DEV Community

Cover image for The DEV (Design) Team is Growing
Ben Halpern Subscriber for The DEV Team

Posted on

The DEV (Design) Team is Growing

The most polarizing thing about DEV is its design. As the person most responsible for our design as it stands today, I'm pretty much in agreement with all the different perspectives. We have made some good choices in creating a fairly usable interface with character, but by and large we have been a pretty amateur effort; Forever holding out for help.

We have had visual design help through the open source community as well as with @arakodesigner and her project-mates Rachel and David, who stayed on for a stint with us after we volunteered as their guinea pigs (through a UX course at General Assembly two years ago). However, by and large, we have not been able to muster up the resources for dedicated design leadership within our organization, until now.

Today marks the first full day for @lisasy as part of the DEV team. She has worked with us for the past month or so to help us map out our future plans in this arena, which will likely include at least one additional product design hire. Additionally, and in a fun coincidence, @peter and I worked with Lisa many years ago — before she went on to work with thoughtbot, Facebook and Dropbox.

Nobody embodies the term "generalist" more than myself. On any given day you'll find me collaborating on our low-level site reliability concerns, working with our frontend team, our marketing, support, or anything in-between. I am, however, a total amateur at most of these tasks. I also find myself lacking the time to provide deep guidance on any of it. So, just as our community can breath a huge sigh or relief that we now lean on @molly_struve to lead up our site reliability, our users will soon see the benefits of experienced leadership in our product/design.

Lisa has expressed a deep appreciation for collaboration with users in order to make the right design choices. As an open source and community-driven company, we'll be giving her the reins to do just that.

Just as we hope that our engineering choices will provide the basis for an ecosystem bigger than DEV, we look forward to the propagation of our design choices. We are not an organization that can truly be described as "engineering-driven", or "marketing-driven", or "design-driven", etc. We strive to give appropriate weight and credit to each discipline required to serve our community. Today, we add some much-needed balance to the structure of our product team.

We hope you all give Lisa a warm welcome!

Happy coding (and designing) ❤️

Top comments (18)

Collapse
 
nickytonline profile image
Nick Taylor

Sounds like an awesome hire! 👏

Collapse
 
lisasy profile image
Lisa Sy (she/her)

thanks :)

Collapse
 
link2twenty profile image
Andrew Bone • Edited

Welcome 🙂
Dev is growing so fast it's exciting to see!

Collapse
 
aritdeveloper profile image
Arit Developer

Lisa! Congrats sis! A role well-deserved! Looking forward to seeing, enjoying and being inspired by your work!

Collapse
 
lisasy profile image
Lisa Sy (she/her)

thank you!

Collapse
 
jlrxt profile image
Jose Luis Ramos T.

Gracias DEV y bienvenida Lisa
Yo amo a DEV

Collapse
 
tarasnovak profile image
dataPixy 🧚‍♂️

congrats! where do I sign up? 🤓

I could def. do some damage to your stats & dashes ...

Collapse
 
ben profile image
Ben Halpern

Keep an eye on jobs.dev.to (Of course, we'll also post to listings. In the meantime, everyone is welcome to contribute to the project...

GitHub logo thepracticaldev / dev.to

Where programmers share ideas and help each other grow


DEV

DEV Community 👩‍💻👨‍💻

The Human Layer of the Stack

ruby version rails version Travis Status for thepracticaldev/dev.to Code Climate maintainability Code Climate test coverage Skylight badge CodeTriage badge Dependabot Badge

Welcome to the dev.to codebase. We are so excited to have you With your help, we can build out DEV to be more stable and better serve our community.

What is dev.to?

dev.to (or just DEV) is a platform where software developers write articles, take part in discussions, and build their professional profiles We value supportive and constructive dialogue in the pursuit of great code and career growth for all members. The ecosystem spans from beginner to advanced developers, and all are welcome to find their place within our community. ❤️

Table of Contents

Contributing

We encourage you to contribute to dev.to! Please check out the Contributing to dev.to guide for guidelines about how to proceed.

Getting Started

This section provides a high-level quick start guide. If you're…

Now that we have design folks onboard, we'll also be better at giving design-related guidance in the project issues (though we still won't be perfect!)

Collapse
 
tarasnovak profile image
dataPixy 🧚‍♂️ • Edited

good to know. random PR's are overrated in my books tho, but I def. would like to see more work around your dash stats/followers display, etc. ...

Collapse
 
ryansmith profile image
Ryan Smith

Welcome, Lisa. I'm looking forward to seeing how the design evolves. 🎨

Collapse
 
tarasnovak profile image
Comment marked as low quality/non-constructive by the community. View Code of Conduct
dataPixy 🧚‍♂️ • Edited

yeah, 1 short intro post is a bit weak for dev to bio tho ...

Collapse
 
jenc profile image
Jen Chan

Welcome Lisa! I'm sure you're gonna do some awesome things here!

Collapse
 
lisasy profile image
Lisa Sy (she/her)

thank you! :)

Collapse
 
john_papa profile image
John Papa

yay! looking forward to great things!

Collapse
 
thewasif profile image
Muhammad Wasif

I love everything about DEV except UI. 😥

Collapse
 
utkarsh profile image
Utkarsh Talwar

Awesome to see the DEV team growing! Cheers, Lisa! Looking forward to cool design improvements in the platform. 😄

Some comments may only be visible to logged-in visitors. Sign in to view all comments.