How do you find the time to participate on dev communities? (Such as dev.to)

#discuss

I'm just a bit curious to know how do you guys usually find time to participate in an online dev community such as dev.to (when I mean participate, I mean reading articles but also commenting and writing posts).

Do you do it at home, after work, before work, or at work during dead hours? I know it's a bit too specific, but I just would like to know how my fellow developers do it!

Top comments (12)

Ben Halpern • Jul 23 '18

I have greatly curbed my time on Twitter, which has helped a lot. I'm biased as hell, but a thought that Twitter seems like a dev community but ends up being an addictive time suck, was pretty much the founding philosophy of dev.to.

I still tweet but I don't sit and scroll very often. I also don't have Facebook on my phone. I'm participating in communities and otherwise chilling out. Less mind-suck from my phone.

(I still do some of it, but it's getting much better for me)

rhymes • Jul 23 '18

I work from home so during breaks I refresh the home page :-) Sometimes I also answer "off" hours (I'm a freelance)

I tend to gravitate towards a subset of topics and authors. If the article is super long I bookmark it with the too optimistic wish that I'm going to read it soon after but the reality is that it might take me a few days to get back to it.

Quentin Sonrel • Jul 23 '18

I usually do it when I "work". So it can be when I'm actually at work or in the evening when I work on my side projects. I like refreshing the homepage when I take a break, there is always something interesting to read or a comment to write... like right now 😉

ｅｎｄａｎ • Jul 25 '18 • Edited

First of all, bookmark the website, or add it to home screen. ;)

Something you see very often will trigger your brain to interact with that something (I forgot what it is called but this has something to do with psychology). Like now, I have dev.to shortcut in my new tab. (I'm using Vivaldi browser)

And I just found your post interesting so I'm here :P

Lynne Finnigan • Jul 25 '18

I tend to look at it every now and again during the day and save articles I want to read later in my own time. Sometimes I'll read them there and then.

If I'm writing a post, I would do that after work in my own time as it requires more time/thought.

Sean Killeen • Sep 16 '18

Hey! I've noticed that in this post you use "guys" as a reference to the entire community, which is not made up of only guys but a variety of community members.

I'm running an experiment and hope you'll participate. Would you consider changing "guys" to a more inclusive term? If you're open to that, please let me know when you've changed it and I'll delete this comment.

For more information and some alternate suggestions, see dev.to/seankilleen/a-quick-experim....

Thanks for considering!

Rafal Pienkowski • Jul 23 '18 • Edited

In case of reading and commenting, I'm trying to look every day at my feed and read (if it's quite short or I have enough time to read it) or add to my reading list articles which I'm interested in. Once a week I go through my reading list, and I spend an hour to read the posts from the list and write comments. I think this approach works for mine.

For posts writing, I'm trying to set up a reasonable goal and write one post per month or two. Sometimes I an excellent idea came to me, and I write a post on the fly, but generally, I want to write a post based on my latest work experience or after a lecture of a book.

Maybe it'll be helpful for you. Cheers.

Kasey Speakman • Jul 23 '18 • Edited

I post some topics after hours, but I also take some time at work (especially on Mondays) for professional development including some comments or posts here. I dunno that my boss "likes" it, but he tolerates it. And I often learn a lot from it that I can bring back to the team. (And I make sure to point out that I learned it in professional development time.)

For example, I posted here about event storage in postgres. It was mainly to work out and document my own thoughts on the matter. I received some really good comments which ultimately led to a few changes. We are transitioning to it right now, and I hope to do a followup post on that once we get it in production at the end of the month. Similarly, I posted another article on fixing DB mistakes safely. I needed to document that process anyway because we will have to repeat it several times. That actually got emailed around internally for the purposes of understanding the scope of work involved.