Supporting Asia and its millions of developers

Manikantan Krishnamurthy: Great. Thanks for having me here. My name is Manikantham Krishnamurti. It's a long name as you can see, but feel free to call me as Mani. It's it's synonymous with m o n e y, the thing we all like.

That's my LinkedIn and my Twitter handle. And today, I'm gonna talk to you all about my experience working with developers, the millions of developers in Asia. A little about me. I have been working in DevRel for over seven years now, mostly in APAC. Here are some organizations I'm just very grateful and happy to be working for.

I worked in the Nokia developer relations team, later moved on to Samsung, and for the last four plus years, I've been with Google. A lot of experience mostly on the front end mobile development side of things, but in the last few years, I've also gotten into the back end developer communities, etcetera. So that's a little about me. I've been mostly doing this all from Singapore, working, but the geographies I've covered include many countries in APAC. And with that, I love to start by saying, you know, here at Google, we work with a wide range of developers, from different professions, from mobile developers to full stack developers to people building chatbots or machine learning, models, but also developers with different levels of maturities.

Some students were starting their careers, some freelancers who are doing this mostly, you know, as an economic way for them, and also hobbies who are toying on the weekends or in the late evenings besides their main job. And at Google, we strive to make our products as inclusive and welcome to all types of developers as possible. And and that really is ingrained, and I'd like to talk to you about how we think about building products that work for everybody and also how we cater to Asian developers specifically because of their unique challenges and opportunities in the market. So as a whole, DevRel, it's all about developers. We know this.

It's about connecting with developers. It's about empathizing with them over their challenges and helping them, supporting them along their process of building great apps and solutions. It's about inspiring them with great case studies and videos and up bringing them opportunities and also about educating and training developers to use our products and services. That's still DevRel as a whole. And, you know, if we look at DevRel, I'm sure this has been discussed several times in the day and even the weeks before this.

There are two parts of DevRel that we can look at. One is the tech side of things, building the products, building the tools that developers will use, writing the sample code, documentation, etcetera, and also speaking to developers, helping them use the products to serve their needs. And most of this needs or basically can be gravitated towards the technical side of things. You have the other side of things, which is which would relate to more people in marketing, which is connecting with developers, understanding their needs, building community around our developer products and regions, inspiring building inspiring videos about how developers are using our products. So this is largely how I would still think of different rules inside DevRel within most organizations that both inside Google and also outside Google.

And the reason why I'm talking about all these things is you will see how when we work with Asian developers, developers are fundamentally different both from tech side of things and also how you reach developers. Questions before we start, and I love if you can have some quick answers here. Is your dev rep relations headquarters team, you know, not necessarily just your leadership team, but let's say the people who build your APIs or your products, are they built are they based in US, UK, or the Western part of the world map? Let me just give you few seconds here. And then the last the next question I have for you is how big is your developer relations team in Asia?

Because if you want to work with developers across these regions, you perhaps should have somebody sitting in Asia because Asia has a lot of developers. And I'm wondering how many of you have a decent size or investment in in Asia. Alright. If you have any questions, please put them on the YouTube chat, and we can get back to them towards the end of the session as well. Alright.

Going back. Now that you are able to orient how your team is structured geographically, let's go into Asia. Asia is vast, unique, and diverse. That's the real point that I'm trying to share here based on all my experience and with all the developer relations community out here that, you know, the amazing team at Hoopy has built and and every other organizing party here. Starting off with the opportunity in Asia.

Asia has almost the equal number of unicorns you can think of in the Western world. China now has perhaps very close amount of unicorns developed in the last few years as US. India is also growing really quick, and you have several companies in Israel, in Turkey, in Indonesia, Japan, Korea, which are not listed here, but several of these are unicorns. So, clearly, the opportunity in Asia exists. It's big.

And Asia is growing fast. If you look at GitHub, the recent report says growth of open source contributors on GitHub is very high in Asian countries. Hong Kong, China sorry. Not China. Singapore, where I'm sitting from.

