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Jason C. McDonald
Jason C. McDonald

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Introducing #devjournal

Photo by Cathryn Lavery on Unsplash

There's been an awesome sort of article floating around DEV for some time: one where the author publicly journals their experiences as a developer.

These have always felt like they needed their own tag to call home...and now they have one: the #devjournal tag!

What Belongs Here?

Any time you write a post describing your own experiences, consider adding the #devjournal tag. For example...

  • Development logs detailing your team's progress,
  • Top five things you learned this week,
  • Some "brilliant" idea you tried that utterly bombed (and why),
  • Your weekly journal from starting your first development job,
  • Your goals for the next week.

If it's something you'd write in a journal about your life as a coder, you can put it here.

What Doesn't Belong Here

#devjournal should be exactly that: entries about your experiences. It should not be used for...

  • Tutorials and articles that aren't directly related to your experiences.

  • Posts primarily promoting your project. (Use #showdev or Listings for that.) Tell us how you did it instead!

  • Questions. (Use #help instead.)

  • Most discussion prompts. (Use #discuss instead.) See below...

Discussions

Your post should be about you and your experiences, which generally makes it a mismatch for the #discuss tag.

There is one major exception...Journal Prompts. If you want to encourage other developers to write a #devjournal-style comment in response to a prompt, it may be reasonable to use both tags.

Not To Be Confused With...

There are a few tags that may or may not also fit your post. Be sure to know the rules for the tags you're using, and select the right ones.

  • #beginners is for articles geared towards newbies to programming (or at least to a language).

  • #showdev is for showing off projects you're proud of.

  • #explainlikeimfive is for super basic explanations of topics.

  • #career is for anything relating to careers.

It may also be a good idea to include tags for the technologies you're using, especially languages and specialties.

However, since there's a limit to the number of tags you can choose, if your post fits this tag, please make #devjournal one of them!

...And, That's It!

Pretty simple, hey? As long as your post is written about your experiences, and what you've learned, #devjournal invites you to share your experiences with the DEV community.

Top comments (7)

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jaloplo profile image
Jaime López

Really nice article. It makes me realize the tags I should use on my posts (at the moment I only have created two).
I didn't know there were this classification so thank you so much to bring light on this for me.

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omrisama profile image
Omri Gabay

Don't most blog posts come from something that people here experienced or worked on in their personal/work lives?

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald • Edited

Absolutely, but most of them aren't written as such. #devjournal is more about sharing the story than about disseminating the distilled information.

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deciduously profile image
Ben Lovy

I think several of my old #journal posts for this bill! Great idea, loving all the new tag specificity.

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ssimontis profile image
Scott Simontis

I love it! I was just telling someone about how I keep basically a lab journal on projects and there's a few projects that are probably really cool that a lot of people don't get to experience.

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yusufcodes profile image
yusufcodes

Nice, I didn't know this type of category existed! I may start adding to this tag myself😊. Thanks for sharing!

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piraces profile image
Raul Piraces Alastuey

Great idea!! Hoping more people joining #devjournal