Posted on Oct 11, 2018

Some questions about how DEV.to works

#meta #discuss

There are a couple of things I've been wondering about how the site works. I've been digging through the source code, but I've never learned to work with rails, and so it's not always clear how different parts of the codebase work together.

How are featured articles chosen
When does the featured article change? Sometimes, it seems to stay the same for a while, and sometimes it seems to change very quickly.
How is the main feed generated that a user sees on the home page? Some articles seem to linger on the top of my feet for quite long.
How often is new code deployed to production?

Top comments (2)

Ben Halpern • Oct 11 '18

Featured post is chosen based on overall hotness_score among post with cover images which is positive reactions and time and some other signals.
The top post shows up around 40% of the time, but others in the top eight are rotated in.
Home feed shows recent posts from users you follow, and otherwise "hot" posts from tags you follow. It's possible that some things linger too long relating to the tuning of hotness score. The featured post is shared amongst everyone, the rest are tailored based on follows. It's possible that the featured post could also be done that way in the future too.
New code is deployed a few times a day, but not necessarily to the home feed. We're a small team, it can sometimes be weeks between deployments that would affect the feed.

Frederik 👨‍💻➡️🌐 Creemers • Oct 12 '18

Thanks for taking the time to answer these :). I've taken a look at the code in black_box.rb, and this makes it a lot clearer. Is the code for the lambda functions available as well somewhere?

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Some questions about how DEV.to works

Top comments (2)

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