SDK v1.9.0 + Introducing DevRel Lead

[Albrey_Bristo-B]

Hey there community -

I recently joined the Product team to lead Developer Relations! I get to work directly with the engineers building our developer tools, and advocate for things that this lovely community needs to succeed.

Specifically, my role is to listen to, learn from, and contribute to this community on behalf of Airtable. I’m dedicated to making announcements about recent changes, popping into hot debates and discussions on this forum, and answering Airtable questions as they come along.

From the outside looking in, this community has been thriving. I’m excited to get to know each of you.

That being said, it wouldn’t be a valuable post without an announcement! We recently added the ability to write field descriptions and write description data when creating a field or table using the SDK.

Field descriptions can now be edited and specified when creating a new field:

• Added field.updateDescriptionAsync (docs).
• Added optional description argument to table.createFieldAsync (docs).
• Added optional description property to field objects accepted by base.createTableAsync (docs).

You can find more information about these, and other improvements in 1.9.0 in our changelog.

If you have questions, concerns, feedback feel free to drop them below.

[kuovonne]

Welcome to the Airtable community! We are glad to have you here and look forward to any future posts you provide.

It’s great to see public posts about changes to the development platform. Are you specifically focused on development of custom apps (since you are posting under the custom-apps category)? Or are you focused on code-based aspects of development (custom apps, scripting, and REST API)? Or is your position more expansive to include development that doesn’t involve code (which can be quite extensive once you talk about 3rd party integrations).

Does your background include development / writing code? Or are you more of a liaison with engineering?

How do you see the relationship between developers seeking help here in the forums versus submitting support requests?

[Albrey_Bristo-B]

Thanks Kouvonne! I appreciate the warm welcome.

A little bit more about me - I used to be a professional software engineer, mainly writing JavaScript and React. I joined Airtable in January 2020 as Head of Diversity and Inclusion, and recently found myself building out scripts and tinkering with custom apps in my free time. I’m haven’t mastered our platform just yet, but rest assured I can help debug where necessary.

I’m focused on both the code-based and non-code based aspects of the developer experience. My main goal is to keep you up to date on changes and optimizations to the custom apps and scripting SDKs, and the REST API. And write videos and tutorials that teach new-comers how to build on top of the Airtable platform.

How do you see the relationship between developers seeking help here in the forums versus submitting support requests?

Great question. I don’t have a strong opinion yet. At this point I’m sitting back and learning about how this community functions. I’ll circle back in a month or so once I have a more informed perspective.

Would love to hear your opinion if you’re open to sharing.

[kuovonne]

Thanks for the additional information. It is great to have a someone in charge of developer relations who has experience with development!

Albrey_Bristo-Brown:

recently found myself building out scripts and tinkering with custom apps in my free time

Writing scripts is fun! I think that is how many people who write scripts for Airtable started out. I am grateful to Airtable for building out such an accessible and useful platform.

Albrey_Bristo-Brown:

I’m haven’t mastered our platform just yet ,

Lol. Airtable releases so many new features, and development is so broad, that I don’t think any one person can master the platform.

Albrey_Bristo-Brown:

My main goal is to keep you up to date on changes and optimizations to …

This sounds awesome. Can I suggest adding links to the the https://www.airtable.com/developers page? Including an embed of the “what’s new” table with all the details that relate to development would be awesome. Changes to the the sdk that are very important to code developers are often of minimal interest (and sometimes incomprehensible) to non coders.

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You have a very broad audience to reach, including …

• people who already know how to code but are new to Airtable
• people who do not know how to code, but want to learn to code
• people who want working code, but are not interested in learning to code themselves
• experienced developers

These different groups of people have very different needs. I look forward to seeing how you prioritize and balance these groups.