Building a TigerGraph Developer Community

Hello, everyone! I’m Jonathan Herke, TigerGraph’s Developer & Technology Evangelist. I recently joined TigerGraph from the UnitedHealth Group where I had a leading role in their Advanced Technology Collaborative. I’d like to tell you about TigerGraph’s new initiative to support and nurture a developer community.

Why is it important to build a developer community?

One of the most important aspects of any community is that its members have peers (connections) to reach out when they need help with something – the accumulation of everyone’s individual knowledge (tribal knowledge) is available to the entire community.

Communities exist around a “thing” that brings people together – this “thing” in our case is TigerGraph. A community (for developers using TigerGraph) will enable members to accelerate their knowledge of graph exponentially.

A Model Community

I’ve been fortunate to have played a role in many communities over the years. Perhaps the one that I’m especially proud of is the Futurist Academy, a community with a mission of empowering high school students to shape the future using emerging technologies. 

It began as a consequence of my role at the UnitedHealth Group (UHG) – I got to geek out at UnitedHealth Group after the company created a department to evaluate emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, and graph. I was excited about the possibilities associated with these technologies and started going to local high schools to share my knowledge with the students – after my lectures ended I’d often be approached by students wanting to learn more and asking, essentially, to be part of a community. So, at that point, I decided to start the Futurist Academy. 

The academy is a fusion of education, emerging technologies, leadership and our goal is to engineer success for these students. We initially launched in two schools and have over a hundred students in the community. We plan to expand to 50 schools by the end of the year.

TigerGraph’s plans to build a strong developer community

Creating a community is like planting a garden – one of the first things we need to do is prepare the foundation (the soil). What that means is we need tools that will enable the community to communicate, collaborate and store information easily and openly.  Another important aspect of growing a community is “knowledge transfer”. For this, we will create learning paths (think journey map) that will accelerate the learning of new community members and create the knowledge associated with learning.

The next step is planting and nurturing. This means engaging with our community by becoming heavily involved in hackathons and bringing knowledge into the educational system through schools and colleges. We will also create different online events. Meetups are an example – I’d like to organize a TEDx-style series of meetups on a variety of topics. 

Most importantly I will be creating a place where we can recognize individuals who have made an outstanding contribution to the community and highlight what they’ve done, by promoting/publishing their work, sharing it across social channels, and sharing the contributions with the rest of the development community. 

Your Success = Our Success

One of the key metrics will be the number of active community members and how that number is trending. So, for example, how many blog articles have people written, how many events community events, and how many code repositories have been created – these are better things for us to care about than vanity metrics. 

Graph is still fairly new and can provide developers with an advantage – we can help our community members get ahead in their careers by putting emphasis / promoting their achievements. I hope that people will enjoy learning about graph; I hope that people will enjoy being a member of our community. But, most of all I hope that our members will accelerate their career trajectories and earning potential as a result of being part of our community. 

There’s never been a better time to upgrade to TigerGraph – businesses who have done so are beginning to outperform their competition. You can read reviews by people just like you who are already using our technology here.

You can also take us for a test drive here or consider becoming a Certified TigerGraph Associate – learn more about how to do that here.

We look forward to seeing you in our community!

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