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What would you like to see on your DEV profile?

Ali Spittel on January 16, 2019

When you go to a profile page on DEV, mine for example, there are a lot of things on there: your featured GitHub repositories, social links, your p...
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ballpointcarrot profile image
Christopher Kruse
  • Echoing a "Pinned Article" feature.
  • It'd be cool to have a "Mentor/Mentee" area, where you can list the things that you are comfortable giving advice and help on, and conversely the things that you're looking to learn. These can drive into topics/articles much like the current tags do, and may help build communities around those tags.
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Joe Previte (he/him) • Edited

I second the idea of a "mentor/mentee" area.

I signed up in the "mentor system" but I haven't heard anything after putting my information down.

It seems like it would be more accessible if it were listed on people's profiles.

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david_j_eddy profile image
David J Eddy

Mentor system is available herein dev.to/settings/mentorship.

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ballpointcarrot profile image
Christopher Kruse

Well there I go, asking for features that already exist. 😂

Will add myself to that.

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Ben Halpern

It exists, but we haven't fully worked out the kinks in our process, so we haven't been super loud about it.

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Emma Bostian ✨

Y'all could also use Coding Coach :D

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marpme (Marvin) • Edited
  1. Pinned Articles

  2. moaaaar statistics (public views, last activity ...)

  3. Total Unicorns/Heart etc. count

  4. Styling options like changing colors, moving widgets etc

  5. A leveling system to recognize commenters from writers and from lurkers :D

  6. Approving skills or knowledge areas by other people

I think that's a lot for the beginning, hopefully that's what you are searching for :D

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ld00d profile image
Brian Lampe

Total Unicorns/Heart etc. count

I think you might want to avoid turning this site into a game for internet points

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marpme (Marvin)

Build a blockchain upon this, including virtual coins and there you go!
... but no, those are literally just my brain farts on the internet :)

So we can also cut out some of those points from the list.

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Pabi Moloi, but Forbes

I totally agree with this

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Tobias SN • Edited

A leveling system would make things a lot more competitive, as people make a lot of posts just for the sake of getting levels, spending less time on each, thus decreasing the overall quality. Meanwhile, people who write posts are considered to be better than those who prefer to just read posts and give feedback.

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Meghan (she/her)

that info is available privately here: dev.to/dashboard

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Sobio Darlington • Edited

There's no statistics for reads. I'm not sure how views are measured, but it'll be nice to have views/reads ratio

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Jason C. McDonald
  • What I'd really like to see is a way to actually feature articles. Some of my personal favorites get lost in the backlog, so it'd be cool to be able to pin a few (maybe three) of my favorites to the top, alongside my most recent post. While we're at it, maybe show my most popular article up there too?

  • Similarly, "top (five?) tags" might be helpful, so people get a quick idea of what I usually write about. Most of my contributions are to #culture and #python right now, and we'd probably get more engaged followers if they knew what topics to expect from any given author.

  • I'd also like to see better integration with other VCS services, so we can pin repositories from Bitbucket, GitLab, or Gitote. (While we're add it, perhaps adding Gitote to the links?)

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Michael Tharrington • Edited

I really dig the "top tags" idea. Similarly, it'd be awesome if one could filter through an individual person's writing by tag. This way, if I were viewing your profile, for instance, I could filter to see just #python or just #culture... or perhaps even more than one tag at a time.

I'm envisioning your profile including another column on either the left or right of articles (similar to the way you've set up "skills/languages" in your profile) that would list the different tags you've covered. I'm thinking it would list your most used tag at the top and descend from there. And as a profile viewer, I could then flip them on and off depending on what results I'd like to see.

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Benny Powers 🇮🇱🇨🇦

showcases articles

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Saulo Vargas

I'd like to have markdown available in learning/trying, projects and hacks and available for

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Lynne Finnigan

I'd like the 'Recent comments' to be less prominent. And as some others have said, a way to have some featured articles of your own. It could be cool to have somewhere that shows articles that you have liked and maybe display the badges in the header section, or in a different way.

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jess unrein

This is a really good point. Sometimes I do like seeing things people comment on, but I think maybe only including top level comments, or the first comment someone makes on an article, in the "recent comments" might help with this a bit?

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Dinesh Pandiyan • Edited
  1. More badges and badges available and how to get them - badge goals.

  2. A little bit of gamification like SO to reward every quality post based on views, likes and unicorns - collecting gold maybe?

