It's been a while since I did an AMA, and I'll be hanging around the site on support this weekend, so post some questions and I'll try to respond to a bunch today and over the weekend.
FYI: If you want to follow along, you may want to click the "three dots" in the actions menu and subscribe to Post Author Comments which will allow you to get notifications when I respond to comments here.
About me: I'm a coder from Canada. I live in the New York City area (no longer right in the city). I'm a semi-self-taught developer with a bit of formal CS education. I created this community and brought @jess and @peter on to help make it survive, thrive and grow as a business we could work on full-time.
Ask me anything!
Latest comments (111)
no questions, just a big thank you!
ok just one question, are Canadians really as nice as everyone says? :P
Any plans on expanding DEV.to to, for example, a podcast or something like that?
Yeah, we'd love to expand to podcasts but don't want to do it until we clearly have the resources to do it without being a distraction. DEV team member @aspittel is part of one of the best new podcasts Lady Bugs. You should check that out.
Looking forward to it :)
Hi Ben, You are doing a wonderful job with dev.to.
Lately I m in to learning css, and looked into dev.to css by inspecting in the browser and learned few things.
I have question why you have not used flexbox/grid for layout and followed the approach of floats and absolute positioning for layout?
Is there any reason other then browser compatibility?
Hey, Ben. Cool ama :)
I was wondering what businesses have you had before DEV?
What's something interesting you've learned about business or programming due to DEV?
Do you miss Big Pepperoni Sticks from Nova Scotia?
If the entire web (but NOT computers) were to suddenly go "blip" and cease to exist, what would you like to code instead? (Assume you can get any documentation and programs/packages you need through other clever means.)
I feel like I may have taken this answer in the wrong direction because I first interpreted it as a scenario where the web were to be sort of "reinvented", but below I'll say just what I might be coding on without "the web", as my current career/interests is so rooted in web.
That's a pretty scary scenario because for as much as we are threatened by corporate misdeeds and government overreach with today's web, you can bet that if things started from scratch today with the undeniable knowledge that the whole world runs over the Internet, you can bet that there would be power grabs the likes we never saw as connective technology was first coming up.
That being said, if we got the chance to start over, it would be pretty great to re-invent some obvious winning technologies in a way that wasn't so unilaterally driven by corporate profits, and I think Google and Facebook are the big ones.
Free market capitalism helped those companies become a thing because it's hard to motivate the thousands of engineers required to help out without the monetary incentive, but if we got to start over from scratch knowing we could beat these folks to the punch I think we could more effectively do it grassroots.
My current work, more practical in nature, tries to touch on these ideas while leveraging the interplay between grassroots development, software that is not built for egregious data mining, and free inspection and distribution of the source code alongside the capitalistic mechanics that help these things actually happen. I think my efforts are pulling the right levers in terms of overall contributions to the greater good, but with the opportunity to start over from a blip, I might get to take a more "radical" approach.
If I were to just code on non-web stuff (lighter answer)
I mean, if I had to apply my coding knowledge to a whole new domain I'd have a hard time passing up alternative energy as the place to be developing software. It's the one threat we face and I can't help but be motivated to code to solve big problems.
A lot of the science with alt energy is non-software but you can bet that in every challenge is a lot of software in terms of making processes more efficient, creating simulations, etc.
These days I support and follow projects committed to alternative energy, but if I had to go non-web I'd probably find out how I can make the max impact.
Yeah, the "just code on non-web stuff" was the answer I was aiming for. :)
Today we, the tech community, use Twitter primarily as social media. Do you think Dev can become the social media for the tech community? Do you already have plans to go into that direction? If so what features would you build to make that happen?
Why ruby? What do you like about it as a language? What do you dislike about it?
Hello fellow Hustler,
I have two Questions.
Question 1
All entrepreneurs have hard times, can you share one such story while making Dev.to when you thought that this could be the last day of your company and how did you cope up with it.
Question 2
What will be the top 3 books you will gift someone you are mentoring?
Hope I’m not too late and will get a response. 😅
Hey Ben,
Two questions--
1) As a fellow New Yorker, I'm curious what your favorite things to do are in the city.
2) How did you make dev.to so fast?
Hey Ben, was that you handing out stickers at Codeland? I'm a newb and hadn't heard of DEV before but I grabbed one of your stickers at codeland and a sort of mentor/friend of mine I met through Twitter recommended I start a blog here... So I did and after only 1 post I've already gotten some very helpful responses and a possible job offer. So... Not really a question, just want to say thanks!
Bonjour Ben,
Simple question : parles-tu le français ?
;)
Ben oui, mais mon aptitude et confiance eté meilleur quand je suis jeune.
What kind of articles should I focus on writing to get featured in your weekly curation. What's the criteria for curating articles.
Hey Ben,
How do you describe dev.to comminity?
I thought many are interested in practical stuff, but actually the post about useless script for tinder got many views lol
I think most people come here for practical help in coding and to teach one another, but we are all humans and will always tend to click on things for entertainment value and general curiosity.
If we were perfectly rational, we’d probably click on the purely educational content—but we’re not that way most of the time. 😂
😂😂😂