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Top comments (112)
dev.to has been called the "Medium for Developers" by many people I know. Does that align with your vision or do you see dev.to as evolving to something more than a content platform?
Step 0 has been to provide a lot of the value that people find with Medium, but I've always thought of this as a starting point of what it can be. Medium is constrained by its need to be all things to all publishers. I really think serving developers specifically allows us to be a "progressively enhanced" version of Medium.
I'm not the kind of person to try hard to correct people because it's not my platform, it's theirs. If they have a different thought about it, I take that description seriously and go back to the drawing board with the intel.
So that's a good way to describe it but it's not how I/we think of it because we're thinking towards the future where we've built on top of our core primitives to provide more value than just Medium for devs.
Agree wholeheartedly. I think the "Medium" analogy is primarily in the sense that this encourages well-crafted long form narratives (vs. short tweets or social network posts). And in that sense it provides a basis for starting.
The biggest value/difference I have seen though is that dev.to seems driven more by conversation (2-way community interactions and collaboration) than publication (1-way content sharing). It fosters a better sense of "belonging" and a lot of credit for that goes to way all of you at TPD/dev.to have embraced experimentation and feedback. Thank you all.
The biggest value proposition we can offer over Medium is that we really care about the experience for developers, and we have ideology specifically focused on improving the developer community. Any positive effects that Medium provides in this since are purely coincidental.
Medium has raised $132M and was founded by a publishing platform celebrity, so I won't be so bold as to say we're just better, but we have a lot of leverage in our capacity to go vertical and focus on this community.
As an aside, before I moved to the states to try this wacky tech-venturing thing I'm doing, I was working on a Medium-esque platform and consulting some investors to see if I should pursue this. This was before Medium had launched, but I was given the advice to not bother competing since they'd crush me. This was probably okay advice at the time, but I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about that, and I feel like I have my own private rivalry with Medium. I'm not one to care much about the "competition", but I go back to that conversation a lot for motivation.
And you have real markdown, not that weird
crapthing medium does 💗Yeah man!
Whats the single, most important technical advice you would give to yourself if you managed to travel back in time right before starting dev.to?
I can be pretty hard-headed when it comes to people giving me direct advice I didn't ask for, so there's a chance I'd ignore my own advice 😁
But if I were to...
A lot of my hypothesis along the way have been pretty good. While we've made a lot of detours along the way, no one thing strategically was bad enough to take us way off pace. I have some hypothetical separate directions which might have been way better than the current path, but no way to know if they'd be better.
But here's the one thing I'd do:
Open source the app from the beginning.
This is something that didn't even occur to me early on, but it's something I could have done. We're gradually working to open the app, but it would have been way easier to do that from the beginning.
lol, I wanted to give this comment one like but it always counted down, now it shows -12?! xD
What is your philosophy on ads? I notice that Google Analytics is the only thing my ad blocker flags on this site. (I'm one of those people on whom ads are utterly wasted.)
How is dev.to funded since its apparently not ads? (And thank you for that.)
Revenue plans: Value add features: Job listings (as a tag users can follow when they are looking), courses, paid pitches by infra providers, and anywhere were we can provide strong value delivered to just those who want to hear about it. Some form of high quality ad has its place in this mindset as well. But I am extremely skeptical of anything that makes us money without simultaneously providing a lot of value to the users.
Right now we're being frugal with some funding for our current operations. We'll be launching the first rev-generating feature soon (hiring tag) and we're also scoping out some seed funding. We thought about approaching revenue earlier on but it was really hard to keep our eyes on the prize in terms of being skeptical of non-value-add revenue.
So basically we do have what we think is a solid business model but we're going to run on some seed capital while we patiently make good on it.
Here's the mental model for the value of the platform.
As you consider ads, please be wary of 3rd party ad platforms. You never really know who is going to be advertising through these. They can be used as an attack vector to spread malware.
In general, I appreciate your thoughtful approach. Thank you!
Way ahead of you on that. We're not going to be serving third party ads at all unless it's clearly the right choice, for the reasons you're describing and the general user experience. We want a fast website that delivers actual value.
We will potentially use other tracking pixels in addition to Google Analytics, where appropriate for analytics and cross-platform stuff. But the plan is to be reasonable about it. Users come first.
I saw you added a Billing tab to the Edit Profile tab. Do you have any idea of how much the premium features will cost? I definitely want to pay, I just am still looking for work right now. I find a lot of value in what you are doing here, and the job tag is important to me.
When will these features be rolling out? Any ETA?
