How I Decided on dev.to as My Writing Home 🖋

When it comes to sharing knowledge through writing, the choice of platform is crucial. Should you prioritize earning income or expanding your audience? This post will help you decide while explaining why I made dev.to my platform of choice.

Why I write

You can search for countless reasons out there for writing. And I should have a link somewhere near here to show you my reasons in detail later. But here are mine.

• Building my personal brand: I've built a presence on platforms like YouTube, GitHub, and LinkedIn, and I believe a dedicated writing platform will help me further expand my reach.

• Source of income: Let's be real—I’m not just doing this for free. I just find another way to make money

• Tracking My Learning Journey: Writing helps me document and reflect on what I've learned over the years.

These reasons led me to prioritize the following factors when choosing a writing platform:

• Openness and Popularity: It should be easy for potential employers or clients to access and get a clear understanding of my work.
• Engagement & Community: More readers and more comments mean more motivation to keep writing.
• Ease of Maintenance & Tracking: The platform should be simple to manage, it will reduce motion waste and other factors that doesn't add value to you and me

Platform comparison

Based on these priorities, Let's compare and find out the strength and weakness of each platform based on my experience.

1. Viblo:

   • Pros: Developer-focused with a strong tech community, great for sharing knowledge and connecting with peers.
   • Cons: Primarily popular in Vietnam. Since I aim to reach a global audience, Viblo is not the best fit for me.

2. Notion:

   • Pros: All-in-one workspace for writing, project management, and collaboration. Highly customizable with various templates.
   • Cons: It’s not discoverable to a broader audience, lacks interaction features like comments. Writing here feels more like internal documentation than public engagement.

3. Medium:

   • Pros: Large, diverse audience with built-in distribution; clean interface and easy-to-use editor.
   • Cons: Limited customization, reader paywalls, and content ownership issues. Also, Medium is restricted in Vietnam, requiring a VPN for access—a significant barrier for local readers.

4. GitHub Pages or my own website:

   • Pros: Full control over customization and branding
   • Cons: High setup and maintenance effort with minimal audience reach—similar to Notion but even less community interaction.

Why dev.to

Developer-Centric Community

dev.to is made for developers by developers, which means it’s easy to engage with the right audience and get meaningful feedback. As a developer, I often turn to GitHub and Stack Overflow for answers. Lately, I’ve seen more high-quality blogs on dev.to, which made me realize—if it’s become a go-to for me, it likely is for others too.

If I were a customer looking for someone to build a service or an employer seeking a potential hire, platforms like dev.to or GitHub feel much more reliable compared to Notion or Medium. Prove me wrong!

The focused, tech-centric environment here is a big advantage—there’s less distraction, allowing me to stay on track. I once tried using Threads to share thoughts on AI, but I found myself endlessly scrolling through unrelated content. dev.to offers the right balance of engagement without the noise.

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

dev.to offers a user-friendly dashboard that lets me manage posts, track views, and interact with readers. I can even see where my audience is coming from, similar to the analytics features on YouTube. This kind of insight helps me tailor my content and focus on what resonates most with my audience.

While I’ve experimented with content creation on YouTube, I found that producing videos took up a lot of time and effort. Writing on dev.to allows me to reach my audience more quickly and easily. However, I still use YouTube to showcase larger projects when visual content is the best way to convey complex ideas.

Free to use

Starting out, my main goal is to build an audience and establish my personal brand. When my group of audience is small, writing on paid platform would be a wrong decision

The income from writing alone might not be significant, but the opportunities it can create—more clients, more projects—are what really matter. For me, dev.to provides that background to grow my reach and open doors to new ventures.

Conclusion

Choosing the right platform is crucial for anyone looking to share knowledge, build a brand, or attract clients. For me, dev.to ticks all the boxes—community, simplicity, and opportunity. It’s a platform where I can write freely while reaching the audience that matters most.

Comments

[John Pile]

Thanks for this comparison. I have only started dabbling in this website.

How well does Dev.to do when it comes to formatting code snippets and samples? Is there support for formatting in various coding languages and does it include features like line numbers for referencing included code?

[Mai Chi Bao]

Hey there! I'm new here too, and I haven't written anything about coding yet, so I'm not sure if I can be of much help. But I do know that the format is in Markdown and Rich Markdown, so you can format it in other coding languages. I've seen some coding tutorials here, and I think the visual is pretty good.

[MartinJ]

Interesting. I write for dev.to because it's a friendly, supportive platform. The editor could stand some improvement, but I have strategies for that - you might be interested in my post on "Using Grammarly in dev.to"

[Mai Chi Bao]

What do you think about other platforms. Tell me

[Cesar Aguirre]

Not all content works on every platform:

• In a blog, you're at the mercy of SEO and search engines. I wrote for years on my personal blog and just saw crickets. Later I learned to write for my readers and for search engines too.
• Here on dev.to, beginner content around web development tends to work well, of course YMMV. My most viewed article was a post curating React resources.
• On Medium, sure you have a paywall, but it's up to the writer to put the paywall in front of his articles. You're better off with publications on Medium. Coding tutorials tend not to work that well, again YMMV. My most viewed post was a summary of a coding talk at a conference, I published it under a publication.

[Mai Chi Bao]

Wow, your knowledge is crazy deep. Right now, I'm not too bothered about the algorithms. What I really want is to have something to show clients when they come to me. That's why I'm not stressing about this too much.

I heard some YouTuber saying that their social content is way more interesting than coding content. And yeah, that's true. But we still need some coding content here. I'm thinking of writing something like my journey to becoming an AI engineer for the students.