When you go to a profile page on DEV, mine for example, there are a lot of things on there: your featured GitHub repositories, social links, your posts, and your recent comments.
There are two sides to the profile: what you would like to feature on your own profile, and what you would like to see on someone else's.
For your profile: what would you ideally use it for? Would you like to send it to prospective employers? Use it as a portfolio of your blog posts? Or, as a landing page for yourself on the internet?
For someone else's profile: what would you be visiting their profile for? Are you an employer? Or, interested to learn more about an author?
In each scenario, what information would be helpful to have on that profile? Of those things, which are the most important to you?
Feel free to think big and be creative! Thanks in advance for your feedback and ideas! 😊
Top comments (56)
I second the idea of a "mentor/mentee" area.
I signed up in the "mentor system" but I haven't heard anything after putting my information down.
It seems like it would be more accessible if it were listed on people's profiles.
Mentor system is available herein dev.to/settings/mentorship.
Well there I go, asking for features that already exist. 😂
Will add myself to that.
It exists, but we haven't fully worked out the kinks in our process, so we haven't been super loud about it.
Y'all could also use Coding Coach :D
Pinned Articles
moaaaar statistics (public views, last activity ...)
Total Unicorns/Heart etc. count
Styling options like changing colors, moving widgets etc
A leveling system to recognize commenters from writers and from lurkers :D
Approving skills or knowledge areas by other people
I think that's a lot for the beginning, hopefully that's what you are searching for :D
I think you might want to avoid turning this site into a game for internet points
Build a blockchain upon this, including virtual coins and there you go!
... but no, those are literally just my brain farts on the internet :)
So we can also cut out some of those points from the list.
I totally agree with this
A leveling system would make things a lot more competitive, as people make a lot of posts just for the sake of getting levels, spending less time on each, thus decreasing the overall quality. Meanwhile, people who write posts are considered to be better than those who prefer to just read posts and give feedback.
that info is available privately here: dev.to/dashboard
There's no statistics for
reads. I'm not sure howviewsare measured, but it'll be nice to haveviews/readsratioWhat I'd really like to see is a way to actually feature articles. Some of my personal favorites get lost in the backlog, so it'd be cool to be able to pin a few (maybe three) of my favorites to the top, alongside my most recent post. While we're at it, maybe show my most popular article up there too?
Similarly, "top (five?) tags" might be helpful, so people get a quick idea of what I usually write about. Most of my contributions are to #culture and #python right now, and we'd probably get more engaged followers if they knew what topics to expect from any given author.
I'd also like to see better integration with other VCS services, so we can pin repositories from Bitbucket, GitLab, or Gitote. (While we're add it, perhaps adding Gitote to the links?)
I really dig the "top tags" idea. Similarly, it'd be awesome if one could filter through an individual person's writing by tag. This way, if I were viewing your profile, for instance, I could filter to see just #python or just #culture... or perhaps even more than one tag at a time.
I'm envisioning your profile including another column on either the left or right of articles (similar to the way you've set up "skills/languages" in your profile) that would list the different tags you've covered. I'm thinking it would list your most used tag at the top and descend from there. And as a profile viewer, I could then flip them on and off depending on what results I'd like to see.
showcases articles
I'd like to have markdown available in
learning/trying,projects and hacksandavailable forI'd like the 'Recent comments' to be less prominent. And as some others have said, a way to have some featured articles of your own. It could be cool to have somewhere that shows articles that you have liked and maybe display the badges in the header section, or in a different way.
This is a really good point. Sometimes I do like seeing things people comment on, but I think maybe only including top level comments, or the first comment someone makes on an article, in the "recent comments" might help with this a bit?
More badges and badges available and how to get them - badge goals.
A little bit of gamification like SO to reward every quality post based on views, likes and unicorns - collecting gold maybe?
A better feed algorithm that brings up quality posts in the feed.
Anything that would reduce the struggle to find quality posts in the feed - a lot of sort options maybe?
+1 on series. Definitely a good element to show off.
+1 for pinned articles
In terms of LinkedIn-esque features, yeah maybe like a bulletin-board style comment folks could leave on profiles and the user could make some of them public for use as an "endorsement" of sorts, but it with an eye towards more authenticity than LinkedIn.
I don't have specific features, just usage considerations.
I wouldn't use my profile to send to (potential) employees/clients. I'd prefer that to be my own website, my own place on the web. I want my DEV.to profile to represent my identity within this community, although I have nothing against showing off things from other places around the web like GitHub repos, portfolio items, StackOverflow rep/top tags/...
That's an awesome insight!
Maybe more projects to show off along the lines of GitHub repos but more generally, like projects (with screenshots), maybe including stuff like codepens?
I think features that could help discovering like-minded people would be of value.
The profile categories are currently arbitrary text, which I think is generally a good idea. I could imagine that this could be enhanced by twitter-like searchable hashtags, or a seperate category for arbitrary tags could be introduced, because hashtags are a bit limited when it comes to expressions which are not only one word, e.g. "constraint logic programming" or "dependent types".
Following and followers
+1.
I've love to see who the person I am following is following or followed (inception 😉)
Possibly a follower graph?
I'd like to see "this person follows you" if the person follows me.