Let’s celebrate! The Freshworks developer community turns two❤️🎉

We are a family of 1800+ Developers❤️

It’s time to celebrate :sparkles::tada:

The Freshworks Developer Community celebrates its second anniversary this month; looking back, we sure have come a long way!

We want to take this opportunity to thank each one of you for being part of this incredible journey and helping us build this community together. :heart:

Two Years of Togetherness!

Through the Freshworks Developer Community, our goal has always been to create a place where developers could share knowledge, collaborate, and have discussions on common queries and points of interest with fellow app developers and Freshworks engineers. Last year, the community grew to 1000+ strong!

When we launched the community forum back in 2020, we had no idea what was waiting for us. Due to the pandemic (three continuous covid waves), we were mostly restricted to the digital means of communication and catch-ups. However, that did not stop us from building our relationship with the community and making the bond even stronger.

Here is the look back to the last two incredible years in the community

These were just some of the highlights from the past two years, and we are sure we have many more years waiting for us to celebrate as we are just getting started! Let’s have a huge shoutout (and a virtual, socially-distanced hug) for our community’s heart and soul -the members and the fantastic team behind the community, for driving this community with a lot of dedication and enthusiasm.

As we derive our inspiration from this quote by Germany Kent, “Be transparent. Let’s build a community that allows hard questions and honest conversations so we can stir up transformation in one another.”

Keep contributing! :heart:
Cheers to the Freshworks developer community.:tada::sparkles:

11 Likes

While we’re humbled by the results of these first two years, we also believe we’re just getting started, and there’s still so much to do.

As you would have experienced, developers have always been an essential part of our ecosystem. We continue to engage with them regularly through group interactions or one-on-one interaction, and below we are sharing two such opportunities where you could also participate.

The community hours

The community hours is a monthly virtual catch-up to connect and learn from the experts in the community and know more about the Freshworks Developer Platform. You all would have already received the invite, and if you haven’t registered, you can register now.

Exclusive Developer Interaction

These are short 45 minutes 1-1 or 1- few interactions that we are doing this week and the next week to showcase to you some of our thoughts around developer persona and learn from your feedback. Your contribution is greatly valued. We had a chance to interact with some of you in the last few weeks, but if you missed out on this opportunity, please click here to share your details. If there is a slot available, our team will reach out to you and block your calendar.

We are looking forward to seeing you all joining these catch-ups.

Spoiler alert( Coming Soon: Community Quizathon😅)

Thank you, and let’s keep shipping!
With that, It’s also the time that I invite @satwik to share his experience with the developer community, and what we can expect in coming years :sweat_smile::tada::weight_lifting_woman:

6 Likes

Thank you @Juhi_Singh for tagging me. This is indeed an important milestone and something for the whole community to celebrate together :tada: .

I still remember how it all started

Back in 2019, shortly after our Developer Relations team was established, we started to look at developer experience a lot more closely than ever. This is when we noted that our developers endure isolated, frustrating experiences as they try to get help with their development challenges using traditional customer support channels. More importantly, they could not see or learn from other developers going through similar challenges. Worse, we had no idea how many developers gave up even before they asked for help. :frowning_face:

We knew it was time for Freshworks to create a platform to bring together a community of developers who share one thing in common - Freshworks!

A lot of thought and meticulous planning went into this community as we wanted this to be a welcoming :hugs: place, as well as something that is uniquely associated with Freshworks. Nothing however counted more than the enthusiasm and participation that the developers in our community brought to this platform. 2 years later, we have close to 2,000 devs on the community, creating and responding to posts by the hundreds each month, sharing valuable inputs to influence the roadmap, highlighting bugs as well as nits in developer experience, but most importantly, bringing a sense of belonging across this fast growing community.

What next?

As we grow bigger, it becomes important for us to help keep the community in touch beyond the day-to-day. We also see the eagerness and drive in some pockets to actually help make this platform better, if only we had better feedback loops. Another emerging opportunity is helping build cross connections through the network of this community that may start with helping someone, but endures as something bigger. We realise that it is for Freshworks to drive the programs that enable all this within our community, and the 2nd anniversary of our community is a great time to start on this new journey. There is so much more possible with this amazing community of developers, and we are excited to see where we can go together! :raised_hands:

7 Likes

:tada: I just want to take moment and congratulate the Developer Relations team on their success. :tada: The endeavor to unite developers across the globe was no small feat. It is an exciting time to be a developer on the freshworks platform. So many opportunities to express creativity in the applications we build while uniting to solve some of the most difficult business problems ever. Having a solid support system is imperative to success in all areas of life, and I am just glad to have found that system as a freshworks developer. Thank you for all the hard work, and I look forward to the next 2 years!!! :heart: :pray:

9 Likes

As we are continuing with the celebration! :tada:

I am so happy to present you the experience of one of our developers from our community, @Zach, who is the most enthusiastic, energetic, motivated, and the first member of our developer community.

