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What was your win this week?

Jess Lee on September 04, 2026

👋👋👋👋 Looking back on your week -- what was something you're proud of? All wins count -- big or small 🎉 Examples of 'wins' include: Getting a pro...

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FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ • Sep 4 • Edited

Met with @heyitsjem (official dev.to member) and @codingwithjiro talking about DEV

Jem is now a DEVenger :)

Jem

Musician, writer, digital media enthusiast, and educator. Currently learning to make games and weird archaic web experiences.

Sylwia Laskowska • Sep 4

AWWWWW 🥰🥰

FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ • Sep 5

🥰🥰🥰

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐚𝐳𝐲 𝐆𝐢𝐫𝐥 • Sep 5

Three Cute Legends 🔥

Dhruv Jani • Sep 6 • Edited

🐛 My win this week: my Summer Bug Smash submission got featured by the official DEV Community LinkedIn!
I wrote about a notification bug where a “clever” optimization turned out to break when someone used a second monitor.
The eventual fix? Delete the optimization. 😂

The Bug Smash results aren't out yet, but seeing DEV pick up and share the write-up is already a pretty cool win for me. 🙌

The Optimization That Was Too Good: Why Our Push Notifications Only Worked When You Weren't Looking | DEV Community

A notification suppressed whenever the tab was visible. Then a user mentioned the second monitor. This dev's fix was deleting the clever optimization entirely. Submitted for the Summer Bug Smash. { author: Dhruv Jani } https://lnkd.in/gsvvH46P

linkedin.com

Sylwia Laskowska • Sep 5

I think my biggest win this week is getting the ability to award Gems. It’s such a cool feeling to be able to dig up and highlight those less popular but genuinely great articles that might otherwise fly under the radar ❤️

Azrol khairul Khan • Sep 6

That's awesome Sylwia! ❤️
Gems feature really helps hidden gems get noticed
Love seeing underrated articles get the spotlight

xulingfeng • Sep 4

This week, the Thirty‑Six Stratagems series has reached three‑quarters of its total run. The grand finale is finally drawing near.😝

ujja • Sep 5

Not sure if everyone is aware of my love for auth and fraud detection, but I have been playing around with these for a while, and one of my Temporal projects finally made it onto the Temporal Code Exchange! 🎉
I submitted FlowShield, an authentication system built with Temporal, with email verification, password reset and JWT auth, plus AI bits for fraud detection, password analysis and behavioural security. It also has a React frontend and Docker setup.
The Temporal team reviewed and accepted the submission, so it’s now officially up on their site. Pretty happy about this one! ☺️
If anyone's interested, they can check it out here: temporal.io/code-exchange/flowshie...

Ryan Brown • Sep 4

I seen a Pelican flying today as I was mowing.
I've seen many muskrat, deer and even a salamander (that I'm afraid I could not save from being where it shouldn't have been)!

I no longer work in IT, or as a Developer.
Grass and grass touching is what I do now.

I still code for myself, and during the day I break my body for money.
But there is no AI whatsoever in what I do. No threat in the near future (where I work is far too poor to pay for AI enabled grass touching machines) and no one is insisting I use more (or any) Tokens of any kind.
Does it suck? Yes in many ways. My hands hurt to type this. My back hurts sitting to type this. Everything is broken and breaking (it was like that when I got there), so I guess that's kinda the same as IT/Coding.
But, NO AI!

Alexandra • Sep 4 • Edited

(+) I got finally an offer 🎉
(-) That said offer was so bad that was almost offensive 😂

(+) Also today i will go to black keys concert, which i will consider it my future highlight of the week.

So neutral week for me

FrancisTRᴅᴇᴠ • Sep 4

what was in the offer? 👀

Alexandra • Sep 4

The money was too little, only a one-year contract, and it was fully on-site, which the recruiter had told me was 2 days per week at the office

Vicente G. Reyes • Sep 5 • Edited

I have two!

