Need a mentor?
Need collaborators on a new project?
Need conference talk proposals?
Need work?
The DEV Community needed a classifieds section.
π DEV Listings
DEV Listings is a dedicated area where members and organizations can post about opportunities ranging from upcoming events, to job openings, to mentorship offers, and everything in-between.
Importantly, listings get a dedicated space adjacent to the blogosphere that is the rest of the DEV Community ecosystem. By providing space for seekers and offerers of services, we will help proper collaboration happen while also improving the quality of the content on the rest of the platform by reducing the pressure to "plug" things within content where it may not be useful or relevant to the reader.
Naturally, this product represents a business model. Creating a listing will typically be free, but the more commercially-oriented listings (e.g. jobs) will usually be paid for. More on how this will work below. It is important to us that we make money in a community-oriented, rather than the "you are the product" kind of way. And we feel like this is in that spirit. It is also important that we not try to monetize "content" in a deceptive, heavy-handed way like a certain shared blogging platform that occupies the space between "small" and "large".
Ultimately we feel like this is an additive element of the platform. And since we are open source, you can track or contribute to any changes we make along the way.
How to make a listing
Creating a listing costs "credits". We awarded all existing members as of this weekend with at least five credits each, plus more credits for badges earned. Going forward, everyone will earn five credits for every badge they earn. This system makes it effectively free to publish a listing for folks in the community, but also acts as an anti-spam measure to ensure that listings cost "something".
Credits can also be purchased in order to create the more "costly" listings, such as job posts.
π Create a Listing
In the future, we will integrate credits into other parts of the site where doing so could improve the community.
On the technical side
Listings were built using Preact on the frontend and Algolia to manage the serving and filtering of content. You'll find that the experience is blazing fast due to these choices.
This is the type of application feature I've always loved building, and we will be leaning more and more into this type of development in the future. We recently rewrote our Reading List feature using a similar approach:
Thank you
Every launch must come with a major thank you to the community that has believed in our project since day 1. The kindness, and compassion, and trust demonstrated by all of you has helped us grow to where we are today. Together, we're making the software world be more open and feel more like a community.
One last thing
π DEV Listings on Product Hunt π»β¬οΈ
Happy coding!
Top comments (42)
One more thing:
I can never keep track of conference CFPs. And in general I hate that I'm supposed to be plugged in to Twitter so I don't miss some of this stuff. This was the one part I was dying to create for my own purposes.
If you are part of organizing an upcoming conference, please submit a CFP listing! I hope we can become the dedicated space for getting the word out. We have a kind, engaged, diverse community of developers who would love to know which conferences to submit to.
π
Also if you have any ideas for additional categories, please let us know!
Also if you don't like the grid layout, we'll have configuration coming soon! (In addition to other useful follow-on features).
The only issue I have encountered so far is with replying...if the poster has not enabled open inbox, there's no way to actually reply unless they happen to list contact information on GitHub or their personal website.
It would be very helpful if the instructions on the create a listing page mentioned how to change your inbox settings so that others can reply. Bonus points if it can detect automatically if you have already opted-in to open inbox!
Yep, we didnβt get to build out every path and feature before we saw how folks were using it but stuff along these lines is in the works π
Thanks a lot for the input to help guide us in the right direction.
Happy to help! This site is awesome...the community is a lot more positive and mature than some of the other communities I used to frequent for programming-related discussions. This weekend, I am going to try to look into some of the open issues and see if there is anything I can assist with, I would love to be able to give back to the community!
Love this thinking. As a Developer Advocate, I struggle to find a maintained list of not only CFPs but also developer conferences to consider for sponsorships.
For CFPs, one thing I've found useful is the cfp land twitter feed: twitter.com/cfp_land There's a website also, but I haven't used it much. Also, there's twitter.com/mozTechCFPs
Nice job with this! I'll be listing a Heroku job opening shortly (sneak peek).
And I just found this! cfpcalendar.com/ which covers CFPs but something similar for the actual conferences: airtable.com/shrR7hf53OElntauf/tbl...
source: twitter.com/kantrn/status/11261592...
I'm organising JScamp and the first CSScamp in Barcelona on July 17-18-19 and that would be very helpful πBig thanks for all your contribution to the community!
I'm helping to organise Pycon in Singapore for this year will definitely put in a CFP for when we are ready. It's awesome to have multiple awesome features.
