On January 3rd dev.to turns 2 years old. But it was 2017 when Jess and I took the plunge and began working on it full time, with Peter joining as the third founder. This past year where we saw a lot of the hard work from the previous year show itself in terms of growth and exposure. In reminiscing on a great year, I want to mention a things that stood out for us.
The Ask Me Anything threads were a lot of fun. It's been a great way to engage some of the personalities in our industry doing fascinating work.
The way the community has adopted the attitude of constructive commentary has been wonderful. In order to have a healthy community, we need humane dialog, and we are consistently amazed by the community's general respect for the code of conduct and regard for one another. We have had several threads like this one where folks have expressed a lot of gratitude for the environment and it warms our hearts. It's clear people came here with shared values. We still have work to do, but none of this would be possible without the community embracing the need for better spaces for collaboration across all skill levels, identities and backgrounds.
The global nature of the community has been an amazing learning opportunity and a lot of fun. Traffic to the site comes from all over the world and we've done everything we can so far to accommodate this, technically and socially. The big influx of Japanese users recently was very exciting in particular, and it is wonderful to see people from all backgrounds and cultures come together based on their shared interest in the craft. Of course, there is a lot more work to do and we are excited to keep up the journey in 2018.
The #SheCoded celebration we kicked off on International Women's Day, where 163 women from our community shared stories and advice. Our team worked really hard to make this event genuine and impactful. With the help of our wonderful community, it was a huge hit.
The community grows by word of mouth and spreading the good word about our inclusive values on the platform. This was all on display in a recent Twitter thread where Dan Abramov asked about whether he should be on dev.to and the community responded wonderfully to convince him to sign up and offer React help. We certainly hope he and other great teachers keep it up in 2018.
Seriously, check out all the natural responses to this tweet:
On to the new year 🍾
Indicators of health and success on the platform continue to be strong and we expect a lot of growth in 2018. We have a few key initiatives we are launching early in 2018 in order to continue the growth and sustainability of the platform, including open-sourcing the code. We are very excited to keep up the journey with all of you and recognize the amazing, but yet-to-be-fulfilled, potential of an inclusive global community of software developers.
Coding has become a lot more fun for me with the whole community here to learn from and share with. I know it's the same feeling for the early adopters of dev.to. I hope as we improve the little things about the platform together we can spread this feeling further in 2018 and beyond.
Thank you so much for being a part of this so far.
Happy coding ❤️
Top comments (14)
Personally I hope to communicate better in 2018.
In my code, and in everything else. I'm sometimes lost in my own world and do a bad job getting on the same page with my partners @jess and @peter and the team. In 2018 as we expand and grow in many ways, communication is number one.When I say "in my code", I'm very hopeful. I've improved a lot in that area lately and am coming into my own.
Another goal is absolutely to read more. I'm currently catching up on some coding books I've seen recommended a million times and I'm finally getting to them. I also want to do a better job this year of reading dev.to posts with great care. I sometimes do a lot of skimming, but when I read with attentiveness, I learn so much from the content on this site and I can learn even more if I take the time to read with intent.
One more anecdote that I forgot to put in the post: When Jess mentioned in our newsletter that she was headed to Patagonia, Chile over the holidays, several community members from the area reached out to offer advice or if she was going to be around to meet up. It's so touching to receive such kindness from the devs, and awesome to see that this community has folks from every corner of the globe.
Don't forget to read some 'fun' books as well!
Is "Dreaming in Code" on that list? It's a lot of fun, and very insightful into why software is so broken so often. :)
How appropriate, I'm wearing my black DEV shirt to write this. My discovery of dev.to in April has been by far the best moment of my young developer career. I feel like finding a safe place to grow is challenging those days. Here, we are able to express whatever opinions, feelings and knowledge we have safely.
Being part of a community that values respect and solidarity above all else is precious. If there is one thing we must keep, it is that one. No more am I afraid of posting a article explaining a concept I learned or expressing a opinion, because right or wrong, I'll know the responses will be constructive.
We all wish the dev.to team good luck for 2018. It seems like you have a lot of things in store for us. We will patiently wait and assist whenever we can. I think I can speak for everyone when I say you can be very proud of the work you've done here.
Cheers!
Heck yes
This is really nice to read! I'm not sure how I stumbled upon dev.to last year. I think it were the funny dev book covers on Twitter that led me to following the account. Along the way I saw that there was a website tied in, and it seemed like a nice place to post everything develop related. As I mentioned in a post earlier, I kind of missed a place like this. It used to be Medium, but I'm not sure what Medium is anymore and it just feels my stories get lost out there. Thanks to you guys some of my articles had tremendous reach and it's really encouraging to see such results and support when blogging for the first time in a long while again. For that I say thank you!
Wishing you all the best for 2018 🍾
I'm so happy to be here.
I can't wait for another year of positivity and awesomeness by and with this community.
Thank you Ben, Jess and Peter!
Happy (almost) Birthday to dev.to! Here's to many more!
That tweet is what brought me here and the wide range of content is what made me stay.
This community feed was exactly what I've been looking for. I hope it'll become my/the main dev hub in 2018, because at some point consuming becomes too much of a pain and can get annoying. Think of all those twitter lists, multi Reddits, newsletters and podcasts.
It's always exciting to be part of a newer, growing community. It makes contributing 'easier' and more 'fulfilling' as you're closer to the core.
Personally I haven't contributed yet, but in due time I'm sure that I will.
The platform invokes a sense of feel-good and camaraderie that I haven't experienced elsewhere. It makes you want to get involved.
Keep on keeping on!
Hi all, I became more aware there was a dev.to site after searching where those “copy and paste from stack overflow” Tees came from. Can I get one of those or will you bring that back? I so related to that as an amateur starter.
It’s been a pleasure to have this site as a resource and I really like the smaller community with people from all skill levels. A lot of the posts are easy to read and feedback has been super welcoming and amazingly fast. Oh yeah one problem I do have is that since getting an account through twitter, is that I can’t change my personal details on my profile at all (would like to stop being called “fake Jen Chan” hahaa)
Hey sorry about the issue with your account. It should work now.
Glad you're liking it here Jen. 🦄
Yay thanks a lot!
joining as founder after the founding? xD
This place is truly special. It's my favorite coding-related site on the entire interwebs, bar none!