After mentioning a vague roadmap to open-sourcing the dev.to codebase, we've finally decided on a date for the launch: August 8 (8/8).
Eight is a very lucky number 🎱 🤗
The overall benefits of open source code are numerous and fairly well-known, so I don't think I need to get into that too much right now for this audience. As such, I'll just mention a few key items of note:
The first release will consist of our code, not a framework for immediately building an instance of a platform like this. However, that is a perfectly valid use case in the future. If you are interested in contributing such that we can eventually help people stand up their own version of this platform for their own business or society, we'll definitely welcome that input. But don't try to do that on day one, it would be silly. I wrote a post a few months back about what this platform could be in this sense. Our core business will remain serving the developer community as best we can.
We are a for-profit company. We're working our butts off to grow a big, profitable dev network. I mention this because open source is sometimes conflated with non-profit. The transparency that comes with open-sourcing should add accountability and will help ensure we remain aligned with the community and un-evil as we grow.
The code will be released under the GNU General Public License. Similar platforms have released using this license and we believe our use cases and ideology fit the same model.
We still have lots to iron out before August 8. If you want early access right away to help us in the push, please fill out this form.
Thanks for being an awesome community! Happy to discuss and answer your questions in the comments.
Oldest comments (59)
We've had the consultancies Stride and Planet Argon help us with this process and they have been really awesome. I'll be writing much more on that front in the coming weeks.
The Corgibytes also helped us in the past and we are so grateful.
Of course thousands of devs have chipped in with thoughts, ideas, advice, or code to this point as well. We can't wait to take this journey with y'all to great places.
🙌
Something to consider when you open source ➡️ oss.skylight.io ✨
Yeah, can't wait! We're still using way too much memory but Skylight has been crucial in getting to the bottom of those issues.
Just sent you a GH invite to the repo in case there's anything you'd like to see from poking around.
Awesome! Can't wait to play around :)
This is crazy! I'm happy that you're moving in this direction. Also to be one of those who influenced you to do this. 💯
Yeah!!
Woah, this is awesome, Ben! 🙌
Great move! I'll be happy to contribute!
Yay!
Woohoo! 🎉
Yeah, we're no geniuses, it's basically just another web app but we do think every open codebase is a great learning experience and eventually I feel like with enough eyes we truly could make this a fantastic technical project.
The fastest-loading, most optimized "just another app" out there. You beautiful geniuses.
Amazing ! This gonna be some good for newbies to explore an excellent project to learn, thanks for this ! We'll be waiting !
You mean We'll be waiting. ;)
Edited, thanks!
Woah! Really looking forward to it Ben. I love it 👍
This is great!
What is the current architecture of the project?
I've seen that the Backend is Ruby on Rails, but I'm not sure about the rest.
It's Preact on the front-end, but doesn't act like a heavy-handed framework. Just sprinkles. We have a lot of vanilla JS too which we'd consider as legacy as we move things more to Webpack land and delete some of the old stuff.
If it is possible, could you publish the technical stack somewhere?
This is amazing guys! Thanks for that :)
That's a wonderful news ! I hope this will benefit a lot to thé platform (:
🎉 🍻 🍻 🍻
Yay! Hope the full codebase goes open source too cause I’d love to have my own platform like this. :)
Ah! what can i say? great news!