Today I hit 9 years in the DEV community. I joined with the intention of blogging as I learned. But for a long time I just lurked. It wasn't until Covid that I actually blogged at a regular pace.
I'm celebrating by catching a cold. Today has been rough.
What Have I done in that time?
- Run a weekly Goals series that's been running 3.5 years. Need some accountability? Drop by on Monday and tell us your plans for the week. Then come back Friday and say how you did.
- CSS Art * A series of geeky themed images created with code. I've not done any in a while need to restart.
- Made the Top 7 Featured posts twice.
- Earned top CSS and top JavaScript Badges.
- Help Moderate posts and up vote great DEV content.
- Entered many of the DEV Challenges. And was a Co-winner in a CSS Art challenge. (link below)
- Wrote a blog post for Virtual Coffee Community announcing our 2024 Blogging Challenge.
- Followers aren't public here. It's one of the things I like about DEV. What's more important is active followers, the ones that respond to your writing.
This was made with CSS and HTML for a Frontend Challenge.
June 2025 Was a winner in the Jun 2025 Frontend challenge for CSS art.
The companion piece was a landing page about Dad Jokes. It is my Top 7 most viewed post. It also earned the Top Javascript Badge that week. Father's Day means Dad Jokes
What's Next?
I don't know. The rash of AI slop articles is making it harder to enjoy the site. Some writers may use AI as a brain storming tool to get started. But there's stuff that's clearly just not altered and is copy pasted as whatever the AI spit out.
This hurts the community. Just make it harder to find blogs with a personal touch.
I'm going to restart my personal challenge to blog more each month than the same time last year.
-$JarvisScript git commit -m "9 years!"
Top comments (10)
Oh Wow! Congrats on being on Dev for 9 Years! Quite a journey you must have and I am glad you are still here!
One thing that stood out: "The rash of AI slop articles is making it harder to enjoy the site.". I started to notice that as well and I am glad I am not the only one. I do not want to call anyone out since that is just disrespectful, but I notice that some people use AI for their articles. I run it through GPTzero and in most cases it is fully written by AI. I do not mind someone writing and using AI to correct grammatical errors, but a person using AI just to write their articles feels like I am the only human person on this site and makes it feel like I am just talking to bots (no offense to anyone, but this is currently what I am feeling right now). I just wish there is an indication of whether the article is written by AI or not? (I could request that feature to @ben about it that shows the user if the article is written by AI or not. Though, it could be controversial in my opinion).
It doesn't ruin the community for me because I enjoy being on here, but I do feel like it does hurt the community in a way because of AI slop and just make you feel like 99% of people on here is not real. It genuinely hurts to think about it since my goal on here is to interact with actual humans.
Thanks for sharing your 9 years experience by the way and hope you are still around in the future :D
We're actively working on ways to offer a feature like that. Easier said than done, but we'll ship something that should help.
What great news!
Great to know, thanks.
Oh? That's actually great! Keep us updated on that!
That’s really interesting 🙂 I wonder though how is it technically possible to tell if an article is written by a human or AI? Assume there must be false positives/negatives in this kind of analysis
I share the same frustration. I'm passionate about writing and used to spend a lot of time reading, especially learning journeys through DEV Community, but by now, everything seems so predictable, AI-shaped. I fear for what will be of creativity from now on.
"Ruin" is a strong word but the AI stuff does hurt the community. I have to wonder if I talking to a real person or not. I've not checked a post with an AI Checker. There were a few I checked to see if I could find else where cause they sounded more like ad copy than an article.
But mainly I'm of the theory that if a human can't bother to write it why should a human bother to read it.
Thanks for all these years of contributing to DEV Community, making this place even better each day. Read your posts, make my day better. I can feel it is something you put all your creativity into.
Wish you a speedy recovery from your cold!
Cool. i am 5 years also