Japan, Korea. These are all experiencing extreme growth in open source contributions. If you look at Kaggle ranked users, not just users who sign up, but ranked users, again, you see Asia is high up in the ladder, very much on par with North America and Europe. So I hope that this tells you that there is enough opportunity in Asia as a continent and as a market as a whole. But the real challenge of Asia starts with something called data accuracy.

Asia is huge, and not proper data reports and insights have been well captured over the years. We will see quite different reports between Stack Overflow slash data and many other research organizations on how they report data on Asia. And it's it's, to be fair, not their mistake, but it just shows the complexity of Asia. Unless you are sitting in Asia, unless you are interacting with developers in Asia, it's really tough to analyze and estimate the market opportunity and the size of developers in Asia. So that's problem number one.

If you're making a decision just looking at data, I'm sorry, that is not sufficient data to fully give you a picture. Second, Asia is also complex. If If you you look at the cultural differences in Asia, they are quite stalking. Here is an example where you have a prominent geography, The Middle East, where you have right to left written languages and apps being used prominently. I'll give you another example.

There is a specific script in Myanmar called Zwagi script, which is not compatible with Unicode and does not clearly represent the language. So here is a scenario where popular forms, including Roboto, which is used in many Android phones, have some form of compatibility layer built in to ensure that the script can offer that the font can offer what the script provides. And, similarly, you also have error names in Japanese, which are the users and are a part of a date format that you also have to now deal with. So as developers developers in Asia have to go through extra hoops and barriers as they're building software. And this is what users here are familiar with.

So it's important that developers are writing and building products that cater to the users in these regions. So these just points are the internationalization implications that a developer should consider as they are building for Asia. Let's look at how developers, especially game developers, are approaching the market opportunity. Here is a report from Museu. Museu is a very popular gaming research firm, and they publish reports on mobile game developers almost on an annual basis.

Here, you can see if you look at Southeast Asia, the developers who are making money building for the Southeast Asian consumer market are in many parts of the world. They are building from Singapore, South Korea, China. You go down the list, you also see Russia, Finland, etcetera. So, literally, everybody's building apps for such games for Southeast Asia, and they're making money. Let's take a look at Korea, for example.

You see here, most developers who are making money out of the gamers in Southeast Asia in sorry. The gamers out of South Korea are South Korean companies. You can see that eight out of top 10 games are revenue making games are actually built by South Korean brands. This is not very different from Japan, where, again, you see most local developers are building for their local markets. So the mentality that which they approach, the consumption behavior that they see would be vastly different from, let's say, an American game developer building for Asia.

Not just that, you will see that there are big demographic differences in both the skill level and how developers in Asia start or build apps or games. From the time they start building their first line of code, you see that developers in India are starting much later at the age of 17 compared to many parts of the rest. Similarly, you see that the age and experience of, coding experience of developers is also much different. Here in the case of India, you see most developers average with roughly seven years of experience. But it's very common to see developers in US, UK, etcetera, to have much more years of experience.

Again, you see how they are fundamentally different from from where they start and how long they go in their technical, journey. You also see that developers in Asia are flanking more towards mobile development. This is because many developers started building their apps or they'll they learned coding when after looking at their after purchasing their first mobile phone. It's a mobile first market. They're naturally gravitating towards building apps and services for mobile because that's what the users around them are also using.

And you can see that there is much less developers in roles such as DevOps, embedded systems, etcetera. Sources for all these data will be forwarded with the last few slides. So you can see how fundamentally they flank towards different professions depending on their education, etcetera. One more interesting thing is also how long they stay in a job. We see, whereas Indian developers stay much lesser after in a particular organization after four years.

You will see that you have many more developers who are working for longer periods of time in US, UK, and many other western worlds. The mentality and what they think of growth, professional career growth is also very different. Developers also build for new surface areas. A good example is how many chatbots or chat based programs started popping up in WeChat in China, and they're very popular in products like LINE, which is heavily used in Thailand, and also Japan, and many other part parts of Asia. Inside these chatbots, you have full blown applications from booking tickets to a cinema, to ecommerce, to even going to to even purchasing tickets to a national park, for example.

