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.
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 ❤️
Oldest comments (31)
:runs to look up the spec for
Comment#id_code_generated:🤣
Did you find it?
It's here.
Can't say I get what the commenter got so excited about... 😕
Lol...can't say myself either!
Whomst among us has not been a standard rails mess at one point or another
Don’t let imposter syndrome lie to you: dev.to is indeed famous for the right reasons. And that’s because of your (all for you) hard work and dedication. The rest is just details.
I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about what makes a piece of software successful. We both agreed that at the end of the day, it's rare for software to succeed or fail because of the technology. Often projects succeed in spite of bad or mediocre technology, and once they become successful, they can hire top notch experts to fix the problems they started out with. When they fail, it's usually for a variety of reasons around business and project management.
I'm not saying the dev.to code is bad. I just think that comment about "standard rails mess" is a bit silly. What matters is the end-user experience, and that usually works great for me here. I think the team at dev.to has also done a really good job of promoting a positive, inclusive, and friendly vibe.
It's always better to have a real product that people can use than to fetishize some abstract notion of code purity.
Well to make a sports analogy, the ideal "interception rate" to optimize for a quarterback is not zero. Interceptions are bad, but shooting for perfection would lead to a sort of conservatism that would not feed the end goal. "Many" is also a terrible rate. "Few" is the ideal place to be.
I love dev.to because you would never see that comment here :)
To me being the Justin Bieber of Open Source is equal to being the most hated project in Open Source, which I totally think is not case here.
Still huge props to you guys for your determination and commitment to the process.
Ok I thought of a funny line. What does Justin Bieber and Dev.to have in common?
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Hmm (Clear throat)
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Lots of gems and issues.
Ha, I starred dev.to before it was cool to star dev.to! 🤣
Maybe it's good to be messy in the standard way. Hopefully that means there will be lots of information on dealing with it or cleaning it up.
+1