  3. A better feed algorithm that brings up quality posts in the feed.

  4. Anything that would reduce the struggle to find quality posts in the feed - a lot of sort options maybe?

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Ben Halpern

+1 on series. Definitely a good element to show off.

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Steve Layton

+1 for pinned articles

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Max Antonucci
  • I agree with everyone saying pinned articles. Maybe also have pinned comments as well? It all adds up to highlighting activity on our posts that best represent who we are here.
  • Some basic styling options would be nice, like some colors, typography, or custom banner images. Mostly custom banner images!
  • A few people here have mentioned skills, and letting other users endorse like on LinkedIn. Maybe also have a place where devs can leave direct feedback of developers, like about their real-life experience with them or the benefits they've gotten from their writing. These would probably have to be approved first, and is more of a "nice to have" for me.
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Ben Halpern

In terms of LinkedIn-esque features, yeah maybe like a bulletin-board style comment folks could leave on profiles and the user could make some of them public for use as an "endorsement" of sorts, but it with an eye towards more authenticity than LinkedIn.

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Frederik 👨‍💻➡️🌐 Creemers

I don't have specific features, just usage considerations.

I wouldn't use my profile to send to (potential) employees/clients. I'd prefer that to be my own website, my own place on the web. I want my DEV.to profile to represent my identity within this community, although I have nothing against showing off things from other places around the web like GitHub repos, portfolio items, StackOverflow rep/top tags/...

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Ali Spittel

That's an awesome insight!

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Ben Halpern

Maybe more projects to show off along the lines of GitHub repos but more generally, like projects (with screenshots), maybe including stuff like codepens?

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Fabian Holzer • Edited

I think features that could help discovering like-minded people would be of value.

The profile categories are currently arbitrary text, which I think is generally a good idea. I could imagine that this could be enhanced by twitter-like searchable hashtags, or a seperate category for arbitrary tags could be introduced, because hashtags are a bit limited when it comes to expressions which are not only one word, e.g. "constraint logic programming" or "dependent types".

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Mattia Astorino

Following and followers

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Sung M. Kim

+1.
I've love to see who the person I am following is following or followed (inception 😉)
Possibly a follower graph?

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Andrew Bone

I'd like to see "this person follows you" if the person follows me.

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Craig Nicol (he/him)

Preferred pronouns, as an explicit (optional) field, to normalise that, and possibly expose against profile pictures in the comments section, to make it super easy to use the right ones in replies.

Given there's a chat feature, maybe make that accessible from the profile too?

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David J Eddy

I like the custom banner image idea. I use the same banner everywhere as part of my personal branding. Would be neat to add it here as well.

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Claire Parker-Jones

I'd really like to able to list my Instagram profile alongside the other links like Twitter and GitHub. dev.to has an Instagram account after all! :)

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Prahlad Yeri • Edited

One nice to have thing on profile is # of followers. Not only do people like to brag about their achievements, but your follower count acts as a reputation token on the interwebs.

Its one of the determinants for the level of trust you may want to put on an author. Like in the 18th century (when there was no internet), how do you think people came to the conclusion that some authors like Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Milton, etc. were better than the rest? That's where reputation points come into picture, those authors who were referred to by other authors who's books they used to read were treated with more respect in comparison to those who weren't.

I won't trust any random dude on the interwebs unless a hundred other people trust him/her. If that number went to a thousand, its even better, a million will convey even more trust, etc.

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Madison Kanna

I don't know if this has been said before, but...

It'd be super awesome to be able to add more custom CSS to our own Dev.To profiles.

Like, Myspace or Neopets.

This may actually be a terrible idea but I feel the same fun expressiveness here that I did on Myspace/Neopets!

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Joe Beretta
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Miklos Bertalan
  • Please don't add more statistics - like followers and total likes. I think keeping these hidden is part of the reason why the community is so nice here.

  • Pinned posts (and comments) would be nice.

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Mark

I'd really like to be able to link two sites since I have one for Elixir and another for front-end.

Another thing is YouTube. I don't really use a lot of the other networks like LinkedIn or Facebook, but I most of the tech related content I make is for YouTube.

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Chinmay Joshi

I read all of the ideas from the above comments. I would love to see top articles, reading list of the particular user.

But, how about a birthdate? (Just thinking out loud and may sound completely irrelevant).
Let's say it's my birthday today. Then my profile will have a special emoji around my birthdate. This can be right below the date joined.