All these programs and websites literally reside inside messenger or it's not called messenger, but essentially chat applications. You saw this behavior later translate into products like messenger, Facebook messenger, etcetera. And, fundamentally, a lot of things are different. Right? From the tools and laptops and machines that are used for develop developers in Asia, many of them are old.

They may not be able to afford the latest 2019 or 2020 MacBook Pro that is very common in developers in the Western world. Internet connectivity is a challenge in many parts of Asia. Reliable Internet connectivity for them to download a 300 MB SDK was a challenge few years ago. It's getting better, but these are all considerations you need to think about. Language support.

How many languages can you support? Asia is huge and big. How can you prioritize? How can you help at least certain developers, get better access? Asian developers also have a different preference in learning.

If you look at developers, are relatively younger, and they perhaps gotten exposed to YouTube videos much earlier than perhaps exploring sample code. So you will see that the fundamental learning behavior of developers in Asia is different. Where they learn also makes a big difference. It's not necessarily just Coursera or Audacity. There are many popular local, learning portals such as analytics, they are, Coder School, Secola's coding, etcetera.

And there are so many hundreds of other learning portals that I'm not able to mention here. This is where developers congregate. That's where they acquire new skills. These are all important considerations if you want to build, your developer engagement and presence in Asia. Online billing.

There are many regions in Asia where, methods of payment are not as formidable as the Western world. They might be used using vouchers or carrier billing so that they're able to monetize, usage and or consumption of digital data in India. Lastly, education and curriculum is also sometimes outdated. And all these affect the thought process and how a developer in Asia approaches your developer product or audio tools. There are also fundamentally very different professions of developers.

Something I call as an outsourcing or a delivery developer. An example is, let's say, is a Rolls Royce, or or a BMW where where the hedge headquarters is. But part of their engineering, or development is actually outsourced to Asia. Right? So so the business decision making is happening elsewhere, but the implementation is happening in Asia.

And it's happening to a consulting firm like Infosys, TCS, etcetera, or the hundreds of other companies in Asia who deliver value to western countries who are western companies who are clients. And these developers have fundamentally different thought process and challenges. First thing that you have to understand is these developers are working by the r. They are built by the r. And their entire objective is to deliver the functionality as quickly as possible.

They are given a PRD based on the advice of a business user, and they develop the product. Faster you develop, the better you can make money. And in this process, sometimes, good quality performance of your product and all these things are neglected. Functionality wins because that's how they are build. Certifications are higher valued.

So if I'm an engineer, I will be very interested in acquiring certifications because certifications help me pass the hoops in hiring much faster. Many organization need 100 engineers a year, 500 engineers a year. And at that scale, it's very difficult to assess thoroughly every single candidate. So they are very much happy as an organization to look at, oh, you have passed a certain certification. Great.

I don't have to focus so much heavily on your technical skills, and they just jump into the next process. So certifications still carry a lot of value compared to many western worlds where you are evaluated for the skill. Most times, people's career growth depends on the projects they are assigned to. So let's say I'm a mobile developer. I love being a mobile developer, but next phase, if I'm basically mapped as a database administrator, my career directly shifts to be database developer.

I acquire a wide range of skills, but it does not necessarily contribute to growing up into the same stack or this particular, domain per se. And this is this is the type of journey that you will see in an outsourced development. They also have very less choice or decision power on the framework used. Let's say I'm told, hey. Build this app or this website on Angular using a, b, c frameworks, and as a developer, I need to build it.

So I would basically go and hunt on how to do certain things on Angular or a certain framework, and I use I'll use I will basically try to get done. I, as a developer, necessarily do not have enough decision making power on what the technology is used because the decision is made at the at the headquarters at a different level. Lastly, it might be surprising, but some of these developers do not have full access to Stack Overflow or even the Internet. This is because of some of the highly regulated security environments that you might be provisioned. Let's say you are building apps for Bank of America.

