Hello, SKY Developer community

Paul Gibson

Hello SKY Developer Community!  I'd like to introduce myself to the community and give a heads up for some things to be on the lookout for coming soon from Blackbaud.

My name is Paul Gibson and I am a Vice President and Technical Fellow at Blackbaud.  Some of you may have seen me on stage at BBCon 2019 with Ben Wong‍ and our CTO, Mary Beth Westmoreland, talking about the exciting things going on with our developer ecosystem.  (picture below, which Ben Wong won the caption contest for labeling me his bodyguard )


I've been at Blackbaud a while, and in the past I've had the opportunity to work with current SKY Developer rock stars like Ben Lambert‍  and Bobby Earl‍  on what now might be considered some of our proto-platforms, going back to the Raiser's Edge COM API and then the Infinity SDK which powers Blackbaud CRM.  I've always enjoyed seeing how partners and other "citizen developers" have been able to use their creativity and passion to bring even more value to our shared customers.  We have learned a lot over the years, and now with the SKY Developer platform I'm really excited to see how the ecosystem is advancing on modern, cloud based technologies.  Earlier this year I got the opportunity to pick an area of Blackbaud where I could make a contribution, and I jumped at the chance to work even more closely with the Bens and the rest of the great team behind SKY Developer.  My reasoning was simple - I see huge opportunity for us to help build the so-called Ecosystem of Good, and there is a ton of existing momentum that this community has going already.  I want in on the fun!


So that is who I am and why I am here.  With that out of the way, I'll end this post with some things to be on the lookout for. 


In 2020 we are going to be iterating on a number of fronts, and we are doing that with an attitude of being open with our SKY Developer community .  We are going to be transparent about ideas we have and we will be inviting the community to take part in experiments to help us learn.  You may have seen some recent community threads about webhooks, for example. Soon we expect to have some fundamentals in place to allow you to try out webhooks and give us feedback.  We don't expect to have a perfect implementation on the first iteration, but our approach is going to be one where we engage as soon as possible with our developer community to begin the learnings.  As another example, in a few weeks we expect to be ready to do some experiments aimed at addressing feedback we have gotten about the challenges developers have getting oriented to the SKY Developer platform, especially around access to test/sandbox instances.  I'm personally pretty excited about that example since a small part of it includes some code I've recently contributed to the platform.  For those of you in our Partner program we will soon be increasing the visibility of your Marketplace apps so that not only administrators but also non-admin level users can discover your apps and request their admin get started connecting to your apps.  And in case you missed it, the Events API was just made available in (Beta), aka "ready to learn from you" mode!


Thank you for being engaged members of this growing community, and thank you to everyone who is on this journey with us to make good even better! I'm looking forward to engaging more with this great community in the coming weeks.

-PaulG



 

David Zeidman

Hi Paul


Welcome to the community! Great to have you on board!


Looking forward to more great things in the future...