Listening to the Developer Community Yields Benefits: Introducing Timescale’s Community Forum

Developer products like TimescaleDB are made more useful and powerful when listening and acting on the needs of the developer community. Timescale believes that developers drive the success of companies like ours through product adoption and advocacy. Successful developer communities might be facilitated by companies, but their members drive them. And the health and vibrancy of a community are a consequence of developer-to-developer conversations and collaboration.

From the outset, we’ve understood the importance and power of the developer community, and adopted Slack as the main channel for community discussion and influence. The immediate feedback loop worked well. Timescale met a lot of great people along the way and has some awesome community contributors helping less experienced users with the phenomenal features of TimescaleDB. (Thank you!)

The feedback you provide via Slack and GitHub issues often drives our product development. For example in 2021, we delivered the ability to insert into compressed chunks, and experimental features to provide for variable sized time buckets and timezone support for time buckets via time_bucket_ng in response to requests from our community.

However, as anyone who joined our community day session with Chris Engelbert and Ben Wilson will know – and if you’ve been around TimescaleDB’s Slack for a while – there are several discussions that recur frequently. We’ve also received community calls for the chance to create more structured and longer-lasting discussion threads. Not everyone enjoys corresponding in chat channels, and for our global community, conversational short-form chat is not always the best medium. Lots of projects offer both a chat channel and something more along the lines of a traditional forum, and we’ve had several requests from users for us to launch a forum for Timescale.

Time Travelers

As part of our work to make our community a great place to exchange knowledge about these database application technologies, we’re revamping our community recognition program. We want to recognize contributors big and small because all contributions to the Timescale community can have a positive impact. Our talented designer Julia Nasser had made some awesome drawings of Eon for our NFT Collection of Time Travel Tigers, and that sparked an idea for the theme of our new program–Timescale Time Travelers.

The Time Traveler program enables everyone in the community to travel with us as we continue to learn, build, and develop Timescale… Asking questions, giving answers, writing posts, contributing code, editing docs… there’s a multitude of ways that valuable contributions can be made to the community. While being helpful has its own rewards—and with the new public forum, you can share evidence of your community spirit and knowledge—we’re also creating some unique SWAG to distribute to our most active community members. More about this soon!

It takes a village…

Looking back to my own community day discussion, as Timescale’s community manager, I want to make sure that all voices have the chance to be heard and that everyone has a place where they can get the information they need in a format that works for them. The new forum and the Time Traveler program move us along the path of helping you as developers get the most out of your database applications.

If Timescale’s a place where you can build your knowledge, discuss things that matter to you, and meet other developers that share your interests, then we are doing our job.

For those who already use our Slack community, I’ve posted a link to the forum in the #announcements channel… using that link, you’ll get a special welcome, and a thank you 🎁 from us as a Timescale OG! Also note we will continue using Slack and make sure conversations of note are highlighted in both forums.

For those who are not currently using Slack, you’re welcome to join us there, but you might also enjoy taking part in our new community forum. Sign up now!