Challenge your #DataDev skills and take advantage of your sandbox site with the Tableau Developer Program

One of the biggest benefits of joining Tableau’s Developer Program is a free, personal developer site. With this site, developers can learn and test Tableau APIs on various projects. You don’t have to stress about accidentally deleting all the sites on your production environment (I’m talking from personal experience) since this provides developers with a safe space to experiment and test.

In this blog post, we’ll give you some tips for making the most of your Tableau sandbox site.

Remember, your site is yours and it is an isolated environment from your production site or server. You don’t need to install anything to begin. Just sign up for the Developer Program, request a developer sandbox site, and you are set!

The site is a safe space to get started to learn more about the Developer Platform or to learn more about a new API. Learn by making mistakes. No need to be an API Jedi or have coding as a second language to start taking advantage of the developer sandbox site. Let’s say you create a script to send emails to all users on the site, but you find that it is only sending to one user. You can spend time debugging the script instead of apologizing to all your Tableau users. It is no consequence. This is your playground—play around, make mistakes, and try something new!

We also developed step-by-step tutorials for anyone that has a developer site so you can get started testing Tableau APIs. For example, learn how to automate the creation of new projects with the Tableau REST API to build an extension that refreshes a data source.

Because every sandbox site owner has Tableau Server admin access, developers can test their code end-to-end. The site comes up with three licenses: one Creator, one Explorer and one Viewer. That enables developers to test their implementation using the different types of roles that Tableau offers. For example, since an Explorer is one of the end-users of an extension, you can test their user experience before deploying an extension to your entire user base.

The production site is set with the pre-release of Tableau, where developers can try the latest APIs or features before anyone else. Through the Developer Program, developers also receive exclusive invitations to monthly Tableau Developer Sprint Demos to hear all about the new features from the engineering team that they can start testing. Developers don’t have to wait for the organization to upgrade to test and learn about new features; they are ready as soon as the upgrade is done!

We are announcing the #DataDev Site Challenge, three months of fun challenges for all. And obviously, we want to reward our community for achieving these challenges with exclusive #DataDav Swag Packs!

There are 18 challenges in total. All the challenges are categorized (Extensibility, Automation/Integration and Embedding), and have different levels (easy, moderate, and advanced). Developers have two weeks to solve one or more of each set of new challenges. At the end of the two weeks, we will host a “How to” webinar to spotlight what someone from the #DataDev community has built before publishing the next set of challenges.

Join the Developer Program to get more information in the coming days. The challenges will start on April 6. We will publish the first challenges on the main page at 8 a.m. Pacific time. We also have a Slack workspace for all the #DataDevs out there to communicate and share tips. We’ll see you there!