Launched a job board for helping Filipino Virtual Assistants find jobs gigglegigs.com
Received the Docker Badge here on DEV for being the top Docker author for the week!

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

adriens • Sep 4

Last week before the first big hackathon I'm organizing with the help of Station N in New Caledonia, dedicated to Open Data and Job offering in public sector :

More details here

adriens

Aug 26

🏆 #HackAVP, premier hackathon dédié à l'emploi dans la fonction publique en NCL

#hackathon #career #opensource #ai

14 min read

Amara Graham • Sep 4

I started at a new company!

Yuyi Kimura (YK46) • Sep 5

I published two projects around the open-source task manager SuperProductivity.

A plugin for planning next days tasks: github.com/ypk46/sp-better-planner
A Desktop app to visualize time tracking data: github.com/ypk46/sp-sundial

As someone who used to heavily rely on Todoist + Toggl, SuperProductivity has been a game-changer, specially because of it being open-source, which means it is built around letting folks expand its capabilities and make it your own!

logarithmicspirals • Sep 7

My win this week was publishing my first package to NPM. I wrote about it here logarithmicspirals.com/blog/remark... and the plugin can be found at npmjs.com/package/remark-csv-table.

It's nothing crazy. It just allows you to convert CSV files into tables within markdown files when processing them with a remark pipeline.

This is a problem I had on my website, and now I want to share the solution in case anyone else was encountering the same pain point as me.

Yash Kumar Saini • Sep 4

I deep dived into the rust language compiler, for a inerest in making custom error, and although the issue was already up, I have raised a PR, and sharing the findings with community

sumaiya qureshi • Sep 9

Yes. If by “algorithm behind hosting a hackathon” you mean the research-backed process/decision algorithm that an organizer follows, there isn't one universal mathematical algorithm. Research instead describes a repeatable planning → execution → evaluation → follow-up process.
ResearchGate's How to Organize a Hackathon – A Planning Kit identifies 12 key decisions and their trade-offs for designing a hackathon. � Research on hackathon success in ScienceDirect similarly emphasizes objectives, publicity, participants, logistics, judging, and follow-up. �
ResearchGate
ScienceDirect +1
🧩 Research-based "Hackathon Hosting Algorithm"
START
↓

Define PURPOSE ↓
Define CHALLENGE / THEME ↓
Define PARTICIPANTS ↓
Select FORMAT + DURATION ↓
Select VENUE + TECHNOLOGY ↓
Build ORGANIZER / MENTOR / JUDGE TEAM ↓
Promote + RECRUIT participants ↓
Register + SCREEN participants ↓
Prepare resources, rules & judging criteria ↓
RUN the hackathon ├── teams form ├── problem discovery ├── ideation ├── development ├── mentoring └── testing ↓
SUBMISSION ↓
JUDGING ├── relevance ├── technical quality ├── innovation ├── feasibility └── impact ↓
DEMO / PRESENTATION ↓
WINNERS + FEEDBACK ↓
POST-HACKATHON SUPPORT ↓
Measure RESULTS ↓
Improve next event ↓ END The literature specifically emphasizes that pre-event preparation, suitable participants with diverse skills, effective facilitation, and follow-up are important for successful collaboration. � ScienceDirect 🔬 The interesting part: optimization You can actually treat hosting as an optimization problem: Maximize: Participant value + innovation + collaboration + project quality Subject to: Budget + time + venue capacity + mentor availability + technology + organizer capacity This is consistent with hackathon research that evaluates organizing practices in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and appeal. � ResearchGate And event-project research finds that communication, cooperation, and project leadership have an important relationship with event success. � ScienceDirect So for something like the DEV/MLH Hacktoberfest local Fests, the underlying logic isn't simply: “Find a venue → invite people → hack.” It's closer to: Goal → participants → resources → event design → execution → judging → measurable outcomes → feedback → next iteration. That's the research-backed algorithmic way to think about hosting. � ScienceDirect +1

sumaiya qureshi • Sep 9

Yes. I checked the exact DEV post you linked. It is a weekly-retrospective/community post, not a DSA or DBMS research paper. DEV asks people to share a win such as starting a project or fixing a difficult bug; one recent comment describes removing a “clever optimization” after discovering it caused a notification bug. �
DEV Community
If you want to connect this with DSA + DBMS + algorithmic complexity, there is a useful research angle:

