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Tips for New DEV Members

Tori Crawford on November 15, 2019

One of my favorite aspects of working as a software engineer coach at Flatiron School is our requirement of students to write blogs. It was this re...
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Nick Taylor • Edited

This is a great resource for newbies to DEV. Thanks for writing this. One thing I would add is, get to know the liquid tags offered by DEV's editor as they offer rich embedding of popular sites/tools like Twitter, codepen, Instagram etc. When you're in the editor, simply click on the ? button at the bottom of the editor to see the list of supported liquid tags.

Looking forward to your next post!

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Tori Crawford

I attempted using these for the tags themselves within this post when I was discussing tags, but they wouldn't work within my post. 🙁

#ruby

This tag is for questions related to the Ruby language, including its libraries.

Yet I use it here and it works. 🤔

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Nick Taylor

Hmm, could be a bug. If you can still reproduce it, consider opening an issue in the DEV repo.

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Jim

Thanks for the great article. The section about the backticks ( ` ) is surprisingly important. I'm embarrassed to admit it took me years...yeeeeears of using a computer before I ever realized there was a backtick key🤦‍♂️ I remember being so frustrated whenever I'd encounter these "weirdly formatted apostrophes" and couldn't reproduce code or commands without having to copy&paste. I also remember the moment I saw an animated scene in a game, that just showed the tilda button pressing and depressing with information on what it did in game. I sat there for a solid 20 minutes just completely dumbfounded.

Are...you...serious?

Quick follow-up question about the first few paragraphs where you discussed blogging being a requirement for your students. Why does there seem to be a push to get people coming into Tech to be hyper-social social media users? It's like there's now a requirement where in order to be in the industry you have to have an active public git commit history, a daily blog, give talks at cons, and be super active on Twitter. It seems kind of foreign to me. What am I not getting?

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Tori Crawford

I believe there is a huge push to be active on social media and blogging platforms because it is a form of networking. I think networking is the big push here.

When you become active on these platforms, you start interacting with people from all over and you can try to leverage that to try and find a job.

This is all just a guess from my experience though, so I'd take it with a grain of salt.

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Ranvir Singh • Edited

When I started out as a programmer under a good mentorship, I was forced to write posts every day to share whatever we have accomplished on the last day.

It was very frustrating at times to find time for such a trivial thing but now I really like the idea of blogging regularly.

Nice post.

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Chloe • Edited

I did not know about adding the language for syntax highlighting always wondered how that worked great tip thanks.

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TJ Wright

It's worth noting you can even use languages you might not always expect, like bash!

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Peter Kim Frank

Amazing post!

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Zen

Can I use Dev to post about non-technology; like psychology, book review, etc? Hehehe..

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Tori Crawford

There is a tag

#watercooler

Light, and offtopic conversation.
that is made specifically for this type of thing. 😊
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Zen

Thanks 😀

I'm new here.

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deji adesoga

Great post Victoria. This is gonna go a long way helping beginners who are interested in writing on here.

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Chris Jarvis

Thanks for the tip on specifying a language in code snippets. I edited on of my CSS posts and it looks better now. Which means some time I'll have to go and edit the code in other old posts.

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Madhan Mohan Tammineni

Thanks for the info!

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Sagiv ben giat

Nice one. I wish DEV would support line highlighting in code snippets

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Aria Janke

Still unsure how tagging works, like for instance how should tag if I want feedback on ideas?
A google search on that very topic is how I got here.