It’s been three years and ten months since we “officially” started building dev.to. At the time, our Twitter account was much more widely known than the fledgling community platform, so we interchangeably referred to ourselves as the team behind The Practical Dev or dev.to. Eventually, we settled on the name “DEV” and our organization morphed into a single identity -- “The DEV Team.”
One of our company’s guiding principles is to “constantly evolve.” In that spirit, I’m happy to share that the DEV Team is now the Forem Team.
What is Forem?
Forem is the underlying open-source software that powers DEV. As we shared in our “For Empowering Community” announcement post, our goal is to generalize the software so that anyone can stand up a community that is modern, safe, and independent.
While we could have continued on as the DEV Team that maintains Forem, we want our deep belief in and commitment to Forem to be reflected in our company identity. In embracing this name, we’re empowered to think big, and to make decisions that serve Forem’s ambitions beyond the scope and needs of one community.
We recently updated the name of our open-source repo from /thepracticaldev/dev.to to /forem/forem, too:
Forem 🌱
Welcome to the Forem codebase, the platform that powers dev.to. We are so excited to have you. With your help, we can build out Forem’s usability, scalability, and stability to better serve our communities.
What is Forem?
Forem is open source software for building communities. Communities for your peers, customers, fanbases, families, friends, and any other time and space where people need to come together to be part of a collective See our announcement post for a high-level overview of what Forem is.
dev.to (or just DEV) is hosted by Forem. It is a community of software developers who 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…
There’s more work to do before we can seamlessly stand up a new Forem community at scale, but we are getting very close. To stay updated on Forem progress, please join our recently launched meta-forem community: https://forem.dev
What about DEV?
Though we’re evolving our team identity, we’re not going anywhere, and not all that much will change on a day-to-day basis. Software development is at the core of what we do, and we will always be DEVs at heart. The DEV Community will continue to be a major part of our focus and operations, and you should expect the same level of commitment from us in supporting and growing the community. We’ll still be here to cultivate an inclusive and positive environment, to share amazing posts through our social channels, to run fun campaigns, to respond to your needs, and otherwise support the community any way that we can.
DEV has become its very own standalone brand, and decoupling the priorities of Forem from DEV allows more room for exploration and creativity within DEV-specific initiatives. The same is true for CodeNewbie, CodeLand, and all of the work being invested into our podcast network (now spanning DevDiscuss, DevNews, and The CodeNewbie Podcast).
Next Steps
The biggest evolution here is a mindset shift -- self-identifying as the group working on Forem allows our team to prioritize and think through the prism of Forem and how we can support communities beyond DEV. We’ll be continuing this transition over the next couple of weeks and months so expect some updates in places like our “about page” or jobs site.
Thank you all for being part of the journey <3
Top comments (17)
Congrats on beginning the transition! 🥳🎊🎉
Curious is this means dev.to will migrate all the users and content to forem.dev or just this current platform will change it's looks and the domain name to forem.dev?
forem.dev is already it's own site to discussing more meta level topics! 🎉
Yup, forem.dev is where anyone can post to chat with one another or get our attention on ideas and concerns. Right now it still kind of makes more sense to post to github for many ways, but we foresee forem.dev being the most scalable way to have some kinds of discussions in the long run... Or to just chat and get to know one another.
Yup! It will be a long haul because Ruby is not built for that quality by nature, but we feel pretty good that as we refine the platform we rewrite whatever the worst components are and we win in the long run.
Impact wise, this is a big part of our big picture plan with the hosted product, which will be called Forem Cloud.... Here's a little internal memo I just wrote about what Forem Cloud is all about, think of it as rough-draft copy for a future specific mission statement.
can't wait for forem.cloud
I always get confused when I see the new name. Because here in Belgium, Forem is the name of the agency for unemployed people 😄
oops!
Growth is one way and the only way forward. Congratulations 🎊
Yayyy! Congrats 🎉
Congratulations on the big news and transition! A new chapter is always exciting!
This is great, thank you for sharing! And congratulations! And, Thank you and the team for building DEV, and for your vision for Forem - it's very compelling.
congrats!
Congrats well done! 🎉🎉🎉
👏
How can we get some devs to help us migrate our older forum software over to forem?
Congratulations! 🎉🎊
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