In the past couple days, dev.to has racked up a lot of internet points. Since we launched as an open source project early yesterday, we have remained at the top of GitHub's worldwide trending repos.
GitHub stars don't necessarily mean anything, but they also don't mean nothing. One way or another, there is an expectation that comes with popularity. People certainly correlate popularity with "greatness", or something along those lines.
A lot of people see this as a chance to learn from us, and of course, we hope to teach as much as we can — especially to newer folks. That said, most of the teaching will be peer-to-peer; from the top down, we don't have that much to offer. We are here to learn as much as anyone else.
What are you learning from the DEV open source codebase?
Michael Lee 🍕 ・ Aug 9 '18
This Hacker New comment tells a pretty typical story in terms of expectations:
Looks like the standard rails mess :/ Don't get me wrong. From time to time i am going to look at other peoples rails code to learn, how they solved common problems in grown rails apps. Most oft the time i leave rather disappointed...
I like the spec for Comment#id_code_generated ;)
It's true. We are a pretty standard Rails mess. We didn't get here because we write perfect code. We got here because we care a lot about the community. I happen to think that now that we are open source, we may eventually live up to our status as an important web app in the developer community. But that is not where we are today.
We are popular for, in my opinion, all the right reasons. We have worked closely with the community every step of the way and have always strived to do the right thing. But in a sense, we're also famous for being famous, and as software developers we hope to deserve the success of this project as we grow over time.
Happy coding ❤️
Latest comments (31)
It's funny how high expectations are for open source code despite zero money being involved. However, I'd at least expect that a site (not a framework or library) wouldn't be scrutinized as highly.
Anyway, you've done a great job of focusing on community first, and it's always great to see what real world code actually looks like. It breaks the illusion that production code is modern and perfect.
Congrats!
@benhalpern ur a hero. Human, vulnerable, real. Beiber takes a back seat to you (and Jess). Keep up the good work! Blessings 🙏🏻!
As long as it works it works 😈Who cares if the codebase is a little mess, I mean what isn't?
Love the community you built here 😍
I guess that makes users of dev.to Beliebers. 😂
I would like to know ruby instead of php so I could help to you.
I think your guys decision to go open-source is awesome and in the near future it might get you out of the "standard rails mess" and into rails heaven!
Haters Gonna Hate ... But Coders Gonna Code :)
Stay awesome 🤘
"We are a pretty standard Rails mess"
Haha, it was 2009 all over again when I got invited to that repo xD
"Oh cool, now I can finally fix some bugs....what...what year is it?!"
Oh, and also gratulations to that OSS launch :)
Oh you crazy Canadians, with your crazy Canadian analogies involving Canadian celebrities 😜
My second favorite hackernews comment calls Massive "a less complete knex" -- it's accurate! That's intentional! Look at it this way: you're popular enough to get a little hate. Nil illegitimi carborundum, & all :)
Thank you for open sourcing the app Ben. I'm a Ruby developer and I'm learning a lot from dev.to codebase.
I want to learn how you made dev.to so fast and try to replicate it with my apps.
Ya'll are doing great! As many have said already, the reason I stick around the community is because it's always for the community. I love:
Working with the community to build the community we all want to be part of help out with.
As for Rails, I recently switched to a team that's a Rails shop. As such it has been a delight to learn Rails and finally seeing the value of convention over configuration. You can onboard folks quicker because you know where everything is. Folks can talk about actual paths for building things instead of getting caught up over small details.
For this reason, although I'm a huge fan of JavaScript across the entire stack, in the team that I am in, I will keep pushing Rails because it's inclusive in nature. Once you get past the learning curve, you can jump into a Rails project and get up to speed fairly quick. Seeing DEV as a Rails project delights me and I'm learning new stuff and using it as a point of reference to take away and implement new ideas into projects I'm working on.
Excited for the future of what this community will become. Thanks to you and the rest of the DEV team for taking the helm and navigating the community to an awesome place.
Congratulations to you, Jess, and the Dev.to team! Way to set a date, then deliver in spades!
It takes a lot of guts to put your entire codebase on GitHub for all the world (and the critics) to see. But it's the right call. Now the entire developer community can jump in and help out!
wow, didn't knew @ossia is also here.
Wow, means so much coming from you Quincy, thanks so much!!! ❤️
+1