Love It!
It'd be interesting to be able to sort the listings based on things related to the submitter's activity on the site. Incentivize people to be more involved in the community instead of just dumping their listing and leaving. (Not sure if that's going to be a problem, just a thought)
Thatβs a really good thought!
I have those occasionally!
Love this idea! Great mix between business proposition and community value!
I know you guys replaced the membership style support with this, but I'd probably be willing to support with a monthly purchase or a credit or too as well! Just another thought/idea!
Thanks Corey!
Yes. We gently retired memberships in conjunction with this. We also retired the dedicated mentorship area. Both were the right ideas but rushed and never quite right.
This was a moment to regroup and get rid of a lot of technical debt from the past year. In some capacity, all the good ideas that came with memberships will live on in the future, we just needed to refresh.
Anyone looking to "buy in" and/or "invest" in dev.to in a way, can definitely do so with bulk credit purchases of some kind. You get a discount by buying upfront and there will definitely be interesting ways to spend them in the future, both in giving back to the community but also helping your own career.
We haven't rolled everything out yet, but unlike memberships, where we were seeking reasons for the value exchange to make sense, this time we're overflowing with possible scenarios, we just have to implement it cohesively.
We have a very strong platform to grow from here. Both in terms of the community, as well as the codebase. The listings/credit system will also be valuable for future communities that are spawned from the generalized open source version of the platform that we're chipping away at.
It's been fun and your support has been amazing Corey!!
Love everything about it!
As you mentioned this would replace both memberships and mentorships but I feel like it can also replace the
events page.
Thumbs up for the occasional weekend sprint βοΈβοΈ
Yep.
The way we're thinking about this is that the listings area is the window in to all of these things and allow us to get as "horizontal" as we like in terms of covering mentorship, collabs, events, etc. But if we want dedicated, structured features, those could be added back in after at a later date.
I could see a future where listings are a thing, but from listings you could create a dedicated "event" page with all the fixings like RSVP, date as viewable on a calendar, etc. and listings wouldn't have to know about this stuff. For now listings are free space that only have to adhere to a few protocols in terms of categories and tags. For events you can link out to Eventbrite etc. if you need a dedicated lander but we could eventually provide that as an option.
The same goes with something like job listings. Right now we take the simplest approach to sort of kick you off to some kind of job lander where you can go through whatever dedicated funnel you want to. In the future we could complement that with an option to allow folks to go through the initial funnel right on-site.
In the past we've made the mistake of trying to build all these vertical funnels ourselves instead of acting as the glue. We ultimately shipped a bunch of 80%-finished features and never had the resources to properly maintain and iterate. So we're back to acting as the glue and if we ever want to go vertical in the future as a progressive enhancement over listings, we can take our time and do it right.
Both for job listings and available for hire I would suggest that you use a standardized format. Perhaps take the format from HN hiring. That would make that much easier to scan the listings.
Also it would be nice if the properties of the standardized format could be searchable.
This makes sense, thanks for the feedback.
Great work @ben and team. Awesome stuff. As awesome as this cat shooting fireballs out of its mouth.
How long do listings last for?
Great job! Is there a protocol for responding to the listings (like a mentor request)? Just message them through dev.to?
I think that's supposed to be the idea...but if the listing owner hasn't enabled open inbox, then you're SOL unless they have contact information on their GitHub profile or personal website.
I have not tried to create a listing yet, but it would be helpful if the instructions encouraged the user to enable open inbox or if there was a way to initiate a chat from the message listing.
Thanks. I have just an informal response that I wanted to make like "I have some, but not all of the skills listed in your mentor request. If you are still looking for someone, let me know."
Well done to everyone who was involved in this! It's a great addition to the site and fits in perfectly to the dev.to ecosystem.
Will be really interesting to see how this evolves, as there are so many possibilities! π
Just use it, can you make markdown doesn't count for the character count?
By examples, links, the brackets, the parenthesis count and also de url.
For URLs, my suggestion would be to add them as a field in the form.
Yep, this is on the TODO list but something we didnβt think of as critical for launch. Thanks for bringing it up.
Thanks, in the meanwhile I can share my workarround; use bit.ly. By example I got bit.ly/cutiko_resume and reduced signinficantly the url length from the storage original