74. How Dev.to Built a Community

Ben Halpern and Jess Lee are the co-founders of Dev.to, an online community dedicating to helping the developer community communicate. They've been described as a social network for software developers, where anyone from novices to experts can create a blog post to share their ideas. They worked on the site for a long time as a side project, and after they launched, the unexpected and overwhelmingly positive responded they received encouraged them to turn it into their full-time job.

Part of what makes Dev.to so appealing is that it's been designed to be fast. The site is designed to take advantage of caching at POP centers, so that individuals around the world can access the content as quickly as possible. Since the project is also open sourced, they've been able to receive contributions from over 500 individuals, ensuring that no bug goes unseen.

Dev.to also considers community health to not just be essential to the business, but also a value woven into the company and the product. Their focus on education and strong moderation tooling has helped them build trust in their users. Users feel safe when the site actively minimizes aggressive language. The future of Dev.to is shaped by the feedback they receive, but in many instances, they allow the community to thrive without too much administrative interference.

Links from this episode

• Dev.to is a community of software developers getting together to help one another out.
• CodeNewbie is a supportive, international community of people learning to code.
• DevDiscuss is a podcast from CodeNewbie that shares stories from people on their coding journey.
• CodeLand Conf is a community-first remote conference.