I just looked at my dashboard and saw something that made me stop scrolling: 3,011 followers on DEV.
I want to sit here for a second and actually say thank you, properly, not just react with a heart emoji and move on.
How this even started
I'm Tobore. Some of you know me as Laurina Ayarah, the name still on my profile from before I started going by BuildWithTee. I'm a full-stack developer and a technical writer, and honestly, for a long time I thought I had to pick one. Turns out the two feed each other. Building things gives me something real to write about, and writing forces me to actually understand what I built well enough to explain it to someone else.
I started posting on here without a big plan. No content calendar, no growth strategy, just me writing about bugs I found, systems I shipped, and things I was learning in public. I did not expect people to stick around for it. You did.
What you've actually given me
Every comment, every reaction, every DM where someone said a post helped them debug something or made them feel less alone in this industry, all of that added up to something I did not see coming. Some of you have been here since my very first post. Some of you found me last week. All of it counts.
A few of you have reached out to talk, to ask questions about breaking into tech, to share your own wins, or to tell me my writing made a hard day a little easier. I read every single one of those messages, even the ones I take a while to reply to. Please know they land.
What I'm still building
I write to think out loud, and I build because I genuinely love making things that work for real people. Whether it's a silent bug that crashes live surveys, a system built for patients who cannot afford for it to fail, or just me trying to figure out CSS versus Tailwind at midnight, this space has become somewhere I can be fully myself as both a developer and a writer.
I'm not slowing down. There's more building, more writing, and more honest documentation of the process coming. If you've been here a while, thank you for staying. If you just followed me today, welcome; I promise it gets more interesting from here.
One ask
If there's a topic you want me to write about, a bug story you want to hear, or something about full-stack dev or technical writing you're curious about, drop it in the comments. I read all of them, and I'd love to write the next post for you specifically.
3,011 of you believed this was worth following. I don't take that lightly. Here's to whatever we build next.
With gratitude,
Tobore
Top comments (2)
Well deserved! 🎉 Consistently sharing what you’re actually building and learning is much harder than chasing trends, and people notice the difference. Congrats on 3K+ followers! Looking forward to seeing where the next 3,000 come from.
Thank you!