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!
Oldest comments (111)
What resources did you use for self-teaching?
I used Lynda.com (I pirated the videos because I was broke af but later bought a subscription to pay it back).
"Self-teaching" isn't really the right term because I had a Lynda teacher. I just didn't have anybody grading my work or answering questions per se.
Thank you for confessing to the thing we've all done but would never admit to.
How did you get codepen to integrate with dev.to from thier side?
This was my email:
link to full res
I tried to make saying yes pretty easy and to let them know they wouldn't be the only ones doing it. But I also never would have bothered to make this ask in the early days of DEV. I knew we had gotten big enough to be trustworthy as an integration partner by then.
I made sure to reach out to form a good relationship and wouldn't have made this kind of ask if I didn't think it made a lot of sense for both parties involved.
That's really cool! And lovely to see this was a success.
I'm a big fan of Dev I'm wearing my shirt today 😁
As a fellow Canadian, I was wondering why you decided to move down south and if it was hard to leave your home country?
I love Canada and would love to move back some day. I'll be home to Halifax in a few weeks for a friend's wedding. I am a dual citizen so moving to the US was fairly easy. I wanted a change of scenery and New York was an appealing adventure!
I've created adult roots and ties here in the states or else I may have moved back already. The Toronto Raptors championship also reinvigorated some of my national pride! 🏀🦖
Do you wish you would have done anything from the beginning with DEV that you didn't get around to until recently?
On the flip-side did you do anything in the beginning that looking back you realize you didn't really need to do?
The process of going open source was way more difficult because it wasn't a day one thing, but now that it's been almost a year it's hard to imagine a time where we weren't open source.
You can look back into our commits migrations to find about a million things we added and didn't use and later removed. But I wouldn't want that to force us to get too narrow with our ideas around product.
Besides the many little things, I can't point to anything that we did that didn't serve our longterm learnings.
What was the hardest / most challenging part of getting an online community up and running?
I had a lot of good hypotheses in terms of how this would all come together. I've been involved in other efforts which had failed on the chicken-and-egg problem of getting these sorts of communities thriving
How to Grow a Multi-Sided Platform: Start with Single Player Mode
Ben Halpern ・ Jun 20 ・ 2 min read
So the "challenging" part is inner-team communication. Taking what's in my head and getting many people to work together. It's also key to take inputs from everyone and shift my ideas along the way in terms of how things take shape without losing sight of what's important.
As the project has evolved I feel like I've gotten to become truer and truer to my "ideal vision" of how this whole thing can be most helpful to the world. Early on it's silly to be overly consumed by "the big vision" because I'd have been happy if it were to have been successful in a much smaller way.
As promised:
Secret to these luscious locks?
Wow, that is an epic follow-through!
And, apparently, still a closely guarded secret.
Where do you see dev.to by the end of this year, this time next year, and in 5 years?
By the end of this year we'll serve around 7m "unique visitors" per month and have ~450k registered users—meaning we'll be serving a bigger and bigger chunk of the whole software world.
And in general we expect that progress to continue until we reach "full saturation" the way some other platforms have in our industry.
But growth wouldn't be very useful if we didn't evolve to meet the needs of a bigger and bigger community. By the end of the year I hope we have really sewn together a lot of UX concerns which have been around on the site for a long time. We have a few small launches coming up but mostly want to simplify and stabilize the experience.
We went open source last August and one thing we want to have kicked off by the end of this year is delivering on the promise of making it possible to stand up "separate, but compatible communities" using our software. We'll have a lot more info on that coming up, but we really don't want to grow and grow and grow until we are a monolithic community which owns everyone's data. We want to purposefully reduce our role as central data owner and become a bit more decentralized.
Besides tastefully evolving our current business models with sponsors, and listings etc. we want to make our business model ultimately center around hosting communities on our software where we can provide a benefit without owning everybody's data. Within five years hopefully we've accomplished our goal of serving many communities we don't "own" instead of "owning" everything. dev.to itself is likely fairly big in this scenario but we don't want to grow and grow and grow until we consume everything.
