Embark on a journey into the revolutionary world of low-code with April Schuppel, Lead Developer Advocate & Product Evangelist at Appian, as she shares her personal transition from industrial engineering into the pulsing heart of software innovation. Our conversation at Appian World unveils the colorful tapestry of a community thriving on collaboration and the latest platform advancements. Discover how April's multifaceted role in community engagement, content creation, and spearheading events like hackathons is not just about promoting Appian's features—it's about crafting a space where developers can challenge the status quo and redefine the boundaries of what's possible with technology.
Learn how Appian Community Edition project, a groundbreaking initiative set to flatten the learning curve for newcomers to the field. We take a closer look at the support systems that make this community exceptional, where quick responses and shared projects under Live Build challenges lead to the development of robust, real-world applications. From the crucial role of the App Market Submissions app to future gazing at an Appian World infused with AI and collaborative platform enhancements, this episode is a treasure trove for anyone keen on staying ahead in the fast-evolving landscape of software development. Join us for an exploration of how Appian is not just changing the game—it's rewriting the rules.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Embark on a journey into the revolutionary world of low-code with April Schuppel, Lead Developer Advocate & Product Evangelist at Appian, as she shares her personal transition from industrial engineering into the pulsing heart of software innovation. Our conversation at Appian World unveils the colorful tapestry of a community thriving on collaboration and the latest platform advancements. Discover how April's multifaceted role in community engagement, content creation, and spearheading events like hackathons is not just about promoting Appian's features—it's about crafting a space where developers can challenge the status quo and redefine the boundaries of what's possible with technology.
Learn how Appian Community Edition project, a groundbreaking initiative set to flatten the learning curve for newcomers to the field. We take a closer look at the support systems that make this community exceptional, where quick responses and shared projects under Live Build challenges lead to the development of robust, real-world applications. From the crucial role of the App Market Submissions app to future gazing at an Appian World infused with AI and collaborative platform enhancements, this episode is a treasure trove for anyone keen on staying ahead in the fast-evolving landscape of software development. Join us for an exploration of how Appian is not just changing the game—it's rewriting the rules.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
And it's Evan here at Appian World with April. Lead Developer Advocate here at Appian April. How are you.
Speaker 2:I'm doing great. How are you, Evan?
Speaker 1:I'm doing great. This is my first Appian World.
Speaker 2:And what do you think so far? It's fantastic. I love the energy.
Speaker 1:The community, as you know better than anyone, is pretty amazing. Your customers, your partners, it's all here For the folks listening to this. Maybe introduce yourself and your role, your team's role, at Appian.
Speaker 2:Sure thing. Yeah, so my name is April Schupel. I'm a lead developer advocate here and I'm on the Greater Product Evangelist team, and our team is all about crafting beautiful experiences for how people experience Appian out in the market. So whether that's a prospect interested in learning oh, how does this really work. Or whether that's developers and how they are learning about new features, whether that's people who are interested in getting into Appian and how do I get started, what are the first things that I can work on? So we really focus on making sure that Appian is putting its best first foot forward. Is that the expression Sure when it comes to new people first coming in the door and then keeping people excited once they're here?
Speaker 1:Well, there's a lot of excited people here, that's for sure Really a lot of energy. How did you get into the world of low-code software development and how did you get into Appian?
Speaker 2:Sure thing, I actually studied industrial engineering for a while.
Speaker 2:I was a consultant at a few different places doing implementations of more kind of configuration software, asset management, things like IBM Maximo, things like this, so things like this and every role.
Speaker 2:I wanted to get more and more technical than just those more easily configurable enterprise applications. And as I was looking for a new role, appian found me and came into my LinkedIn DMs and they were interested in hiring someone for a community and app market lead role, which was kind of a very dynamic catch-all role involved with working with the community site, helping with community support app market operations. It was kind of a bit of an open-ended job description but I was eager for a challenge and to learn a lot of new things and from my first week at Appian in Academy, learning the product from day one and my experience with years of being a consultant doing these implementations, all I kept thinking was oh my God, if I had this, I wouldn't have had to say no in front of my customers as often, as I did, or have to kind of fudge it a little bit, say, oh, we can't quite do it that way, but maybe we can do it this way.
Speaker 2:With Appian, from day one I was like, wow you, really anything is possible here. It's a really great platform to work from and that only continues to get better with every release. So it's been 24 Appian releases since I started and I like to say I think that first project that took me two weeks of learning. I could probably build that application in less than an hour, maybe 30 minutes, just with how far the platform has come at accelerating all those beginner base parts so that I can just get into the more interesting challenges.
Speaker 1:Well, you have the funnest job. That sounds amazing, oh it's the best job.
Speaker 2:I actually created this job for myself, so that was my old job. I got more involved with hackathons. As I was getting into hackathons, I was doing more research into the developer relations space and realized this is really the focus area I want. At the time, appian didn't have this role. So I actually put a lot of research together with my old manager and we pitched hey, all of our competitors, tech companies they have these developer advocate, developer relations roles and I want to be the one to do that. Let's get this started. And now we have a larger product evangelism team here. But it's the perfect role because I kind of crafted it for myself.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. I love that. And what does a typical day or week look like? Not every week can be happy in the world, so what's a typical day in the life working with developers?
Speaker 2:You know it's always fun, exciting, different. Some of my different focus areas besides events you know Appian World is obviously the big one. I spend all year preparing for it, but we also have smaller regional events that I'll do things at. I also will do dev days at customers and kind of visit around there. I produce a lot of content for our Appian Community YouTube channel. So I do a variety of live streams to kind of do deep dives into different areas of the product and bring people from the community as well as internal product managers on. And I you know I'm kind of the face in a lot of ways but I really just want to use my face to highlight all the amazing people we have in our community. So I try to do that with the Live Build Challenge with our community YouTube channel is give the developers a chance to just talk about Appian because, honestly, the way they talk about it is better than anything we can come up with in our own marketing department.
Speaker 2:It's authentic from the source. So I work on hackathons, I work on events, big and small. I work on the community YouTube channel. In the background that will eventually help the developer community, such as things for our community edition experience, our free Appian offering. So we have a new Appian community edition that's going to be launching this summer that I'm really excited about.
Speaker 1:Yes, and so much news this week. Obviously, tons of announcements. Features, functionality news. What are you excited about this week in particular?
Speaker 2:This week in particular. I'm excited about the Live Build Challenge and showing you know you hear in the keynotes throughout, but the fun thing about the Live Build Challenge is it's actually showing in action those things that we've been talking about, so some of those new features that you've been hearing about. Well, tomorrow, live on stage, you're going to see developers face off head-to-head trying to build an app using those features for a $30,000 cash prize. So really getting to….
Speaker 2:Oh, it's a party, this is show business, baby, baby. So it's going to be a lot of fun to not just tell but get to show and show in a way that is celebrating our community and highlighting some of the amazing developers that we have out there.
Speaker 1:Oh, I love that. That's fantastic. And talk about AI from your own personal point of view. What does it mean? What will it mean in the future? It was a big theme today.
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure thing. So I think AI it kind of in some ways, reminds me of Appian and just tech in general continuing to improve, improve, improve and me saying you know, I could have built my six years ago the app I built for Academy. I could build it in an hour. Now that's kind of the same thing with AI, but in some ways just like even more that it's helping us do so much more so that humans can focus on the human parts right. And I think that's a cool thing about the Live Build Challenge and part of the appeal is we are highlighting the humans and they're getting to do cool things, but using the power of the new technology to help them accelerate so they can focus on some more interesting problems or focus on being more creative with the design elements, things like this. So I think what excites me about AI is what excites me about the Appian platform. As it continues to grow, it makes a lot of the boring stuff easier so I can focus on the more fun and interesting things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a great way to put it and talk about, you know, massive productivity boost. That's amazing. So for new partners, developers, customers, how do you recommend they dip their toe in the water in this whole low-code journey? How do they get started? Day, one week, one month, one? That's the hardest part, right. It's just getting started with a new environment.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And you know, feeling really is believing right and getting your hands on it. I have been working on this new Appian Community Edition project. It's going to be launching soon. That will provide an even better experience for that in your first few days.
Speaker 2:But we offer a wide variety of content to really enable people on that journey from the beginning and things at different levels depending on where you are and depending on what kind of learner you are. So whether that's reading the docs we have really really great documentation or whether that's a little bit more like me, I prefer watching YouTube videos or live streams and things like this. So we also have, you know, we provide the content in a variety of ways. And not only do we provide content, but we also have a really strong community where on our community discussions, you can post a question and get an answer so quickly or if you're Googling a question, it's probably already been answered on the community. So it's a lot of everyone helping each other. And you know maybe a shameless plug for my own past Live Build challenges, but all the prompts for them are up on community as well. So maybe you won't be able in your first week to do it in one hour on stage for the cash prize.
Speaker 1:A little high pressure, yeah.
Speaker 2:But it's a good way to kind of have a project that you can work towards with acceptance criteria, because I think, ultimately, the best way to learn is just start building things.
Speaker 2:I know for brand new developers, something that I like to tell them is just pick something that you know a lot about or an app that might be helpful to you, where you don't need to worry about understanding the use case. It's just trying to work on the implementation and practice there. So you know, sometimes the Live Build Challenge, you know one year at Appian Europe it was right around the World Cup, so they were building a World Cup portal where you could see the schedules and vote on who you think was going to win. Maybe, considering our enterprise customers, that's not quite a use case that they're going to need to learn. But for a developer to have a fun use case that you can work on that will help you practice the features so that once you get into your day job, when you're trying to implement that mission-critical application, you will have practiced the skills so that you can then put them to use. So my advice build something fun.
Speaker 1:That's always good advice. Speaking of use cases and projects, do you have any favorite, more memorable projects you can point to, without picking favorite children, that had a big impact, had a significant impact to the business or operations, or?
Speaker 2:In terms of, like, internal projects, customer projects, live build challenge, yeah, sort of things.
Speaker 1:Either, or all of the above, all sorts of things.
Speaker 2:Let me think about that for a second. I mean something that's kind of near and dear to my heart just because it was my first project, was you know? And dear to my heart just because it was my first project, was you know? We have a rich app market with a lot of solutions, plugins to extend the platform, utilities to help developers. Again, it's all about how do I get to a new starting point, right, the starting point is not always zero. It's like oh, suddenly the starting point's 50 and then we have something that helps it be 55, if that makes sense on the scale.
Speaker 2:So, just in terms of a personal favorite, my first project when I joined was building an Appian application that allowed you to submit apps to the app market and control that approval process. Depending on what type of application it was it needed to go for different approvals. Depending on what type of application it was it needed to go for different approvals. And this is something right in terms of the empowerment and feeling oh my God, I can do anything with this. I built it by myself after having just learned Appian, and this is Literally our app market that's full of all these great things. This is how everything gets onto it. People can submit their descriptions, their graphical assets, as well as the application packages and the technical bits all along, and it goes to all of the right approval flows and then afterwards it gets where it needs to go so that you can deploy those plugins directly from the product and you can download things directly from the App Market. So just in terms of a personal one, the App Market Submissions app that was my first baby.
Speaker 1:No, that's fantastic. It's an app store for the enterprise.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:Brilliant. What are you excited about longer term, I mean beyond this week, some of the trends over the next one, two, three years? What will Appian World, you know, 2028, look like? Oh my goodness, robots running around with telekinetics or something.
Speaker 2:I am always trying to think of new ideas and ways to spice it up and where things are going to go. Last night I was having a conversation with someone after one of our quick mini challenges about oh what if we had kind of an AI bot building some part of the application. So someone came up to me and was saying they had built an AI that could actually, you know, build Appian applications from the ground up. So that could be interesting.
Speaker 1:It could be your AI coworker, yeah coworker exactly.
Speaker 2:So, taking AI Copilot to kind of a new level. It's been individuals up until this point. This year it's the first time we're introducing teams, seeing how we can work together. So I think the product is continuing to evolve and personally, and as Appian developers in general and in the community, I think that's something that keeps us really excited, that we can expect new features. You know, a lot of times, like, for example, with record relationships and data fabric, it's something that I hear developers say oh my god, I didn't know we needed this, but now that I have it, I cannot go back right.
Speaker 2:And so I think it's a combination of those things that you may be expecting, or things that are just continuous improvement on what we have, and then so excited to see hey, what are those new things that, oh, I didn't even know this was possible. And now that we have it, how do we, how do we show it off?
Speaker 1:So, I don't know. It'll be fun, it'll be fun to see, I'll pencil that in so you have a really interesting and diverse and global customer base. But there is a challenge with women in tech, women in software development and you're a great spokesman, I think, in that regard.
Speaker 2:How can we get more A great spokeswoman.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a spokesperson.
Speaker 2:Spokesperson Yep.
Speaker 1:How can we get a more diverse developer community and you know, is low-code a way to do that.
Speaker 2:It's not as intimidating as when I used to write in C or C++ right.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I would say like that is one of the great things about Appian is the level of entry is much lower than more high-code things, but it's still the nature of it being full stack and working with all of the different objects, the process, the back-end data integrations, the front-end UI and how people are experiencing it, and from the first moment you're learning. Being able to understand how those pieces work together, I think really accelerates the learning as well. As you know, looking out at the Appian community and even this is a story for myself as well there are so many amazing Appian developers who don't come from CS backgrounds, who come from industrial. Engineering was my degree. I know people who are math majors, even people who studied philosophy and things like this, who were able to get into being a developer with the Appian platform, and it really just makes it a lot more accessible to anyone and it's really empowering in that way.
Speaker 2:And even looking at the Live Build Challenge contestants this year, we have a lot of women. I think three of our four teams have. I'm trying to think now we have one team with two women, another team with two women, a team with one woman and then an all-male team.
Speaker 1:That's kind of unheard of, I go to a lot of tech events, right?
Speaker 2:So I mean it's pretty incredible and even looking back to past years, the first year the Live Build Challenge winner was a woman. Last year the Live Build Challenge winner was a woman. So you know, it really is just. This platform helps all people from everywhere If they're interested in learning. Like, appian is really great at you know, getting you going really quickly, right?
Speaker 1:Well, it's so well said, and thanks so much. We have two more great days to go. I can't wait Onwards and upwards, onwards, thank you.
Speaker 2:Thanks.