We're excited to announce a new part of the site called DEV Connect. Spurred on by an interest from the community in this sort of thing, we've added a place for connecting and chatting with other community members.
It's a messaging section which many will find immediately useful, but we plan to progressively enhance with some really nice dev-oriented tools. Here is an (early beta) example of what you can do:
Connect is live, but is very much still a work in progress. We plan on pairing these sorts of features with initiatives around mentorship, office hours, and all sorts of goodies. You are going to have a lot of fun with all of this.
We also expect that Connect will become a hub for interacting with the content of the broader platform. Consuming, creating and sharing DEV posts will be very native. This next feature is not live as I write this (but may be when you read this), but here's a quick shot from my local environment of what I'm talking about.
For now, you may open a channel with anyone you mutually follow. As DEV Connect evolves we'll make the configuration of who you can chat with available in finer detail, but the mutual-follow model is a pretty well established protocol for this sort of feature across the web.
We also have some group channels which are available to some members at the moment for testing. We will make those more accessible as we work out the details.
This is very much a beta feature, so things might be randomly broken, but we invite you to check it all out.
dev.to/connect
Happy coding ❤️
Top comments (57)
Whoa! This is awesome!
I like the mutual follow requirement.
Need to actually start following people now... 😜
I don't completely get the "mutual follow" rule.
If I'm a newcomer and want to talk to you, I can't do so. I can follow you and hope you follow back, but then you will have to follow everyone looking for mentorship.
It's great for people with many followers, but locked to newbies.
I have a small "ivory tower" concern, that's all.
Would this be something that allowing a toggle option could handle? That way, if you're open to communicating with anyone and everyone, you can enable that feature, while allowing other people that just want to communicate with their mutual followers that option as well? If that wouldn't work, perhaps adding a "second" room could solve that problem? Have one that allows open communication with anyone (like an IRC chat room) while offering another that only allows for people you're connected with. It's an interesting situation either way...
Sorry if this is a newbie question, is there a place for feature request/discussion that would be a better place for this?
There already is a "public" room where anyone can interact, and I guess if someone wants to communicate with someone privately they can post there to request a follow, but I doubt that's ideal.
That is true, didn't think of it from that perspective.
There should probably be a feature that lets you request chat privilege with someone who doesn't follow you.
Any thoughts on that @ben ?
Only if you want to chat with them.
The awesome thing is pair progamming.
You can just hit someone and say "hey do you want a pair programming session ?" and you're Gone.
Follow and follow back make sense now.
Good job.Respect
Thanks! Exactly what we're thinking, and we'll try to evolve it to make this concept more powerful. Could hook into different types of file systems or runtimes in theory.
We won't get ahead of ourselves, but it's exciting.
That Alan Kay quote is our guiding light in many ways.
May the four be with you😂
you are late for the pusher contest 😀. Anyway awesome job!
This is an awesome feature!
Request: I would like to be able to dev/connect without following the other person.
Essentially, I want to be open to questions/discussions about content that I post (or whatever) via dev/connect. However, I follow very few people because I mostly want the content I see to be unfiltered. With the exception of a low-pass quality filter to de-prioritize things like buzz-word-bingo ad posts.
I'm weird in the way I use "social" features. And at times I will read pretty much anything, even about techs I'm not planning to use. To see what's going on over there or because the post has other interesting considerations that aren't familiar to me.
Kinda late to the party, but I find the mutual follow requirement to be a bit annoying. As @kspeakman said, I'm not really a fan of following many people in order to keep the content I see unfiltered, but now I feel like I have an obligation to follow back everyone because they might want to talk to me.
I'm really open to discuss anything with anyone, and, as others said, a toggle to enable chats from people that you don't follow would be perfect.
Is it legal to marry DEV Connect? 🤔
You only just met DEV Connect!
Yeah, I know... This may sound crazy, but here's my number, so call me maybe? 😉
(sorry, it had to be done)
Great work! I love this idea. 🤙
Thanks!
Awesome update, but I guess some grammatical mistake is there in this sentence(You and @ben are connected because follow each other), right?
AND
And every time we switch between diff people in dev connect, a vertical scrollbar appears and disappears which I think doesn't look good.
Responded to the message you sent me too 🙂
Thanks for heads up on all accounts
👍 This is a great feature Ben 🤩
❓ Where can I report an issue (should I find one?)
I think in this case you should bug Ben by sending him a message directly through DEV Connect :)
And if that doesn't work, you can always ping us via yo@dev.to
🤔... 🧐 ... 💡 ... 💁 ... 😀
FYI - Ah, I see a comment by Ben.
We take issues in this GitHub repo and welcome the reports. Hopefully we’ll have more clear on-site guidelines in the near future as well.
dear "connect", please stop triggering my OCD, I click this icon 100 times daily, and there are no new messages, I cannot stop! I will soon run out of battery!
This is a noice feature. Loved the update. I suppose this is private messaging?
I hope group messaging is next :) 👏
Yeah, group messaging would be great.
This is awesome! This is a really cool feature and I love the direction this is moving in.
Thanks Eli!
We take issues in this GitHub repo and welcome the reports. Hopefully we’ll have more clear on-site guidelines in the near future as well.
I’m really interested in the office hours and mentorship ideas you talked about. Both offering them and using them!
Awesome feature. That live coding feature is really helpful. Great job guys!