Why should you develop ?
In “Reflections on a Splunk developer’s journey : Part 1″ I shared some of my experiences of developing and supporting Splunk Community Apps and Add-ons over the years.
But WHY did I choose to develop and WHY should you choose to develop and start your foray the Splunk developer ecosystem?
Well the reasons for developing are going to be different for everyone depending on your motives. You might be a business or you might just be an individual community collaborator.
The reasons I started developing were because I discovered Splunkbase (now Apps / Answers) and realized that it was a great forum for collaborating and getting involved with the “Big Data” community to use the Splunk platform to create some innovative data solutions and share this with other users. Data is such an abundant resource, whether it is private or open data, that we are only really just starting to understand the value of. I saw developing Splunk Apps as a great way to tap into this potential and collaborate with like minded people in the community. And to be honest it is also pretty cool when people download and use software that you created or collaborated on 
So let’s have a think about some reasons why you should develop Splunk Apps and Add-ons.
Community and Collaboration
Become part of the Splunk developer ecosystem , collaborate on Splunk Apps and Github , creating exciting new Apps that utilize the power of the Splunk platform to tackle innovative new data solutions.
Make money
Make your Splunk App a commercial offering. You can list it on Splunk Apps and get the benefit of that web presence and traffic and then redirect users to your own hosted site where your App is monetized.
Share / Give Back
Splunk Apps has loads of great content , most of it free. So why not give back also if you are using a lot of this content.
Promote your company
Many Splunk Apps are for the products of our technology partners. Take advantage of this marketing platform , generate more leads for your business via your Splunk creations , sell more license revenue or generate more service revenue if you are a Splunk reseller/partner.
Get a job / Build a career
I’ve seen a lot of resumes over the years. What makes a technical IT resume stand out from the crowd for me is often your involvement in community and collaborative projects.
Learn new skills / Educate yourself
The techniques involved in building Splunk Apps and Add-ons expose you to a rich landscape of software development and general IT skills. Multiple language development, Web development, APIs, Networking skills , OS and Hardware skills, Maths and Statistics skills etc… Splunk is a fantastic IT learning platform. And what better way to get some practical skills than by building something.
Hadoop productivity
With the introduction of HUNK , we have significantly lowered the barrier to get productive results with data locked away in HDFS.So you can build a Splunk App to deliver insights on whatever data you have in HDFS that you are finding difficult to unleash.
Do good
Walk in the footsteps of our Splunk for Good initiative and use data and your Splunk App to do some good in this world. There is so much publicly available data that could be used for this purpose i.e.: as 1 such idea you could create an App that uses Social Data and Sentiment Analysis to detect and combat cyberbullying.
Open up new data sources for others to collaborate on
Data can sometimes be hard to get at. A Splunk Add-on can make it easier for others to get at that data so they can start being productive. They may even reuse your Add-on as part of a grander Splunk App.
Solve problems , make new discoveries
The true essence of innovation , creating and discovering new things that have not been done before. Use Splunk to make new discoveries in data and bundle this up in a Splunk App for the community to springboard off.
Oh , and one more reason , it’s really fun and rewarding to create things !! Especially with the tremendous resource of data that we have at our disposal , you are only limited by your own imaginations.
I look forward to seeing you on Splunk Apps and Answers. I know I’ll be there.