The other day, I saw someone posted a link of site devtomanager.com. My initial reaction seeing it - wow, someone has created an instance of dev.to website ...? I wonder if this already happening and we have list of sites running dev.to code?
Has Dev's development surprised you in anyway?
I started the whole thing with a ten year commitment with my main promise being that I wouldn't give up until at least ten years had passed.
I had a good idea of the longterm ideas, and we've taken paths I wouldn't have foreseen, but I had surprisingly accurate big picture in mind at the beginning.
What was surprising was the path and how much faster things have moved than I anticipated. I thought by now it would be a modest success. It's been incredible to see how much people have caught on to our shared values and helped so much along the way.
I never foresaw just how generous and caring the whole community would be to help this thing happen!
Did you always know the DEV community was going to be such a success, and if so how did you know? We’re super curious if you know how communities are made, since you’ve built one yourself. With the help of the amazing DEV team too, of course!
I knew it could be a big success, and planned for this scenario as I went. But I also knew there were plenty of smaller successes I'd have been happy with.
I think I'm pretty good at holding a lot of different scenarios in my head, so I never thought there was one way communities were made successfully but I had a lot of different possible outcomes and always tried to pay a lot of attention to what happened differently than I expected and made sure to care more about what was important in terms of principles of inclusion, friendship, teaching etc. rather than being too caught up in specific details of what makes for community.
As we continue to grow, we will face new challenges all the time, but also have new resources and more reputation to build around. Eventually we may face entirely unique challenges because it's not like this whole "internet" thing has been around for 1000 years. We need to stay principled and generous. If we do that, things will turn out okay. 🙂
Having such a balanced perspective has got to be so important when to comes to building anything. Being romantic about things going a particular direction blinds us to opportunities to pivot when its practical.
Your focus on those types of principles I think must be in part one of the biggest reasons for the success of the community. They’re the types of principles that not only cultivate community, but really focus on providing your target audience what it really wants - I guess focusing on just making a “big community” is more of a vanity thing - instead it’s been a side effect of the culture you’ve cultivated.
And it has exploded! Congratulations and thank you for providing us and everyone else a platform to share our wealth of knowledge. You’ve created a lot of unique opportunities for us that wouldn’t have been there without DEV and the amazing people that roam here!
When you're thinking really longterm and not accepting undue external pressures, the most obvious way to act is out of principle with the wellbeing of the users in mind.
We've made sure to only go in directions which could allow us to stay principled. When we've taken on investments, we've always made sure to do so with folks who share the principles and agree that our best path forward is to stick to them.
We've created a universe, by going open source, by making certain community promises, that nobody could talk us out of our principles even if they wanted to. We'd always be able to point to our predetermined choices as putting us on a path we can't stray from.
Your mindset and values sound scarily close to mine. I hope a circumstantial partnership comes about in the future.
Thanks again for building the best darn developer blogging ecosystem in existence!
Do you plan to move DEV away from open source in the near future?
Or any plans to put DEV behind a paywall?
No and no.
DEV will always be open source and we'll never have a paywall.
We have several monetization paths, some already happening through site features and tasteful partnerships and the rest center around our future as a commercial open source company.
We can't wait to make progress in pushing open source social software together and building a sustainable business around servicing and hosting our more decentralized open source initiatives.
Of your positive qualities, which would you say is your bestest most favoritest most positivest qualitiest quality that you have?
I am the very model of a modern Major-General
I've information vegetable, animal, and mineral
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights
historical
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical
I'm very well acquainted, too, with matters
mathematical
I understand equations, both the simple and quadratical
About binomial theorem I'm teeming with a lot o' news
With many cheerful facts about the square of the
hypotenuse
With many cheerful facts about the square of the
hypotenuse
With many cheerful facts about the square of the
hypotenuse
With many cheerful facts about the square of the
hypotepotenuse
I'm very good at integral and differential calculus
I know the scientific names of beings animalculous
In short, in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral
I am the very model of a modern Major-General
When people ask me how I am at work I sometimes say
Which nobody as yet has understood
Hey Ben,
Love the site, it's everything a tech community should be! It first caught my attention with the How I Made this Website Hella Fast Without Overcomplicating Things post on Reddit.
