3 Reasons Why I Stuck with Progress Telerik for 19 Years

Hey guys, so my Award as a Telerik Champion has finally arrived today. While this is my second year as a Progress Telerik Champion, it is my 10th year of collaborating with the company as an influencer and technical writer. More importantly, at the time of posting this, I'm officially 19 years and 5 months into advocating for and supporting Telerik's products.

Without diving into my entire journey, I want to focus on THREE reasons why I stuck with Progress Telerik for the past 19 years.

Best Developer Experience

I have been using Telerik UI since 2006. One of my early impressions of using the UI components is that they are effortless to implement. I still recall their former slogan, "For Developers, By Developers."

Long before the industry acknowledged the importance of UX and CX, Telerik, as a company (before Progress acquired it), was already focused on ensuring that its products were developer-centric. As a result, everything that they have created since then has become the de facto standard for other UI component libraries. They understood one of the most fundamental principles - by making the lives of developers easier, more efficient at work, then the product would be able to sell itself.

Gold Standard for Online Technical Resources

Does anyone still remember the early days of online technical resources and documentation? Do you still remember how it felt when some documentation was seriously lacking? Like the company creating the product didn't bother to invest the time and effort to explain how to properly and effectively use their products?

I do. I still remember all those nights when I would be "forced" to support and use certain products that the company felt were necessary, but then it turned out to be very difficult to implement. To make matters worse, the product lacked well-written documentation, an API, and tutorials. I can't tell you how much time I wasted just trying to figure out the code and how it's supposed to work.

But that never happened with Telerik. For as long as I have been using and supporting Telerik's products, their documentation and online resources have been the most comprehensive ones I have found among their competitors.

To make things even better, their online demos and code samples are THE BEST on the market! I mean, seriously, just take a look at their "DOCS & DEMOs" section and you'll quickly understand what I mean.

The Best UI Component Suite for FEDs to Fast-track Their UX Skills

One of the primary reasons I discovered and later stuck with Telerik is its strong connection to UX/UI design principles. Again, this was in 2006 when I first began discovering my own interests and passion for usability design. This was also at a time in the industry where most companies felt that a good usability design (UX) was just a "nice-to-have" thing. For me, I know almost immediately that what the folks at Telerik were doing then was on the right track. They were creating their UI components with UX in mind.

As a front-end developer, I also recognised the value of utilising their UI suite in real-world projects. Since I began using and supporting their products, I have managed to implement Telerik UI components in more than 100 different projects, ranging from web, desktop to mobile apps (yes, they did support mobile UI components at one time). In every single one of those instances, clients were always delighted because their customers were happy.

From the perspective of a UX Engineer today, I'd say that Progress Telerik's products are the ultimate gateway to fast-tracking UX skills and understanding for any front-end developer.

Closing Thoughts

By continuing to provide unwavering support for Progress Telerik's products, I hope to demonstrate that their UI suite will continue to remain the industry standard. One that other brands, like SyncFusion and DevExpress, will have to follow if they wish to achieve the same level of success and provide a much higher level of developer experience.