Do you remember your first day of school?
You were probably about five or six years old, holding a lunchbox in one hand and nervously clutching your favourite toy in the other.
Everything was big and scary. The playground was filled with noise and commotion, and the classroom inspired nothing but confusion, its walls adorned with shapes, numbers, and letters that seemed little more than meaningless squiggles. All you wanted to do is cry and go home.
Sound familiar?
I don’t know about you, but my first day of school reminds me a lot of starting out as a developer. As a novice developer, there is so much going on, so many people, so many resources, and so many new words and symbols to learn that make absolutely no sense.
And I should know, I only started programming two months ago!
So, yes, I’m a total newbie, but within my short lifespan as a dev, I have already experienced the full spectrum emotion, from KMN I’m never going to use a computer again to OMG this is the best thing ever.
But not everything has felt quite so up and down.
Fortunately, there has been one feature of the developer journey that has provided me with constant, unwavering support throughout. It is pretty special and one of the things that makes being a dev so great. Can you guess what it is?
That’s right, it’s you, the developer community!
From finding solutions on Stack Overflow, to discussing ideas on Discord, and reading blog posts on Dev.to and Hashnode, I have already received incredible support and insight from the community.
In fact, it’s that all important word – community – that drew me to the world of programming in the first place. You see, unlike many of you, I am not learning to code with hopes of becoming a full-time developer. The reason I am learning to code is to better understand, and engage with, the developer community.
Pretty unusual, right? Well, let me explain.
Having come from a background in the social sciences, I have long been interested in communities. What makes communities successful? How do the best communities organise themselves? Why do some communities inspire action whereas others do not?
I am particularly interested in the relationship between online communities and mainstream social networking platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Right now, it’s clear that these platforms are not conducive to the development of cohesive online communities. Bigotry, divisiveness, and poor content run amok, and many of the most vibrant online communities take root elsewhere.
As such, I am trying to figure out whether some of the inherent conflicts between social media and forming strong online communities can be overcome.
And it is in search of an answer to this question that brought me knocking at the door of the dev community.
Much like a group of 25 million tech-savvy Mother Teresas, the global dev community is altruistic, passionate, and action-oriented. By studying this community and understanding what makes it so effective, I want to determine how traditional social networking platforms and incentive structures can be redesigned to better optimise for this type of engagement.
To learn more about this issue, I have started speaking to you, the community. I have had conversations with developers from Austria, India, Ukraine, and Tanzania (to name a few) discussing collaboration, communication, content, and everything in between.
So far, these chats have been incredibly insightful, so many thanks for all of your help, and I plan to cover the findings in a handful of blog posts over the next few weeks.
At the same time, I have teamed up with an experienced developer to put some of these learnings into action. We are working together to build a new social networking platform for developers – one that resembles existing solutions, but is specifically designed to nurture, rather than inhibit, positive growth in the community.
I will cover the specifics of the platform in more detail in a later post, but for those of you who are interested, we will be inviting a limited number of beta users onto the platform soon. Please feel free to join the waitlist here or get in touch with me directly to learn more.
In the meantime, I look forward to speaking to more of you, discovering more about the developer community, and devising new ways to improve the social networking experience!
Best wishes, Leo.
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