TelstraDev End of Year Wrap: 2020

We made it! Welcome to the end of 2020, may it soon be just a distant memory. Though it wasn’t the year we expected, let’s look on the bright side. Despite almost a full year working from home, our hard-working developers, product managers, designers, engineers and (me!) our Developer Advocate still delivered some improvements and additions to TelstraDev, to make your developer experience more efficient and enjoyable than ever before.

Your new developer experience

• API Status page: you told us you wanted greater transparency over your APIs, and simple indicators. Now you can check the availability and performance of some of our public API services on the API Live Status. Subscribe to updates to be notified of any incidents.
• Single 'Sign in' with Telstra ID: new registrations on TelstraDev are now authenticated through their Telstra ID. This simplifies experiences across multiple Telstra digital services, including: the My Telstra app, Telstra 24x7 app, Telstra Plus and AFL Live Pass. Existing users will get the chance to migrate their existing TelstraDev identity to Telstra ID if they wish, or merge with an existing Telstra ID in the new year.
• Improved Messaging API documentation: thanks to some savvy developers raising feedback, we’ve been updating the Messaging API reference documentation to include a wider range of code examples, error responses, and feature inclusions. More to come on this in the new year. 
• 1:1 developer feedback sessions: as part of our developer research we sat (virtually) with dozens of active developers, to hear their pain points, their hopes, and their expectations of Telstra’s API developer program. This critical feedback is shaping our product feature backlog and developer experience work. If you’d like to contribute to future feedback sessions, let us know at anytime, or post your suggestion on our forums.
• An pgraded portal: Five years after its launch, we've re-vamped the TelstraDev site to make it more modern and easier to navigate. Our fave page face-lifts are the FAQs, blogs and developer support centre.
• Developer Advocate appointed: we welcomed many new team members to TelstraDev including a Developer Experience lead, a Developer Support lead, and your very own dedicated Developer Advocate. Our team is dedicated to improving the experience of developers across our APIs and IoT products, to make you successful and give you a strong voice inside Telstra. Don’t hesitate to reach out at any time: telstradev@team.telstra.com
• Telstra IoT platform guides: We’ve made it simpler for Enterprise customers to onboard with Telstra’s IoT Platform (previously known as Cumulocity), including a guide built for our Arduino IoT Starter Kit.
• API and IoT workshops: we published our first video tutorial for getting started with the Messaging API, we set up automated SMS alerts on your Arduino IoT device for remote actuation, environmental monitoring and fall detection, and shared several DIY IoT projects.
• Hacking for a better future together: hackers, hipster and hustlers from across Australia joined us at various hackathons: IBM’s Call for Code, GovHack (hear about our Critical Communications and Sustainable IoT challenge winners), Telstra Health Hack for Digital Healthcare, Telstra Innovation Hackathon, Microsoft’s AI for Accessibility Virtual Hackathon and Here Technologies Hackathon. If you’d like to join a workshop with us, keep an eye on our Twitter @TelstraDev.
• Sharing the love: it was great to meet some of the API and IoT developer community at conferences and meetups in 2020, as well as the AusIoT (formerly MelbIoT) meetup. You might have seen us at APIDays Australia, IBM Cloud Conference, Bendigo Innovation and Invention Festival, Write the Docs, Adelaide AI Lab, Queensland AI Hub, or Code Club, or heard us in our IoT & 21st century education podcast feature too. 

New products

And that's not all. This year, we also welcomed the launch of two exciting new products: 

• A new IoT device: the NB-IoT data logger, Telstra Captis Multi, hit the shelves. It's a compact, IP68 rated device designed to measure a range of parameters and run for extended periods of time. Plus, it's certified for use within Telstra’s 4 million sq km of IoT Network coverage.
• A new public API: we welcomed the Telstra Smart Spaces API, which enables Smart Spaces customers to make decisions based on their own building data for smarter people, assets, safety, compliance, user experience and space value realisation.

Get involved

A lot has happened, but there’s a lot more to do! The team behind TelstraDev is already working on making 2021 better than ever for our developer community, by focusing on your feedback and keeping the simple, simple! We’d love to hear from you, so reach out via the community forums, tweet us @TelstraDev or email us at telstradev@team.telstra.com.

Happy holidays!

The TelstraDev team