Coder? Make yourself at home!

It's been four years since Stephen O'Grady wrote The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World, and it's clear that trade show folks finally got the memo. Everywhere I look here at Velocity/Fluent in San Jose this week I see signs and hear words that make it clear: exhibitors want to win the hearts and minds of technical practitioners, rather than just tease out of them an org chart leading to a "decision maker" to call on.

Consider the comfy pillow and chair above at the Akamai Developer booth, which seem to say, "If you are a coder, please feel right at home here." Consider also the answer I got when I asked "So what are you guys up to lately?"

"We used to connect with [executive] decision makers in the past, but now we are creating programs and tools for developers."

Why the shift? Because minting techies that are empowered to succeed and capable of articulating the benefits of a solution is more valuable than handing out cigars to executives at an "executive briefing" mixer and promising the moon and the stars.

It's a healthy progression. Practitioners have to make things work, after all.

At BlazeMeter (now a CA Technologies company), we've been thinking this way from the start. Our founding CEO Alon Girmonsky coined the term, "B2D" or "Business to Developer." His theory was that a huge army of advocates succeeding with your solution before any serious money changes hands would be a good thing. Good not only for business, but for the industry and the state of tech as well.

Instead of: Hype -> Spending -> Letdown we get: Value -> Consensus -> Investment

If you are a practitioner looking to embrace open-source testing tools for functional or performance testing and committed to achieving continuous testing instead of "never quite enough" testing, here are some of the goodies we give away to make you successful before we ask you to vote with your dollars: