TL;DR: we're running a survey about internal tooling and we'd love you to participate.
Chances are you’ve spent time on internal tooling: operational, non-customer facing software that’s often critical to your company’s day to day. Customer support needs tools for refunding orders, operations needs workflow management, marketing needs to pull data from multiple sources for analysis, and even engineering might want to visualize and approve pull requests via the Github API. These tools are important, sure; but they also take tons of time to build and maintain, and never leave the four walls of the workplace.
Everyone seems to know what internal tools are, but they are poorly understood on a broader level. How do the world’s best companies think about internal tools? How much time should engineering spend on them? What should you build internally, and what’s worth buying? How can you avoid maintenance problems down the road?
We’re also curious, so we’d like to ask you about it. Over the next few months, we’re going to try to bring more data and transparency to the internal tools space through profiles and interviews of great engineering teams, as well as a few short surveys. Our first try is a quick, 20 question survey targeted at developers at companies with 10+ employees. We’ll publish the results in a couple of months, and you’ll be the first to get them in your inbox. We’re also raffling off four $250 Amazon gift cards, and responding gets you an entry.