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Ben Sinclair

Well I was going to come here to say we could do with a Mastodon link, but it turns out that's been added since the last time I looked, so yay for that.

I'll poke the bear and say it's got a bug - it's the only icon to have a title tag, which just reads "mastodon icon" so I suspect that's an oversight?

I don't use my profile for anything. I wouldn't share it with anyone except on a reciprocal site (so for how we have links to twitter, I might put a link to my dev.to profile on twitter), but it's not something I'd go out of my way to show people. If I was introducing someone to the site, I'd point them to an article I liked or the main page.

Something that might be fun could be a drawing. You know the thing on the network error page where you can doodle away? Maybe you could have a spot for doing that when you're bored and the latest one appears as a sort of status.

I think we can't talk about the profile page without bringing in the profile panel that accompanies posts.

You know how it's almost (but not quite) the same? Both have "work", "location", "education" and "joined", but the profile page has "email" and the info panel here has "+follow". I'd like to see them both have the same information. I'd also make things linkable, or taggable, so that "Washington, DC" links to a feed of posts from other people who have that as a location, or links to posts tagged with it. That would be great for arranging meetups and conferences and so on, without particularly inviting people to become stalkers.

I'd change the "joined" date, because it's the least useful piece of information. Sure it's interesting to see someone's been on the site for a while, but we have badges for that already, and nobody cares if you joined on Oct 25 or Oct 24. The specificity is really odd. When you made that post about people's CVs it's a point I kept bringing up - people don't need to be specific. It might be friendlier to say "joined: last summer" or something fuzzier, or just to skip it at all. It feels a bit like the info panel needed to look busier and so someone picked the only other bit of public-safe data they could.

How about something about other things you like? In the same vein as liking posts or pinning your own to your profile (as others have said) it'd be cool to be able to promote other people's posts in a little side-panel. Maybe using the unicorn or something - so people seeing your profile could see the last few posts other people made that you thought were coolest.

Sorry this is a bit rambling, I'm insert excuse right now.

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Claire Parker-Jones

This is so helpful Ryan, thanks for taking the time to share it! I will definitely check this out!

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Manuel Mariñez

I would like to see something like a history, you know, to find that good blog, tutorial or gem article that you forgot the name of (>. _.)> please.

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chustedde

I like this idea - maybe a private view of articles you gave hearts or unicorns to in the past?

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Jim Medlock

It would be nice to be able to specify links to other sites. For example, at the bottom of the profile panel having the ability to include a button for my Twitter, Github, and personal homepage.

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Tyler V. (he/him)

There's a field for your website under "Edit Profile" just above the Summary large text area 😉

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Philly • Edited

I second all 3 of these. 👌

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Nick Taylor

I thought a chat button on a user's profile who you follow would be handy.

As a user of the dev.to community, I would like a call to action on the profile of someone I follow, to facilitate beginning/continuing a conversation with them. #1567

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. As a user of the dev.to community, I would like a call to action on the profile of someone I follow, to facilitate beginning/continuing a conversation with them.

Describe the solution you'd like The motivation for this is quick access to starting a conversation with someone if you follow them and happen to be on their profile. As well, someone with more than a handful of followers is currently unable to find a user easily in dev connect.

To compliment this story, consider a lookup field on the dev connect page so a user could filter who they're looking for quickly. Also, as shown in the picture, I'd make the "Following" button a less prominent action than the "Chat" button. Also, I'm not sure about the wording "Chat"

Describe alternatives you've considered N/A

Additional context Add any other context or screenshots about the feature request here.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

This makes sense. I'm going to instruct @mariocsee to make this part of this effort:

github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to/...

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Matthew Francis

Ability to follow people back from your followers list.

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Bhupesh Varshney 👾

I would love to see the PWA of dev.to to go for a Dark Theme 😍

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Vico

i would like to see shared post that i can comment out that my friend can see, simple portfolio is very good, who knows in the future there will be dev.to/job section?

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Ben Dowen • Edited

I'm going to be super controversial...

I just like it very simple. Give me a brief flavour of who you are, and how to get in touch (social).

For all else, I just want to read it in your posts!

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Ben Dowen

I like a lot of the other ideas listed here. I think many could stand on their own as features instead of overloading profile.

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John Paul Ada

Language Badges! <3

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alex_takitani profile image
Alex Takitani

I've added a proposal here:

github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to/...