On the Road with DevExpress
At DevExpress, there is nothing more exciting than meeting with you, our customers. Getting face-to-face with you helps us learn what we’re doing well and where we need to improve. One of the things we often hear from our customers, is “How do you recommend we build this application?” Earlier in the year, Sara Faatz –DevExpress Community Engagement Director – had an incredible idea:
Why don’t we just show people how we approach software development? And of course it will be LIVE!
And from that idea, the Express Way Tour began. As we were conceiving of the idea we were reminded of the importance of User Experience and how critically important it is for our tools to help make the applications that you write every day visually stunning. We challenged ourselves: can our tools do even more? Then it hit us. We could bring a world class graphic designer with us on the Tour and have him share his best practices for developing stunning applications by presenting his insights in a developer-friendly manner. We found one of the best designers in the world in our own backyard: Jared Potter. Jared is involved in a number of complex design projects and played a major role on the design of Windows Phone 8.
We really wanted to have the roadshow be something more than anything we had done in the past. So we asked ourselves, could we build a reasonably sized application in just 4 hours?? It seemed crazy - initially. Think about that. How long was your last development project? Months? Maybe a year? It probably wasn’t 4 hours. But that’s what we wanted to do. We wanted to show the design of an application (we settled on a Customer Relationship Management/CRM application). So we worked with Jared and he came up with a design. And then we had to figure out if we could actually build the application after Jared explained design concepts and the tools.
Our first stop was Brisbane, Australia and it was amazing. The audience started arriving hours before the presentation was set to start and by the time we were about to get underway, we had to bring in more tables to the room because we had reached standing room only. The audience was so engaged in the presentation and we had so many great questions during and after the meeting. Many of the attendees hung around until well after the presentation. It was really exciting to hear about how DevExpress is being used in Australia. We learned about one company that is using our functionality for mining, another is being used in banking. I was really interested to learn about the uniqueness of the Australian vertical markets. For example, the high speed internet connectivity that we take for granted in the USA isn’t always as reliable or as fast in parts of Australia. Aside from the interesting learnings from our customers, we also learned a valuable lesson about Mentos mints. Jared (the 
designer I mentioned earlier) took a bite out of a Mentos candy right before the event kicked off and somehow it chipped his tooth! A piece of his tooth literally came off. He was a trooper though and he continued on and delivered an amazing presentation to the Brisbane audience.
Next we were off to Sydney, Australia where we were once again presented with a large group of excited customers who arrived hours before the presentation. I love these customers – they were so ready to share their experiences with us. Paul Usher, the leader of our Asia Pacific Evangelism team, built out the CRM application in Sydney and when he was done he was swarmed by customers interested in sharing their techniques and ideas and learning more from Paul.
What makes these events so exciting is hearing how our customers are using our products. One customer sheepishly told us that he had reused our TouchBoard application and wanted to make sure that we were ok with that. I was so happy and excited to hear that, I shared my answer with the broader group: “We built these samples and demo applications for you. Please feel free to use them in any way!”
We have more stops scheduled on the Express Way Tour and want to meet you. We’re coming out to Istanbul and Germany later in May and then to North America. I hope I get a chance to see you. I’d love to hear how you are using DevExpress tools.