Thanks for building this.
What do you look for in a software engineer? What do you see as some of the crucial languages for well rounded developers to know?
I think a well-rounded developer should appreciate the strengths and weaknesses of different languages, but I wouldn't need or expect them to know all of them. I really think displaying well-rounded fascination is valuable, but you can develop an expertise.
I think the tee shaped skillset is a great model:
I also think it doesn't matter which area you choose to go deep in, because in going deep in anything you're going to incidentally learn a lot about other things. If you allow yourself to seriously go deep on a subject with purpose and a healthy amount of obsession, you are going to learn a lot about a lot of things. And the things you don't know, you'll have a lot more confidence in your capacity to develop an expertise that you could jump into that stuff later.
What do you want for your birthday?
On my birthday a couple days ago, I told folks they could share this post as a present. If they want to do it as a belated gift, it's super welcome.
Otherwise if you want to pledge to be an awesome member of the community by giving lots of ❤️ to people's posts they worked so hard on and giving loving comments. Those things are free and it means so much to those who put themselves out there with ideas.
Hi Ben, dev.to has a massive community (127K on twitter!) - congrats.
How did you generate the initial following and start to build a network? What was the seed that got it all growing and what has been your most successful growth tactic to date?
My main key was to allow the project to take forever to grow. I said I'd be okay if it took 10 years and worked on it very gradually. I observed what worked and what did not and put myself into it.
Huge growth moments were the jokes and working hard to be myself. I'm a real weirdo and before I got into software, I thought I wanted to get into sitcom writing. I knew I had an interesting on a lot of things in this industry, so I didn't hold back!
These days, since I love writing code, I've been putting most of my effort into writing features that can augment the voices of the rest of the community, especially underrepresented groups.
How are you finding work-life balance with all the things that you do? And how do you stay grounded in a tech ecosystem that has highs and lows on a daily basis?
I try to continually set expectations with those around me so they know burnout is a real thing, and that because I work so hard most of the time, sometimes I'm going to be out of commission altogether. And try to offer the same respect to them.
We try to proactively avoid "butt-in-seat syndrome" where you might be sitting in your chair not being productive, but unwilling to leave and go home because nobody else has. Everyone is expected to work hard, but be honest when they just need to go home and be humans.
Have recently joined the dev.to community and it's great! I just wanted to ask how you've gone about building such a community? What have your biggest challenges been in this process?
For whatever reason, this is the sort of thing I've been building or taking part in my whole life. Online communities have been such a big part of my life but I think there's a lot missing from the current space. So I felt like I had a lot of insight and motivation, the rest was drumming up interest on the Internet.
A community is essentially a multi-sided marketplace with supply and demand economics and serious chicken and egg problems. So key was to start with an offering that didn't rely on the network effect and only lean on that once the overall demand was high enough. Things started out as only the @thepracticaldev Twitter account, and a lot of work in bringing value until it was time to move more in the community direction. We're still petal-to-the-metal on growing to avoid the tide of irrelevancy. There is no space for being complacent.
Who designed the sweet logo?
I did, and thanks!
I really like 70s computer aesthetic
So the design is sort of an homage to that. Sometimes we get busy just doing stuff, and don't have time and energy to stick to the the original vision for some stuff. @jess does a great job of keeping track of the vision in subtle ways we can lose track of when we're busy.
Do you plan to a release a "dev.to" font pack?
Apple cider of choice?
I have a weird relationship with food/drink in that I never really settle on brands I like. I'm always like "I'll have whatever's good". It's an easy way to be, but I wish I could come to become more of a connoisseur about something.
What motivated you to start this site?
The motivations of the site became more concrete over time. Early on it really was "I want to make something I'd be happy to work on even if it took ten years". As certain things worked, it became clear I could solve problems more fundamental to my own life as a developer and the problems the community faces as a whole. I wouldn't say we've even scratched the service on providing a true solution, but that's certainly what motivates me every day.
How can we as the users make what you do easier?
Lots of ❤️🙌 etc. on posts and comments and leave lots of good questions/comments on posts! People usually have more to say and good, positive, encouragement really brings the best out of them.
Would you want us to get you anything as a belated birthday present? :D
😁 No that's plenty!
If you were to start dev.to from scratch again, how would you do it differently?
Why did you feel the need to create this platform? A side project which has gotten out of hand?
It's sort of like a best-case-scenario for a side project. Everything was pretty deliberate when the choice was made, but I wouldn't say it was all seen in advance.
What are your goals for dev.to?
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