extremely valuable to not only you, developers, but also for us here at BC!

Full transparency here --> Looking at Slack from January of 2022 to January of 2023, we can see that we've had a ton of new members, in fact over 400, and an increase in active members as well.

Report with BC-ers

👀 Wow, check out Matt Coy up there 🏆

We've also seen our Twitter handle, @BigCommerceDevs, completely transform into a lively and engaging space thanks to @katiehoesley, our Sr. Developer Advocate! 👏

Events

Last year we saw a vast variety of events in the Community! In case you missed any of them, I'll share some details below.

We held our first-ever Unconference back in May, the Events Unconference, to talk to you all about what types of Developer events you'd be interested in for the future. Our team received so much value from this, and even started the internal discussion of a Hackathon (which you'll see later on 😉). This was a lot of fun, thanks to everyone who joined and contributed!

We hosted 2 AMAs in our Developer Slack with a handful of BC-ers on topics from App Development to Page Builder. Were you able to make either of these? If so, what'd you think? What topics would you like to see in the future? Let us know!

Another first was BigComDevX by Space48, which gathered developers from all over to share tips on BC development and general best practices from BigCommerce partners! Shout out to the Space48 team for organizing and hosting the first ever Community-Led event at BC & we can't wait for the next one in 2023!

Twitter Spaces are next on the list. And yes, you guessed it -- they're another first for the Community. 💥 Katie Hoesley has been killing it with these recurring Twitter Spaces, where she meets with members and BC-ers to talk about all-things-tech and BigCommerce.

Last but not least, BigHackathon: Summer '22!
This was an incredible event in the Developer Community. We had teams from all over the world participate in this Hackathon, which indeed -- was the first Hackathon at BigCommerce! Every team had a creative and beautiful app that enhanced the platform in some way. Our team, DevRel, also learned a lot from this event -- what went well, what could have gone better, and what we'd like to try for future hackathons. Thanks to everyone who hacked with us and we look forward to the next!

Betas

This is something not all of you may know, but 2022 was the first year that we hosted beta groups in the Developer Slack.
We had 2 beta groups launch in the second half of 2022 and are still going strong.

This is a great sign for our Community. Other teams internally are aware of how valuable our Developer Slack is to you all and are trying to make beta experiences better by meeting participants where they are. To compliment that statement, the other side is that beta groups in Slack also attract other developers and technical partners to the space that were previously unaware of it.

Other Opportunities

With beta groups being hosted in our Slack instance, more BC-ers engage and/or lurk there as well. Which is really good for the Community and is the direction we want to go, moving forward.

If you haven't yet engaged with someone from BigCommerce in Slack, other than myself, there's a chance that may be changing in 2023. As you can see in the screenshots above, we had a decent amount of BC-ers join BigCommerceDevs, the Developer Slack instance, and a handful of these members jump in threads from time to time. This past year, many BC-ers lurked in Slack to learn about what you're all running into with our platform.

There is a huge opportunity here, in my opinion, which 2022 made light of! If you agree, let us know in the comments below or shoot me a DM to tell me about it!

What's next??

2023 holds the potential for our team to do more for the Community than ever before. That may be a big statement to make, but I really feel that it's true. Our team has recently been put in a great position at the company and we're going to start brainstorming soon. I will share that we do have solid plans in 2023 around community gathering/events and developer resources. If you have any great ideas or requests for us, share below!

Not only is the potential high for our team, but as we grow and attract different types of people to our spaces, the Community becomes more diverse. Which opens up a ton of potential for you all, as well! Different types of people coming together is what Community is all about and having varying perspectives is what takes them to the next level.

Even though the year has just stated, we've already heard interest from some of you in running your own type of Community-Led event this year, both IRL and virtually. This is really exciting to hear and we hope to see it happen! If you're intersted in hosting your own type of event, reach out to us so we can talk about your idea and help out where we can.

We're stoked to see what we accomplish together!

💙 Cheers from the DevRel team @ BigCommerce