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.

Weeknotes - 12 Makers

ruthmoog ・ Aug 19 ・ 3 min read

#bootcamp #beginners #devjournal #reactnative

10 Days as a Software Developer

Anubhav Jain ・ Aug 30 ・ 4 min read

#opensource #devlife #devjournal

What I learned last week

Felipe Rueda ・ Aug 20 ・ 5 min read

#beginners #c #motivation #devjournal

Weekly Goals - Week of 7/21/19

Ryan Furrer ・ Jul 21 ・ 3 min read

#javascript #devjournal #webdev #writing

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.