DSA: measure the optimization For any algorithm, ask: Input size → operations → time complexity → space complexity → actual runtime For example: Approach Time complexity Space Linear search O(n) O(1) Binary search O(log n) O(1) Hash-table lookup O(1) average O(n) Sorting O(n log n) typical Depends The important research question isn't simply “Which is faster?” It is: How does performance change as input size increases?
DBMS: the same idea applies A database query can also be viewed as an algorithm. For example, searching 10 million records: Without suitable index Full table scan → O(n) approximately With a suitable B-tree index Index lookup → approximately O(log n) for the tree traversal, followed by the cost of retrieving matching rows. But real DBMS performance is more complicated than Big-O alone because I/O, caching, selectivity, indexes, query plans, concurrency, and hardware matter. ScienceDirect research specifically notes that DBMS performance comparisons often fail to represent real-world workloads and may provide insufficient experimental detail for replication. � ScienceDirect ScienceDirect's DBMS overview also describes the DBMS as managing storage/retrieval while hiding the underlying storage and access mechanisms from the user. � ScienceDirect
A strong DSA + DBMS research topic Based on what you've been asking about, I'd frame your project as: “Algorithmic Complexity and Database Query Performance: An Experimental Comparison of Data Structures and Indexing Techniques.” You could test: DSA Array Hash table Binary search tree Heap B-tree DBMS No index B-tree index Hash index Composite index Measurements Execution time Memory usage Number of operations Dataset size Query latency Insert/update cost Then produce graphs such as: Dataset size → execution time and Index type → query latency This is much closer to actual research than simply explaining DSA definitions. ResearchGate literature also discusses database indexing and query optimization in terms of B-tree, hash, bitmap and covering indexes and the trade-offs between them. � ResearchGate 🔬 The key idea The connection between your DEV post and research is: “Win” → identify a technical problem → change the algorithm/design → measure before vs. after → explain the complexity → reproduce the experiment. That's the mindset I'd use if your goal is to eventually turn your DSA + DBMS work into a research paper suitable for ResearchGate/ScienceDirect-style academic work

Henry Robt • Sep 5

Small wins can make a big difference, especially when you can clearly see the progress from one week to the next. It’s always interesting to see what others are building, learning, or finally getting working.

fmerian • Sep 5

contributed to launching Kilo Code for JetBrains on Product Hunt. ranked #1 Product of the Day, currently #1 Product of the Week. OSS ftw!

Eusebiu Balan • Sep 6

Small one, but it had been bugging me. A post of mine had its canonical URL pointing at the dev.to copy instead of at my own blog, so the credit for my own writing was going to the wrong place. Fixed it under Advanced Options in the editor, which I had never opened before.

Also finally wrote the first proper update post for my app instead of putting it off again.

Eugeniya Ivanova • Sep 8

My win is a bit of a strange one for me: I open-sourced my first thing this week. A little MIT skill that turns a solved problem into a social post — nothing huge, but a month ago I'd have told you I couldn't, because I'm not an engineer. I do distribution, and I build these with an AI doing the actual typing. Watching it go public under my own name felt oddly bigger than I expected.

Congrats to everyone else in here — the "quit IT to go touch grass, no AI" one genuinely made my day. 🙂

toby1o • Sep 8

Alex @Bickov • Sep 6

Shipped two blog posts and finally read Search Console properly. 46 of my 103 pages are not indexed, which explains more than I wanted it to. Not a glamorous win, but knowing beats guessing.

MMAR58 • Sep 7

My win this week is understanding that I don't need money now. I can just have fun and grow my skills further by developing my own things this year. Will see what happens after one year.