It's been a while since I did an AMA, and I'll be hanging around the site on support this weekend, so post some questions and I'll try to respond to a bunch today and over the weekend.
FYI: If you want to follow along, you may want to click the "three dots" in the actions menu and subscribe to Post Author Comments which will allow you to get notifications when I respond to comments here.
About me: I'm a coder from Canada. I live in the New York City area (no longer right in the city). I'm a semi-self-taught developer with a bit of formal CS education. I created this community and brought @jess and @peter on to help make it survive, thrive and grow as a business we could work on full-time.
Ask me anything!
Top comments (111)
It's no secret that dev.to is one of the most positive and supportive developer communities.
What do you think is the most important thing when moderating a community to ensure that everyone feels welcome and included?
The term I use in my own mind to talk about this is "chaotic empathy".
People are wired to be empathetic but mostly in a known scenario where it's pretty clear who is being affected by what.
Since anyone could be reading anything on DEV from any context, we need to account for the "chaos" of the situation. We can't be overly consumed with any one solution for one problem, we really need to be thinking holistically about what might affect people which ways.
I draw on a lot of personal anecdotes and then try to apply those scenarios to folks who might feel the same way but are in different scenarios in terms of their personal vulnerabilities, background, insecurities, etc. And I've tried to meet and befriend folks from as many genuinely different backgrounds as possible and really try to find ways my world view needs shifting.
Software developers tend to solve for problems they most care about. I truly believe that we care about certain interpersonal and safety-oriented human needs more than the creators of Twitter and other platforms ever did—and it's hard to retrofit those values onto a project or company after the fact.
As promised:
Secret to these luscious locks?
Wow, that is an epic follow-through!
And, apparently, still a closely guarded secret.
Hey Ben,
Love the site, it's everything a tech community should be! It first caught my attention with the How I Made this Website Hella Fast Without Overcomplicating Things post on Reddit.
I saw you allow for canonical urls to reference posts on other websites, really stoked for that. I was thinking about cross posting some things I'd written in the past here, but I don't actually see many other people doing that kind of thing. Do you think the community reacts differently to cross posts, and if so, how?
Thanks!
Cross-posting is very very very welcome and we are building more and more tooling around that use case
Project Benatar: Fending Off Data Black Holes
Ben Halpern ・ Jun 17 ・ 6 min read
Thanks so much!
How the heck did it come to your mind to go from posting hilarious fake O'Reilly book covers on Twitter to build a Medium-killer community of developers?
(Which I knew it was going to be a huge hit since day one... Yeah, it immediately seemed that good to me.)
Thanks for being such a longtime supporter!
To apply a general theme to this question, I'd say I'm good at identifying bullshit. Satire like the parody book covers was a real opportunity to flex my bullshit sniffer in terms of my everyday life as a coder. Smelling out those hidden, unsaid things about life in software.
And the bullshit there is that the whole world runs on software but we still have no idea what we're doing as a whole and just try our best.
Likewise, I thought there was a lot of clearly "unfinished work" to be done in the realms of publishing, social media, community, software development, etc. So beyond gently criticizing what was funny about the whole thing, I also want to be part of the solution. I think collaborating, communicating and generally finding community is critical for humanity and it will never be the same as before software/internet.
So they're two sides of the same coin and I've always just tried to make the most of what I can do. Lately I've been super consumed with the building side. I hope to dive back into jokes at some point, but when I do I want it to be in the form of a sitcom. I don't have the time right now to write speculatively but if anyone at Netflix is listening, I'd love to pen a tech-related satire to rival Silicon Valley on HBO if you'll commission me upfront for the work 😄
Hahaha I would so watch that!
But, in the meanwhile, I'm just so glad to be part of this community ✌
What resources did you use for self-teaching?
I used Lynda.com (I pirated the videos because I was broke af but later bought a subscription to pay it back).
"Self-teaching" isn't really the right term because I had a Lynda teacher. I just didn't have anybody grading my work or answering questions per se.
Thank you for confessing to the thing we've all done but would never admit to.
As a contributor to the codebase, I think it's awesome that you opened sourced the project. I remember the day it went from private to public. It was a pretty crazy day.
dev.to is now open source
Ben Halpern ・ Aug 8 '18 ・ 4 min read
Once you flicked the switch and open sourced dev.to, was there an "oh shit, was this a good idea opening this up to the world?" moment or was it more "Yeah! YOLO!"?
1:
Yes!
2:
Yes! But not rushing anything. We need to staff up and/or get organized enough to have someone full-time dedicated to this part of the site and dedicated to supporting community members who want to ship in. We currently have bigger fires to put out than the editor 😄
@ben I recently joined Dev, though I had been a reader for past 2 years.
I made a small chrome extension that allows me to send data from zettlr editor(github.com/Zettlr/Zettlr) included in the extension to v1 editor text box.
zettlr allows me to preview the posts while writing it and allows for formatting shortcuts.
hopefully I'll launch it next week on github as open source, but I want to working before that. I doesn't run correctly on linux or Mac, only in windows at the moment.
If you were not in tech and could do anything you wanted, what would it be?
For me, perhaps from watching too much Food Network, I'd want to open a burger shop. We would just do really good burgers. I really like burgers.
I'm legit opening a vegetarian burger place at some point soon. I also really like burgers, but don't eat meat anymore so all the more reason to bring my meatless burgers to the world.
I'm dragging my feet on some of the steps here but I 100% intend to make this burger joint my side project. And if I can be helpful in allowing you to reach your burger dreams let me know!
Otherwise, I'd love to write a sitcom, but I know it would be a stupid amount of work and stress so not something I'd embark on unless it really was my new life's work. I used to really want to do that but thinking about it now makes me a bit queasy by picturing the work involved.
That's so cool if you open a veggie burger joint! I was vegetarian for a couple of years and then when I went to Barcelona for work, I found it hard to be vegetarian there, so I started eating seafood again and some chicken. When I got back to Canada, it just kind of stuck, but I still eat a lot of vegetarian meals.
Will it be called Ben's Burgers? 😉
It will be called BB’s Burgers and BB does indeed stand for Ben’s Burgers.
I’m 100% not kidding with any of this. I’m glad I get to say it out loud.
PS I’m gonna put all the recipes on GitHub and let the community make PRs it they can improve on them.
Wat is your favorite meat free burger recipe?
Didn't know you were vegetarian. Great decision.
Did you always know the DEV community was going to be such a success, and if so how did you know? We’re super curious if you know how communities are made, since you’ve built one yourself. With the help of the amazing DEV team too, of course!
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!
I started learning how to code some months ago and felt like it was super hard to decide how to get started, because of the endless possibilities available online.
What's your advice for new and aspiring developers today? How should they start?
That's a good question.
What comes to mind right away: If you can establish a project you can commit to, your choices on what to learn can be guided by context. Don't learn just to learn (unless you think that way, but it doesn't sound like it).
If you can come up with an interesting project you want to see in the world, you can learn at just the right pace to create the thing. And then once it's "done" you don't need to jump on to something new. You could refine that initial thing if you're still excited by it. You'll learn a lot in this process too.
I really like this answer. I got stuck in well if I want to do this I should learn this but if I want to learn that I should learn this first and on and on only to get all twisted up. Love the site!