Thanks, @ryansolid
for sharing your experience! This is inspiring and insightful, and motivation to ignore ignorance and troll comments and rather make an effort and keep building and sharing valuable and meaningful code and insights.
Although I honestly never heard of Solid before, I have been using React and had many reasons to dislike it, which at least gave me enough energy to try jam stack and to rediscover PHP. Currently I try to give JavaScript frameworks another chance, so to say, in a side project using Preact with TypeScript. I will have a look at Solid and might consider it for future projects.
Concerning content creation and contributing to the tech community, I have learned that many communities seem full of unwritten rules and expectations. While our local German meetup community is mostly very friendly, helpful, and open-minded, the only issue might be that our events are practically ignored by the majority of developers.
In stark contrast, I experienced immediate attention and hateful overzealous gatekeeping behavior when trying to post anything on StackOverflow. While their attitude might actually help content quality, I think it also promotes narrow-minded thinking and, while denying there is anything like "best practice", effectively building a museum of code that was considered best practice at a given time.
Medium.com, on the other hand, seems to let mostly anybody publish mostly anything, and hide most of the technology-related articles behind a paywall that seemed arbitrary to me. Only recently I learned that authors can decide if their content should be free or not. Still, it makes me feel unwelcome and reminds me of ExpertsExchange, a community with a paid membership, that fell into oblivion thanks to StackOverflow.
Enter dev.to, at least a place that lets me publish content that does not risk being hidden or deleted by someone else immediately afterward. Being proud and biased about my own work, I half expected a lot of people to give many likes and comments on my articles, but instead, I had to find out that most are either interested in other topics or they did not discover my content yet. Everything I felt after publishing my first articles is perfectly put into words in your article, so thanks again for your inspiration!
I've been at this for a couple years now. And I've observed the same things over and over. I was on Medium as well and made that switch not so much because of the walls which can be removed but because I find people on dev.to make much more meaningful comments. They are here to discuss. My medium articles still get much better visibility. This article for example would have done well on medium as it is less technical. But what I think dev.to does better is bring communities together.
My early Medium articles got almost no views. I remember getting my first couple claps and half my articles in the first 3 months didn't have any. But the great thing about writing is once you've done it, it's out there. Over 2 years later 5/6 of them now have 1000 views and 70% readership. Not my most successful stuff in terms of views but people found my content later due to newer articles went back and read them (hence the higher percentage of readers). So it all builds towards where you are heading. Keep at it!
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Thanks, @ryansolid for sharing your experience! This is inspiring and insightful, and motivation to ignore ignorance and troll comments and rather make an effort and keep building and sharing valuable and meaningful code and insights.
Although I honestly never heard of Solid before, I have been using React and had many reasons to dislike it, which at least gave me enough energy to try jam stack and to rediscover PHP. Currently I try to give JavaScript frameworks another chance, so to say, in a side project using Preact with TypeScript. I will have a look at Solid and might consider it for future projects.
Concerning content creation and contributing to the tech community, I have learned that many communities seem full of unwritten rules and expectations. While our local German meetup community is mostly very friendly, helpful, and open-minded, the only issue might be that our events are practically ignored by the majority of developers.
In stark contrast, I experienced immediate attention and hateful overzealous gatekeeping behavior when trying to post anything on StackOverflow. While their attitude might actually help content quality, I think it also promotes narrow-minded thinking and, while denying there is anything like "best practice", effectively building a museum of code that was considered best practice at a given time.
Medium.com, on the other hand, seems to let mostly anybody publish mostly anything, and hide most of the technology-related articles behind a paywall that seemed arbitrary to me. Only recently I learned that authors can decide if their content should be free or not. Still, it makes me feel unwelcome and reminds me of ExpertsExchange, a community with a paid membership, that fell into oblivion thanks to StackOverflow.
Enter dev.to, at least a place that lets me publish content that does not risk being hidden or deleted by someone else immediately afterward. Being proud and biased about my own work, I half expected a lot of people to give many likes and comments on my articles, but instead, I had to find out that most are either interested in other topics or they did not discover my content yet. Everything I felt after publishing my first articles is perfectly put into words in your article, so thanks again for your inspiration!
I've been at this for a couple years now. And I've observed the same things over and over. I was on Medium as well and made that switch not so much because of the walls which can be removed but because I find people on dev.to make much more meaningful comments. They are here to discuss. My medium articles still get much better visibility. This article for example would have done well on medium as it is less technical. But what I think dev.to does better is bring communities together.
My early Medium articles got almost no views. I remember getting my first couple claps and half my articles in the first 3 months didn't have any. But the great thing about writing is once you've done it, it's out there. Over 2 years later 5/6 of them now have 1000 views and 70% readership. Not my most successful stuff in terms of views but people found my content later due to newer articles went back and read them (hence the higher percentage of readers). So it all builds towards where you are heading. Keep at it!