On Daily.Dev

This post was originally written for my personal website at miko.ademagic.com/blog/on-daily-dev

Where Developers Suffer Together

Part of the challenge of being a web developer (and my job as a manager) is to find ways to keep up to date with this ever-moving industry, its standards, and the available tools. I'm always on the lookout for good methods to do that.

Recently I came across daily.dev, a slick looking app that promises to help you stay in the loop, as the place "Where developers suffer together". So I signed up and invited my team as well.

What is it

In short, it's a personalised news feed geared towards tech and the web in particular. It takes news from the RSS feeds of various well-known publications or developer blogging platforms, and presents them to you according to the topics you've said you're interested in.

Sure, personalised news feeds are nothing new and if you have an RSS feed you've probably got some sort of reader/aggregator doing what you like. Daily.dev sets themselves apart (in my opinion) by sprinkling in a bit of gamification for habit forming, and social features so you can learn with friends.

Their main feature seems to be a browser extension, but I've been getting by fine with the web app alone. I will try the extension soon.

What I like about it

Dev Cards

I'm a big fan of gamification in UX, especially the "achievement" mechanics that games have popularised. Dev.to got me to sign up with badges, and so naturally I signed up as soon as I discovered the Weekly Goal Badge. It was a great hook to bring me back almost daily, and I'm bummed I've been de-ranked and I'll definitely be reading more this week.

You can flex your weekly goal badge with your Dev Card, which is a slick looking, license-like ID card they generate for you.

They even have a series of instructions on how to embed it, and even how to add it to your Github Profile and keep it up to date with a Github Action. Such a well-executed feature, looking forward to what else they'll do with it.

Squads

You can invite your friends and create a "Squad" together, which gives you a common board where you can write posts and share links of things you read. Its a great way to give each other reading lists and share resources about a topic common to you, or a challenge you're facing together. You also get to find out about things that interest your squad mates which is a great way to foster diversity of thought.

I created a squad for my workmates just to try it out. So far they aren't as hooked as I am but we've shared and spoken about a couple articles. Usually this would be something that happens over slack or another platform, but having this presents it in a much more consumable way.

TLDRs

It's actually strange how useful I find this but how little I use it. I'm not used to articles being effectively summarised for me, but interacting with something in your reading list provides a small synopsis to help you decide whether you'd like to read further. I'm so not used to it that I forget it exists.

It really helps with clickbaity content, or sensationalist youtube videos with misleading titles. Sure I gotta click the card to read the TLDR, but at least that's where I stop.

I'm skeptical of products like these content feed providers since I always suspect some kind of prioritisation/favoritism. This synopsis feature (which could also be biased i suppose) helps by offering transparency before you "convert". I think it's great.

What I don't like

There's not much, but here's a summary.

• The Feed duplicates, sometimes showing me the same card I saw earlier in my scroll. I suspect this is to make it seem like an endless feed, but I've observed it happening a bit too early. Granted it may be due to the amount of topics I've selected, but I would have appreciated a "You've seen all the new stuff! Browse more topics or See results again" interface at the end of my feed moreso than an infinite scroll.
• Sometimes my dev card is wrong, or at least it is right now. I've only ever seen one youtube video of t3.gg in my feed (and am fairly certain I have downvoted), but somehow it's wound up in my favourites on my dev card. Which not only makes me question the algo, but also raises the question of how this made it into the feed anyway? Where do you draw the line between a personal blog and an influencer/creator's youtube channel being a "well known publication"? Follower count? I digress...
• Ads are not obvious enough. Sure they're not the guiltiest, and you gotta make money somehow. Daily.dev has just done a few things that have impressed me, so putting an ad into a feed that looks close to a regular article gets me a little peeved. I would have liked if the card received a different colour treatment so I can ignore that design; the variation they have is just different enough to stay similar.

How it's going

It's been about 2 weeks since we joined Daily.dev as a squad. I'm the one mostly using this but have heard positive feedback from other team members, despite their read counts not being as active as mine :) We'll persist with using it since it's not a demanding part of our daily flow, and I'm interested to review this in about a month or two. But so far it's been a positive experience and I'm interested to see how this app grows.