Also, I would like to nominate @Saif @ilya.belyavskiy, @Raviraj, @Furqan_Mehboob, and @yusrakhatri to share their experience in the thread. Feel free to post a video or a few lines on your experience being part of the community.:handshake::woman_mage:

4 Likes

Aww, thank you so much for the kind words @Juhi. Really appreciate all that you guys do. Look forward to helping to continue to build this community. Please let me know how I can be of help! :+1:

4 Likes

I did not realize two years flew by. All this time, I thoroughly enjoy discussing the topics and understanding the issues that the community comes across on the ground.

Do you contribute and provide help to the community?

Yes. Apart from what I do every day, I often try to help developers in the community. In fact, I block my time every 2-3 days to spend at least 3 hours contributing whatever I can.

What do you like the most about helping others in the dev community? What is the most satisfying experience when you contribute to the community?

Getting a developer to appreciate is hard so is satisfying when my answer helps them at their work. At the end of the day, it is feeling unblocked in what you are trying to achieve that keeps the momentum towards the objective.

What value addition(s) do you think the dev community has done to the product to date?

Every time a developer shares their situation consuming a particular platform API or product API, we get a lot of insight into the areas where we can may the developer’s life easy. They help us report bugs to respective product teams, push platform limitations and finally improve the developer experience of everyone.

Share your experience of what you have learned from the community and your contributions?

By involving in the discussions with the developer community, I learned got an intertwined understanding of both businesses’ use cases alongside the technical scenarios behind them. At the rate this community grows, I see it’s just the start.

5 Likes

Thanks, @Juhi_Singh for tagging me to share my experience with this community.

Our community feels like a park outside the office where you walk and talk about work with your people. But the perspective would be different. That’s what happens when I talk to our community members and I like to be as honest and kind as I can.

What motivates me?

Solving problems is interesting and satisfying. Enabling our community to solve problems is 2x satisfying and that’s what motivates me. I love to see the community helping each other and being empathetic at a time. If it’s technically possible, I would give an extra badge when someone empathizes with another community member. :smiley:

What value addition the dev community has done?

Developers go beyond their knowledge to solve business problems. Often it involves learning the domain knowledge. They share their acquired domain knowledge with the wider community and it gets a compounding effect on our developer forum. It was a hidden gem and never found and never shared before our community happened. I also have learned different domain knowledge through our community.

What have I learned from the community?

I evolved from a developer to a Developer Advocate with our Freshworks Developer Community. It has a big impact on whom I have become now and I thank this community for being empathetic and understanding towards us as well. I will use this opportunity to learn and enable our community even more in the future. :heart:

4 Likes

We gotta tag @samuelpares. He has played a huge roll in helping new community members get started on the right foot!!!

Samuel - Tell us about your experience over the past 2 years with the Freshworks Developer Community!!! :sunglasses:

4 Likes

Hey @Zach, thanks for tagging me!

I can say that this community help me a lot to learn not just about the Freshworks Developer Platform, but about javascript, NodeJS and web development at all.
I’ve come from a world on premise, programming in Delphi, and when I changed my focus to web development, I started already to work with Freshworks platform.
Luck for me, right after I switch area, this community was born. So it was crucial to my fast learning.
And I’m happy I was able to share my learning in some occasions.
Looking forward for what the community future will bring us, and to keep helping it to grow bigger. :smiley:

5 Likes

Hey @Juhi_Singh,
Thanks for tagging me really appreciated

Lemme share my brilliant experience with champions :blush:

I have joined about a couple of years ago with no experience in programming, coding & obviously helping others :rofl: but right after joining this community looking people helping each other and trying to fix the issues and errors with excellence which motivates me a lot to learn. Love to help others to grow it bigger and faster and am proud to be an active user. :sunglasses:

5 Likes

This topic was automatically closed after 60 days. New replies are no longer allowed.