Ask away, I'd love to share! â¤ï¸
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Ask away, I'd love to share! â¤ï¸
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Top comments (111)
What's one of the hardest lessons you learned prior to your success with TPD? Or even during... :)
Patience! Before starting this whole project, I let my own projects come and go too quickly. Before starting The Practical Dev, I told myself I'd have to pick something that I'd still be willing to commit to even if success took ten years.
I still haven't found "that" project yet :)
I'd look for something super low key and maintainable. Something that delivers actual value to, like, 10 people now and not theoretical value to 1,000,000 people in three years and with $15m in funding. Simple, maintainable projects with room enough to grow out to be complicated beasts.
For the record, this project has become a complicated beast, but it happened naturally.
Who designed the sweet logo?
I did, and thanks!
I really like 70s computer aesthetic
So the design is sort of an homage to that. Sometimes we get busy just doing stuff, and don't have time and energy to stick to the the original vision for some stuff. @jess does a great job of keeping track of the vision in subtle ways we can lose track of when we're busy.
Do you plan to a release a "dev.to" font pack?
After reading so much content over the year (since dev.to was created), what, in your opinion, makes for a good technical blog post? What are the characteristics of strong technical writing? Are there any patterns or themes that you've seen emerge in the blog posts that you've enjoyed the most or learn a lot from?
Firstly, I think variety in styles and goals is ideal, so characteristics can vary, but here are a few thoughts:
I'm really not sure I expressed everything perfectly here, but that's what comes to mind. Thanks for the great question.
I see Dev.to mostly publishing technical posts (frameworks, concepts, techniques, etc.), but I've also seen a few of the "Programmer Life" type posts (burnout, mentoring, etc.).
Is there a particular mix of the two you're looking for? Do you want the submissions to be heavier on the technical or is it more dependent on what the community is offering?
I ask as a not entirely disinterested party - if it's the sort of thing you'd like to see, I'd like to submit a more tightly written summation of a blog series I recently started.
Think of the audience as programmers (as opposed to "tech" like startups and venture capitalists and that sort of thing) but otherwise posts do not really have to be technical at all as long as they might help someone. I wrote a post about fitness which really didn't have anything to do with code, but was directed at programmers and the things we deal with in our careers/life.
So I'd say the technical/non-tech isn't as important as knowing the audience. If you are an experienced programmer with a story to tell, it's definitely appropriate. Just use titles that express the value of the post.
Where/What do you hope to see dev.to && The Pratical Dev grow to be?
We want to be that resource that's by your side as you grow as a developer. All our careers are a sequence of crossing different chasms and it can be a scary place. Everyone deals with some insecurity about the paths they choose, and we hope to facilitate the "I have no idea what I'm doing" gap.
We've made it when I feel like people can seriously lean on the tool and we can feel like we're really there whenever you need us to be. Us as in the community or tool, or however you want to describe it.
From there I have some far out ideas about what could be done with a community of all the world's developers working together to solve hard problems. There are a lot of steps to take between now and right now we're five people working out of a single room, so I don't get too deep into those crazy dreams, yet.
Apple cider of choice?
I have a weird relationship with food/drink in that I never really settle on brands I like. I'm always like "I'll have whatever's good". It's an easy way to be, but I wish I could come to become more of a connoisseur about something.
dev.to has been called the "Medium for Developers" by many people I know. Does that align with your vision or do you see dev.to as evolving to something more than a content platform?
Step 0 has been to provide a lot of the value that people find with Medium, but I've always thought of this as a starting point of what it can be. Medium is constrained by its need to be all things to all publishers. I really think serving developers specifically allows us to be a "progressively enhanced" version of Medium.
I'm not the kind of person to try hard to correct people because it's not my platform, it's theirs. If they have a different thought about it, I take that description seriously and go back to the drawing board with the intel.
So that's a good way to describe it but it's not how I/we think of it because we're thinking towards the future where we've built on top of our core primitives to provide more value than just Medium for devs.
Agree wholeheartedly. I think the "Medium" analogy is primarily in the sense that this encourages well-crafted long form narratives (vs. short tweets or social network posts). And in that sense it provides a basis for starting.
The biggest value/difference I have seen though is that dev.to seems driven more by conversation (2-way community interactions and collaboration) than publication (1-way content sharing). It fosters a better sense of "belonging" and a lot of credit for that goes to way all of you at TPD/dev.to have embraced experimentation and feedback. Thank you all.
The biggest value proposition we can offer over Medium is that we really care about the experience for developers, and we have ideology specifically focused on improving the developer community. Any positive effects that Medium provides in this since are purely coincidental.
Medium has raised $132M and was founded by a publishing platform celebrity, so I won't be so bold as to say we're just better, but we have a lot of leverage in our capacity to go vertical and focus on this community.
As an aside, before I moved to the states to try this wacky tech-venturing thing I'm doing, I was working on a Medium-esque platform and consulting some investors to see if I should pursue this. This was before Medium had launched, but I was given the advice to not bother competing since they'd crush me. This was probably okay advice at the time, but I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about that, and I feel like I have my own private rivalry with Medium. I'm not one to care much about the "competition", but I go back to that conversation a lot for motivation.
And you have real markdown, not that weird
crapthing medium does 💗Yeah man!
When are we getting to see an official dev.to Spotify playlist? :-) Would love to see devs share their best coding, debugging and documentation task playlists :-)
Great thought!
What is the best advice you can give to someone who works as a junior frontend (jQuery, html, css) and wants to become a senior developer (react,next,vue,preact) without having much time available because at least in my case my job takes me almost 15 hours a day.
Thank u, i love your community!
Experience will take you from junior to senior eventually, right? Stay curious, listen to lots of podcasts in whatever free time you can find, write about your work publicly if possible, because you'll develop a stronger understanding of your work and possibly a reputation.
But mostly stay positive and patient. It will happen for you eventually!
Thank you for your answer and your advices, I will take it very seriously, and I will continue to do so with much more effort to achieve it.
What are your dev tools of choice? What does your desk look like?
I don't use a lot of personal dev tools. I have my editor, VS Code, and that's about it on personal tools really. I use and like git standup and as a team we rely on some collab tools and monitoring tools.
dev.to stack
I want to find more good tools, but my brain can't handle too many different things, so I'm a very slow adopter of tools. Usually I have to see someone using something for a while before trying it myself, just because I won't have the patience to learn the ins and outs on my own unless it's critical.
As for my desktop:
bro you gotta get a mechanical keyboard 🤓
🙃
You've managed to build up quite a community without even (seemingly) trying! As a community builder, that's fascinating to me :) Do you view it as a "if you build it, they will come" analogy? Or have you been doing things behind the scenes to cultivate this community? Also... if you haven't been doing anything yet, do you plan to in the future?
Oh there is definitely a lot of trying involved. But I've done enough failing in this space that I act very deliberately and have very low expectations about people's interest in the things I make. Like, I've built things where I had to beg my friends and family to use.
So definitely no "if we build it, they will come" mantra, but more of a "If we obsess over the details, remain patient, offer clear value and respect peoples' time, they will come eventually" attitude.
Sounds about right haha :) Do you have a group of folks that you're gathering feedback from (aka the Slack group?) or are you just observing how people are using the site?
It's a combination of things. It's always a matter of "we could be doing more" but right now we're working with UX students to audit our site as a part of their program in school and we are super excited to see what they come back to us with.
ah - that's a fantastic idea!
😁
Some comments may only be visible to logged-in visitors. Sign in to view all comments.