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!
Top comments (111)
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.
As promised:
Secret to these luscious locks?
Wow, that is an epic follow-through!
And, apparently, still a closely guarded secret.
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 ✌
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.
As a contributor to the codebase, I think it's awesome that you opened sourced the project. I remember the day it went from private to public. It was a pretty crazy day.
dev.to is now open source
Ben Halpern ・ Aug 8 '18 ・ 4 min read
Once you flicked the switch and open sourced dev.to, was there an "oh shit, was this a good idea opening this up to the world?" moment or was it more "Yeah! YOLO!"?
1:
Yes!
2:
Yes! But not rushing anything. We need to staff up and/or get organized enough to have someone full-time dedicated to this part of the site and dedicated to supporting community members who want to ship in. We currently have bigger fires to put out than the editor 😄
@ben I recently joined Dev, though I had been a reader for past 2 years.
I made a small chrome extension that allows me to send data from zettlr editor(github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr) included in the extension to v1 editor text box.
zettlr allows me to preview the posts while writing it and allows for formatting shortcuts.
hopefully I'll launch it next week on github as open source, but I want to working before that. I doesn't run correctly on linux or Mac, only in windows at the moment.
If you were not in tech and could do anything you wanted, what would it be?
For me, perhaps from watching too much Food Network, I'd want to open a burger shop. We would just do really good burgers. I really like burgers.
I'm legit opening a vegetarian burger place at some point soon. I also really like burgers, but don't eat meat anymore so all the more reason to bring my meatless burgers to the world.
I'm dragging my feet on some of the steps here but I 100% intend to make this burger joint my side project. And if I can be helpful in allowing you to reach your burger dreams let me know!
Otherwise, I'd love to write a sitcom, but I know it would be a stupid amount of work and stress so not something I'd embark on unless it really was my new life's work. I used to really want to do that but thinking about it now makes me a bit queasy by picturing the work involved.
That's so cool if you open a veggie burger joint! I was vegetarian for a couple of years and then when I went to Barcelona for work, I found it hard to be vegetarian there, so I started eating seafood again and some chicken. When I got back to Canada, it just kind of stuck, but I still eat a lot of vegetarian meals.
Will it be called Ben's Burgers? 😉
It will be called BB’s Burgers and BB does indeed stand for Ben’s Burgers.
I’m 100% not kidding with any of this. I’m glad I get to say it out loud.
PS I’m gonna put all the recipes on GitHub and let the community make PRs it they can improve on them.
Wat is your favorite meat free burger recipe?
Didn't know you were vegetarian. Great decision.
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!
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 ❤
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.
I started learning how to code some months ago and felt like it was super hard to decide how to get started, because of the endless possibilities available online.
What's your advice for new and aspiring developers today? How should they start?
That's a good question.
What comes to mind right away: If you can establish a project you can commit to, your choices on what to learn can be guided by context. Don't learn just to learn (unless you think that way, but it doesn't sound like it).
If you can come up with an interesting project you want to see in the world, you can learn at just the right pace to create the thing. And then once it's "done" you don't need to jump on to something new. You could refine that initial thing if you're still excited by it. You'll learn a lot in this process too.
I really like this answer. I got stuck in well if I want to do this I should learn this but if I want to learn that I should learn this first and on and on only to get all twisted up. Love the site!
You wrote the first version of DEV all alone?
Did you had any overall ideia in terms of development about what to do, how to start, any previous experience in build similar platforms or was a freestyle beggining?
I tried to stick within the things I knew Ruby on Rails could do well, and put off the things that might be harder.
I also settled in on one core feature above all else: performance.
I figured if the pages would load quickly, people would want to come back. And when you make this the #1 priority it helps you simplify and ship what matters.
Tks for the quick tip. You've done a great job.
Sometimes im on cellphone with a poor signal, then a poor connection, and i still can read the dev.to posts ;P
Hey! Love your work. Two questions:
How do you think software developers can contribute to solving the "big problems" of the world - I'm thinking environmental collapse in particular? In other words, as I asked previously, can code save the planet?
It's obvious one of your values is giving/contribution - why is that so strong in you? What is its origin and how do had to cultivate it?
Can code save the planet?
Daragh Byrne ・ Nov 22 '18 ・ 1 min read
1.
I think we spend way too much time contributing to new ways to do low-level things (new frameworks, libraries, etc. etc. etc.) and not enough time contributing and collaborating on things that are closer to the humans on the end. There are a lot of cool open source projects where folks come together to build things that impact for an obvious good.
I'm not sure what it is but I think there's more skepticism around things "meant for good" in terms of whether they'll end up succeeding in any way. It might be easier to picture the benefit of a new npm package?
2.
That's a tough one, let me try and introspect on it...
I have always been "ambitious" for one reason or another with some rebellion mixed in there. That's probably a bit nature, a bit nurture. It's pretty visible throughout my whole family in our personalities.
And then I think there's a combination of growing up poor/single mom alongside a heightened awareness of my own privilege as a smart healthy white male from Canada. Even if I felt like I got the short end of the stick in terms of always having to worry about money, it's pretty clear I'm in about the 99th percentile in my actual fortune. I think I try to see things from both sides of that lens and in the end I just want to do stuff in that regard.
I also prefer actions to words where I can help it. I'm 100% willing to get involved in vocal activism where I'm needed, but I prefer to spend my time working on solutions. But I'd never think anyone lesser for being more activist than inventor. There's a tremendously useful place for both things.
2b.
It's hard to know what the perfect thing to contribute to society is, but I think it's possible to identify things that are pretty clearly "net good". I try to find situations where the outcome is better than the alternative. In web dev I like to focus on performance as one of the most measurable UX feature. You can change the colors or button position or anything on and on and on, and there are so many variables that you may never know whether you are truly improving things. But page speed and time-to-usability are super measurable and it's very clear that going in one direction is better than the other.
So when faced with the many tradeoffs of good and bad things, I try to find areas where it's pretty clear my work offers net good in simple terms that don't have to be overly justified. (Because anything is justifiable if you're good at debate). 95% of our choices live in some kind of murky middle where you don't want to "overcorrect" in any direction. But like web performance, there are a handful of times where you're allowed to "go full steam ahead" because the parameters and outcomes are pretty clear. So I try to look for those scenarios.
Thanks for your insights! Do any of those "net good" open source projects come to mind immediately?
Net good is subjective, of course, but folks like Progressive Coders Network do pretty great stuff.
progcode.org/
I really appreciate good execution. I think a lot of the most well-meaning orgs are not necessarily great at getting stuff done. IMO ProgCode got stuff done.
I haven’t followed or been involved lately but I know they had meaningful successes in the past.
I think if we could collectively figure out how to do more human-facing stuff in open source it would go a long way no matter what.
We need to keep elevating the folks who trend towards supportive and positive in the first place, and we need to continue to question our methods and be open to hearing feedback.
We can't let ego take over and feel like we know what it means to be supportive and positive just because we did okay so far.
We also may not want to keep growing and growing and getting more and more attention as a monolith. We want to enable more slightly private support spaces and also enable some smaller microcosm communities not entirely owned by us via our open source, while still allowing them to interact and be compatible with what we're doing. If we're greedy and try to own the everything instead of distributing the value and upside it could hurt our chances to continue the positivity like it is now.