Hello, Sylius community!
It’s Maggie here and I come to you to tell what I’ve found out in the Sylius Community Developer Survey 2018 that we were conducting lately.
As Paweł already mentioned a couple of times in his last blog post, last year was utterly amazing. Moreover, I need to stress out the words Magda wrote in the recent newsletter – “without our community, we would be really sad”. That sentence is basically the most accurate conclusion of the survey results.
You might be wondering what for did we come up with an idea of a developer survey. Well, there were a few reasons. First of all, we see it every day that the Sylius community is constantly evolving, for various reasons, people come and go. As our relationship with the community is close, we wanted to get to know you. Imagine we could all go out for a beer or two and conversate, just like we do with friends, on all these things I’ve been asking you about in the survey. Would be amazing, true? However great it would’ve been to integrate in this way… we are aware it is nearly impossible – the whole Sylius team is located in Łódź, Poland, although the community is naturally distributed all around the world.
The other reason besides getting to know you was to better respond to your needs (with both the framework and the services like consulting/training), that is why I’ve been asking about your working environments, projects sizes & budgets and dream features. We were also wondering if it is the right moment to start thinking about the Sylius Developer Certification programme, and guess what?! We got an answer 😈
The last reason was to investigate how “healthy” our community is in the matter of open source spirit. Therefore I was asking you about the frequency of contributions and the knowledge about last features and documentation 😉
If you want to see the survey it is still available here.
If I had to present answers to all of the questions I’ve been asking (there were 21) we would have a very lengthy analysis. Therefore I kindly ask for your trust, I will choose wisely the most interesting topics and show the results to you.
The survey was distributed via Slack, Facebook, Twitter, and our newsletter. We got 116 responses. If we assume that the number of our Slack channel members (~1800 users) is the most probable, rough number of people that are members of the Sylius community it means that the survey sample was merely 6% of the whole. To be honest… it could’ve been better.
One of the interesting information we got from the survey is the size of companies, people in the Sylius community, work in. Most of us (97,9%) work in companies smaller than 50 employees, that includes Sylius, the company, which is now 12 people. 🙂
Have you ever been wondering how long do we know each other? It seems that most of us remember well when they started working with Sylius, have a look below. And huuuuge thanks to both people who are with us since last year only, but also to those who are with us from the very beginning.
It also seems that you like working with the most recent versions of the framework (62.9% of the interviewees at the time when the survey was conducted).
Have a look at the chart above. Undoubtedly B2C model is the most popular for Sylius, although nearly half of you try Sylius for B2B scenarios. What is more, you are also experimenting with marketplaces! We are glad to help in all three eCommerce branches.
Below you can see what kind of software is widely integrated with Sylius in order to get the full eCommerce functionality supported.
In the survey, there was a question about the features that you are missing the most in Sylius. This is the question where you’ve surprised me a little bit. Why? Many of you are still not aware of the features we are providing via plugins, you are missing a lot. Let’s catch up with it:
1) Get to know more in our Roadmap in the “done” columns.
2) Read more articles from our blog, we mention the plugins quite a lot.
3) Follow us on Twitter.
Coming to what I’ve called the “open source spirit condition” in the beginning. I’ve been asking you about the last contributions to Sylius codebase… are you curious how does it look? ;>
We are totally grateful for each contribution <3. For those of you who do not know what to do but you’d like to, I’ve got 3 bits of advice:
1) browse the issues list on the Sylius/Sylius repository;
2) visit us on our Slack, there are plenty of Sylius users (core team included) that can inspire you;
3) visit our documentation and try to find what is outdated and report/fix this, you cannot imagine how thankful we’ll be 🙂
The last question in the survey I’ve asked was if you want to see us starting the Sylius Developer Certification programme. And looking at the results below… what do you think? Are we going to launch this initiative in the future, or not? 😀
All in all, it was a very nice experience to conduct this survey, so huge thanks go to each participant. Definitely, I see a need for further research in the future. Maybe you will be more responsive the next time! I personally think that I got to know you better as a community and I hope that you will all have such a feeling after reading this blog post.
Thank you for reading and see you again soon!