I know several of my friends who are building apps for Bank of America and Chase Bank, etcetera, etcetera, who who are mandated to be in an environment where they are responsible for having all the skills required to do the job and not just learning on the fly. That means by answering questions on Stack Overflow and helping developers, it doesn't mean that it reaches these developers. So that's something you will be fundamentally shocked if you look through the life cycle of an outsourcing developer. Lastly, old technology still has value. Many of these old, enterprises which have been around for a long time, they still have a lot of old code and components that require maintenance and support and, you know, mainframe development and patching security updates on this mainframe still has a lot of value.

There are still several developers who have this as a profession, if you are an outsourced developer. The other category of developers that's very interesting is the freelance developer. Freelance developers freelancing as an economic opportunity is rapidly growing in Asia. If you look at the top 10 countries, you will see that Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Philippines, Russia, all these countries represent and provide big economic opportunity via freelance for developers. And these developers also have fundamentally different rates and thought processes.

Trivia question to all of you. Guess what's the hottest in demand technology in Bangladesh? Okay. I'll give you a few seconds to think about it. Guess the hottest in demand technology for freelancers in Bangladesh.

The answer really is WordPress. So now I've told you how very different in thought process developers in Asia from outsourcing to, how how their experiences, how their how their thought process of learning new tools is. Let me very quickly tell you how all this connects. I've told you about this slide, about how there are two different aspects or facets of table, tech side and the nontech side. So if I were you if I was in a DevRel organization looking to expand our developer reach in Asia, this is how I would think about it.

Build start thinking about building for the Asian developer. Understand their constraints. Understand their challenges and build for them. Think of the right tools. What would work for them when large SDKs may not basically be, sufficiently be or comfortably comfortably be delivered over the Internet.

What can we do? Can we give them CDs? Can we do something else? Can we give them thumb drives? Build with that mentality in mind.

Think about sample codes versus docs. So, again, make them dead simple. Many developers are young. So you it's your responsibility to actually make it simple, dead simple, so that a developer can quickly learn, copy, paste, and apply it instantly in inside your inside their applications. Right channels for your material.

Think about YouTube versus blog versus samples versus a tutorial. Asian developers who are younger, who are much more new generation might have different learning methodologies compared to the rest of the world. And that's all the tech side of things. If you look at the non tech side of things, you'll have to fundamentally think about how you connect with developers. How do you increase your awareness on social media?

Should we use WeChat? Should we use Instagram? Can you use a blog? Where? What is the destination?

What is the medium? What type of community building tools do you have to use? Is it Meetup? Have you heard of a tool called Compass? That is by far the most commonly used conference ticketing applications.

It is the equivalent of Air and Bright, but it is the major platform in Japan. So, again, vast differences between tools used in different countries and showcase their successes. We all need local heroes and heroines to inspire us. If you do not show the innovation brought by Asian developers, it is tough for you to inspire and groom local success stories. So pay attention to what's happening and what every developer, across the world is building with your tools.

For your organization, last few tips. One, if you're looking at Asia, again, opportunity is big, but it's wide and it's so broad. Most people struggle with prioritization. I would say, think about a metrics versus effort and impact and prioritize location based on the usage of your product, based on the opportunity, etcetera. Try to build local teams.

It is very tough just like how the previous panel it was spoken about. It is really tough to get a grasp and a grip of the local ecosystem sitting elsewhere. It is important that you have people on the ground who can give you real time on the ground feedback. And build local partnerships with local ecosystem peers. They will help you accelerate your time into into the market.

Lastly, provide feeding feedback to global teams as quickly as possible. Show your leadership around. Help them talk to developers so that they are able to connect with local developers if they are in town. Provide constant insights and feedback to them. It's very important that you showcase what is happening in your country, in your region, and provide insights almost on a constant basis.

If I would provide you with one small, advice, you have to be advocates and gather you have to gather advocates for your region and your developers. I would conclude my talk with one short line. The future is already here. It's just evenly unevenly distributed, and that's very apt for Asia. On that note, I would like to thank all the different data sources that I collected for this presentation along with several wisdom and learnings that I've had from my past teammates.

At this time, if there are any questions I can answer, I'd love to answer. And that brings me to the end of my talk.