I knew it could be a big success, and planned for this scenario as I went. But I also knew there were plenty of smaller successes I'd have been happy with.
I think I'm pretty good at holding a lot of different scenarios in my head, so I never thought there was one way communities were made successfully but I had a lot of different possible outcomes and always tried to pay a lot of attention to what happened differently than I expected and made sure to care more about what was important in terms of principles of inclusion, friendship, teaching etc. rather than being too caught up in specific details of what makes for community.
As we continue to grow, we will face new challenges all the time, but also have new resources and more reputation to build around. Eventually we may face entirely unique challenges because it's not like this whole "internet" thing has been around for 1000 years. We need to stay principled and generous. If we do that, things will turn out okay. 🙂
I'm the CTO of international video agency Wooshii and I run an educational media brand called Skill Pathway. I also occasionally chat to people on my podcast, The Learning Developers Podcast.
Having such a balanced perspective has got to be so important when to comes to building anything. Being romantic about things going a particular direction blinds us to opportunities to pivot when its practical.
Your focus on those types of principles I think must be in part one of the biggest reasons for the success of the community. They’re the types of principles that not only cultivate community, but really focus on providing your target audience what it really wants - I guess focusing on just making a “big community” is more of a vanity thing - instead it’s been a side effect of the culture you’ve cultivated.
And it has exploded! Congratulations and thank you for providing us and everyone else a platform to share our wealth of knowledge. You’ve created a lot of unique opportunities for us that wouldn’t have been there without DEV and the amazing people that roam here!
When you're thinking really longterm and not accepting undue external pressures, the most obvious way to act is out of principle with the wellbeing of the users in mind.
We've made sure to only go in directions which could allow us to stay principled. When we've taken on investments, we've always made sure to do so with folks who share the principles and agree that our best path forward is to stick to them.
We've created a universe, by going open source, by making certain community promises, that nobody could talk us out of our principles even if they wanted to. We'd always be able to point to our predetermined choices as putting us on a path we can't stray from.
I'm the CTO of international video agency Wooshii and I run an educational media brand called Skill Pathway. I also occasionally chat to people on my podcast, The Learning Developers Podcast.
I knew it could be a big success, and planned for this scenario as I went. But I also knew there were plenty of smaller successes I'd have been happy with.
I think I'm pretty good at holding a lot of different scenarios in my head, so I never thought there was one way communities were made successfully but I had a lot of different possible outcomes and always tried to pay a lot of attention to what happened differently than I expected and made sure to care more about what was important in terms of principles of inclusion, friendship, teaching etc. rather than being too caught up in specific details of what makes for community.
As we continue to grow, we will face new challenges all the time, but also have new resources and more reputation to build around. Eventually we may face entirely unique challenges because it's not like this whole "internet" thing has been around for 1000 years. We need to stay principled and generous. If we do that, things will turn out okay. 🙂
Having such a balanced perspective has got to be so important when to comes to building anything. Being romantic about things going a particular direction blinds us to opportunities to pivot when its practical.
Your focus on those types of principles I think must be in part one of the biggest reasons for the success of the community. They’re the types of principles that not only cultivate community, but really focus on providing your target audience what it really wants - I guess focusing on just making a “big community” is more of a vanity thing - instead it’s been a side effect of the culture you’ve cultivated.
And it has exploded! Congratulations and thank you for providing us and everyone else a platform to share our wealth of knowledge. You’ve created a lot of unique opportunities for us that wouldn’t have been there without DEV and the amazing people that roam here!
When you're thinking really longterm and not accepting undue external pressures, the most obvious way to act is out of principle with the wellbeing of the users in mind.
We've made sure to only go in directions which could allow us to stay principled. When we've taken on investments, we've always made sure to do so with folks who share the principles and agree that our best path forward is to stick to them.
We've created a universe, by going open source, by making certain community promises, that nobody could talk us out of our principles even if they wanted to. We'd always be able to point to our predetermined choices as putting us on a path we can't stray from.
Your mindset and values sound scarily close to mine. I hope a circumstantial partnership comes about in the future.
Thanks again for building the best darn developer blogging ecosystem in existence!