Absolutely! When I write up the winners, I'll explain how they were chosen. And hopefully with pretty graphs if permission is granted.
As for tech stack, sometimes that's actually difficult to tell from within New Relic. If people answer the question to "better understand their app" and tell me their stack, I'll definitely report back on those results! I just wanted as few questions required as possible.
We weren't trying to bash on Facebook at all (and the survey had nothing to do with which services people liked/disliked).
Our main point was simply that the developer community really seems poorly served by the API players. And that rings true, scientific survey or not.
But clearly there were lots of things wrong with our initial survey (poor questions, limited sample size, etc.), but we'd very much like to run another survey and address theses issues as well as possible.
So please, chime in and let us know how we can take this up a few notches.
We're trying to reduce the friction between applications and user content. In other words, to do away with all the unnecessary plumbing that most people build every time they want to access a user's 'stuff.'
That plumbing looks like a ton of CRUD-like operations that repeat themselves (auth, query, normalize into your own data dictionary, health check, etc.).
We're at first targeting content APIs (the 'stuff' mentioned above), trying to create a query mechanism so you can do broad queries with a user, without needing to know or care about what endpoints the user's stuff resides in. i.e. get all photos tagged dog, regardless of whether those photos live in facebook, flickr, picasa, or some other web service you've never heard of.
We're having a blast and even have the photo bit work.
We were aiming for gut feelings, which is why we went with percentages in the poll.
These are definitely important questions that the poll didn't take into account, that we'll most likely need to address in the near future.
As for external services, we were really looking for anything you did to bring in external data, which could be anything from writing the connectors yourself to just loading a module and passing through some API keys.
You're absolutely right. We totally screwed that one up, and it just didn't make sense to change it mid-poll.
Honestly, in all the work we've been doing (and the work our friends have been doing), it appeared obvious to us that integration was consistently getting worse and we were curious how much worse.
It is now abundantly clear that we were completely off base here. Guess we'll have to run another survey soon with much better answer choices given what we've already learned in less than a day.
I agree completely. We were aiming for really rough data to validate some rough assumptions of the space, and didn't expect the massive response to the survey.
Given a second chance, we'd be much more specific about these questions. Thanks for taking the time to answer!
Hey all, just wanted to give you a heads up. There are three of us working on this, I'm on the west coast, sick as a dog, and highly medicated, and the other two are on the east coast and already asleep. We'll reply to you all, but realistically it'll be in the morning!