The DEV Survey on BigQuery

Analysis
#1

We interrupt our regular programming to bring you a different kind of dataset that shines a light on the state of web development.

I’ve partnered with the dev.to community to issue a survey with a mix of demographic questions (eg age, gender, education) and technical questions (eg browser preference, feature usage, workflows, etc). They’ve made the results publicly accessible and encouraged the community to mine it for insights. To make it easier, I’ve added the results to the HTTP Archive BigQuery project here: https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/table/httparchive:scratchspace.dev?tab=schema

I’m very interested to see what insights our community could find in there with a bit of BigQuery fu.

Here’s a sample query to get you started:

SELECT
  _43__Are_you_a___ AS animal,
  COUNT(0) num
FROM
  `httparchive.scratchspace.dev`
GROUP BY
  animal
ORDER BY
  num DESC
animal num
Dog person 804
Cat person 621
Neither 441
33

Comment in this thread or create a new post on DEV if you find anything interesting in the dataset.

I’m recording an episode of my YouTube series, The State of the Web, with two of the DEV cofounders on Thursday, and we’ll be referencing interesting community stats.

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#2

1900 responses. cool. totally going to dig through this.

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#3

This is awesome! Here’s a few graphs to start off -

First let’s look at the breakdown of which primary browser the respondents use for web development. It looks like we have mostly Chrome and Firefox devs wiht 74% and 20% respectively. 2.5% of responses were from Safari Devs.

image

Now let’s look at the state of user satisfaction for Browser Tooling in the most popular development browsers. It looks like the responses for both Chrome and Firefox are relatively consistent - which is really awesome to see.

image

@rviscomi’s query above showed us that there are slightly more Dog people than Cat people. Now let’s look at this based on the respondents’ primary browser used for development. It looks like there’s an interesting skew towards Dog loving Chrome Devs here!

image

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#4

Questions 5 through 23 had lots of interesting questions about how web developers rate various topics. I thought it would be interesting to represent all of this data in a heatmap table so that we can look for trends.

It’s probably not a surprise that most web developers dislike ads :). You can also see some other interesting perspectives as well. It looks like developers largely agree that the web is improving and developing for it is becoming easier over time.

What are your takeaways from this table?

image

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#5

image

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#6

Breakdown of respondents age range vs how long they have been working in software.

image

2 Likes
#7

nice work as always Paul. Been trying to connect a few interesting dots in here. There are a few interesting stories tucked away in here. Love that last chart!

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#8

The State of the Web episode for this survey is live. We discuss the results, including community contributions from @paulcalvano!

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