At Amplitude, we are focused on helping customers optimize their digital products and customer experiences with sophisticated behavioral insights. A critical stakeholder and collaborator on this journey are the data engineers and analytics developers in your teams. On the heels of Amplify announcements and an entire week-long internal hackathon, we are excited to share more exciting updates for the developers in the Amplitude ecosystem this week, including
- New developer documentation site
- New features and improvements within our in-product developer experience
- New portal to make it easy for developers to build an Amplitude integration
Amplitude Developer Center: Your one-stop-shop for building with Amplitude
As part of our continued work towards improving your experience with Amplitude, and making it easier to get the most vital and current information when you need it, we are happy to announce a major update to our Amplitude Developer Center. This is just the first release in an extensive overhaul of the entire documentation site that brings together content that was previously split across multiple websites.
Beyond the new streamlined experience, the first iteration in this larger rebuild delivers a number of enhanced features including:
- Redesigned home page that provides centralized access to all products and other helpful resources
- Fully open-source docs that are open for collaboration; if you find an issue or have an idea for an improvement, you can open a pull request and contribute.
The new site will be Generally Available on June 30th, 2022, and the old developer site(s) will be redirected to the new site. To read more about the updates, check out our community post.
Bringing the focus back to trustworthy data
Moving your teams from a reactive approach to data quality to proactive data governance and generating high trust in your customer data, is a critical part of how we deliver value to all Amplitude customers. However, instrumenting data is the most complex and time-consuming part of the data governance process. We typically see two types of customers: either you already have a tracking plan and it’s in a spreadsheet, or you are tracking events in other solutions such as a CDP (customer data platform) but struggle to maintain and control data quality.
Customers, in either case, face common challenges such as inconsistent naming, ad hoc tracking of events that do not always tie to business value, and deteriorating data quality. And while many developers collaborate on an ongoing basis to help teams fix these issues, it does not help when instrumenting events if:
- Code is typo-prone and there is minimal QA
- It is easy to miss events and properties and its a lot of extra work to keep them up-to-date
- As data is generated from a variety of sources, engineers may need to develop expertise with 3rd-party SDKs that they now have to work with.
All of this happens across multiple tools and various stakeholders such as product managers, analysts, and developers in messy spreadsheets and Jira tickets, and it may often feel that you never get it quite right. There are many features that are integral to improving this experience and we are excited to bring those to you with our enhanced developer experience tools. To get a detailed look at specific features and a way to get involved in providing feedback, be sure to visit Amplitude Community for the latest update tomorrow.
Go from raw data to product insights as fast as possible
Over the last few months, we have made it really easy for teams to proactively collaborate to define their tracking plan, with a best-in-class developer toolkit that saves engineers time and helps automate data validation with tracking libraries generated on the fly. All Amplitude customers now have access to an always up-to-date tracking plan that can guide you to standardize your naming conventions and implement a company-wide taxonomy for your customer data.
Without investing in any new infrastructure, these tracking libraries are generated to match your tracking spec exactly so developers get auto-complete for your analytics. As business needs evolve, developers can also refactor and build new features without worrying about how you might break analytics, all the while avoiding many preventable mistakes through strongly typed SDKs. Unlike other automated solutions in the market these event planning and tracking plan management features are available to customers on all Amplitude plans (yes, Starter plan included!).
Build with Amplitude
With the announcement earlier in the year about our Data Connections and Amplitude CDP, it is critical for us to bring the power of an open ecosystem to Amplitude customers. We are excited to announce the beta availability of our new Integration portal to further expand the tooling necessary for our growing ecosystem of technology partners to build, modify and maintain their Amplitude integration. This Integration Portal will enable partners and our team to scale the growing number of data connections that we can make available to Amplitude customers as you get ready to unify customer behavior data and better understand the complete customer experience. To learn more about the Portal and how you can get access to it, read the community post.
If you missed it, we also hosted an AMA with Charlie Groll, Frontend Engineer at Netlify, an engineering leader using Amplitude to streamline the process of capturing quality analytics. Check out the conversation here.
We are continuing to double down in making it easy and delightful for developers to use Amplitude. There are various ways for you to engage us and tell us about your ideas. If you are interested swing by the Amplitude Community where inspiration never stops and introduce yourself!