I saw you allow for canonical urls to reference posts on other websites, really stoked for that. I was thinking about cross posting some things I'd written in the past here, but I don't actually see many other people doing that kind of thing. Do you think the community reacts differently to cross posts, and if so, how?
Thanks!
Cross-posting is very very very welcome and we are building more and more tooling around that use case
Project Benatar: Fending Off Data Black Holes
Ben Halpern ・ Jun 17 ・ 6 min read
Thanks so much!
How the heck did it come to your mind to go from posting hilarious fake O'Reilly book covers on Twitter to build a Medium-killer community of developers?
(Which I knew it was going to be a huge hit since day one... Yeah, it immediately seemed that good to me.)
Thanks for being such a longtime supporter!
To apply a general theme to this question, I'd say I'm good at identifying bullshit. Satire like the parody book covers was a real opportunity to flex my bullshit sniffer in terms of my everyday life as a coder. Smelling out those hidden, unsaid things about life in software.
And the bullshit there is that the whole world runs on software but we still have no idea what we're doing as a whole and just try our best.
Likewise, I thought there was a lot of clearly "unfinished work" to be done in the realms of publishing, social media, community, software development, etc. So beyond gently criticizing what was funny about the whole thing, I also want to be part of the solution. I think collaborating, communicating and generally finding community is critical for humanity and it will never be the same as before software/internet.
So they're two sides of the same coin and I've always just tried to make the most of what I can do. Lately I've been super consumed with the building side. I hope to dive back into jokes at some point, but when I do I want it to be in the form of a sitcom. I don't have the time right now to write speculatively but if anyone at Netflix is listening, I'd love to pen a tech-related satire to rival Silicon Valley on HBO if you'll commission me upfront for the work 😄
Hahaha I would so watch that!
But, in the meanwhile, I'm just so glad to be part of this community ✌
It's no secret that dev.to is one of the most positive and supportive developer communities.
What do you think is the most important thing when moderating a community to ensure that everyone feels welcome and included?
The term I use in my own mind to talk about this is "chaotic empathy".
People are wired to be empathetic but mostly in a known scenario where it's pretty clear who is being affected by what.
Since anyone could be reading anything on DEV from any context, we need to account for the "chaos" of the situation. We can't be overly consumed with any one solution for one problem, we really need to be thinking holistically about what might affect people which ways.
I draw on a lot of personal anecdotes and then try to apply those scenarios to folks who might feel the same way but are in different scenarios in terms of their personal vulnerabilities, background, insecurities, etc. And I've tried to meet and befriend folks from as many genuinely different backgrounds as possible and really try to find ways my world view needs shifting.
Software developers tend to solve for problems they most care about. I truly believe that we care about certain interpersonal and safety-oriented human needs more than the creators of Twitter and other platforms ever did—and it's hard to retrofit those values onto a project or company after the fact.
I really admire what you and the DEV team achieved so far in so little time.
What would you say the reason for DEV's fast growth? is it leveraging twitter power? or using dev rels in a smart way? or sharing it through conferences? or the tasteful sponsorship? or a mixture of all? or just a secret sauce totally different than all that?
Leveraging Twitter as a start, but also knowing that it's not the be-all-end-all of organizing on the Internet.
I think the big thing is always looking to the next step, rather than being too consumed with what's currently working.
I had an online business in college which allowed me to make a lot of mistakes in terms of being overly reliant on gimmicky traffic stuff and short term thinking. With DEV I've always tried to predict scenarios years out and not let anyone argue me out of principled thinking about how to treat the community with respect and fairness as we grow.
Thanks a lot... I needed to hear that ❤