🌍 Where Are DEV Users Coming From?

As you may already know, dev.to has an API to fetch articles and users.

Let's give it a try with my favorite HTTP client, httpie:

http https://dev.to/api/users/1

{
    "github_username": "benhalpern",
    "id": 1,
    "joined_at": "Dec 27, 2015",
    "location": "Brooklyn, NY",
    "name": "Ben Halpern",
    "profile_image": "https://res.cloudinary.com/practicaldev/image/fetch/s--DOU9qJSH--/c_fill,f_auto,fl_progressive,h_320,q_auto,w_320/https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/user/profile_image/1/f451a206-11c8-4e3d-8936-143d0a7e65bb.png",
    "summary": "A Canadian software developer who thinks he’s funny.",
    "twitter_username": "bendhalpern",
    "type_of": "user",
    "username": "ben",
    "website_url": "http://benhalpern.com"
}

What I first noticed is that id seems to be auto-incremented.
After some tries, I quickly found out the total number of users on dev.to: around 119000.
It gives me the idea to scrape all the users public data and try to play with it.

Let's try with this command:

for i in {1..119000}; do http https://dev.to/api/users/$i >> users.dev.to.json && echo "," >> users.dev.to.json && echo "https://dev.to/api/users/$i"; done

After a few hours running in the background, I finally got all the users in my JSON file.

I ended up by importing the JSON file in a mongodb collection using NoSQLBooster.

There isn't many information in the users' profile, but two of them worth having a look at them: joined_at and location. It could be very interesting to have a diagram showing the progression of registrations through time. Maybe I'll do it some day, but for now, let's compute some statistics on users' location.

I used two queries to compute the statistics. This one helped me to get the big trends in people's location:

db.getCollection("users.dev.to").aggregate(
    {"$group": {_id: "$location", count:{$sum:1}}}
).sort("-count")

Then, I use another query to get the count of people per location:

db.getCollection("users.dev.to").find({"location": /\bdublin\b/i})

The conclusions are the following:

Most of the users (90%) don't fill their location.
16.3% of the users who filled their location are from USA.
5.8% are from India.
4.9% are from UK.
4% are from Japan.
3.8% are from Germany.

Let's have a look at the full statistics below:

Note: these numbers are one month old, but they give a good overview of the trends.

Thanks for reading!