Discussion and Comment of the Week

The DEV team is starting a new weekly roundup series to highlight what we believe to be the most thoughtful and/or interesting discussion of the week. We'll also be highlighting one particularly cool comment in each installment. 🙌

There are loads of awesome conversations happening on DEV across various tags (#discuss, #help, and #watercooler to name a few...) so our picks are going to be a somewhat subjective, but we'll try to be as fair as we can in our quest to spotlight these discussions and comments.

So, why are we doing this?

For one, we want to have some fun and make folks feel good! 😄

But also, we think that the DEV Community is particularly special because of the kind and thoughtful discussions happening between community members. We want to encourage folks to participate in discussions and reward those who are initiating or taking part in conversations across the community. After all, a community is made possible by the people interacting inside it.

We have such a great gathering of folks from different backgrounds, at various stages in their dev journeys, all with unique perspectives and something worth sharing! Let's keep the discussions rolling, stay friendly, and help one another out when possible, and enjoy each others' company.

We hope you enjoy this new series! Let's get to it...

Discussion of the Week

This week we'd like to highlight "Those of you who've worked as a contractor and as a full-time employee, which did you prefer?" posted by @moopet.

Those of you who've worked as a contractor and as a full-time employee, which did you prefer?

Ben Sinclair ・ Apr 18 '22

#career #watercooler #discuss

It's common for devs to work both contract jobs and full-time positions, so this one feels particularly relevant to many folks here. Plenty of community members chimed in to talk about their personal experiences as both contractors & full-time team members and there was a lot of great guidance given around the pros/cons of both.

If you have any thoughts on the matter, don't be shy! Head on over to the post and chime in.

Comment of the Week

We're choosing to spotlight this particularly helpful comment from @marissab in response to "I want to start writing about development, but I’m a beginner. Is this is a bad idea?" which was posted by Sloan, DEV's mascot, anonymously on behalf of a community member.

Marissa B • Apr 19 '22 • Edited on Apr 19 • Edited

I want to post about the problems I'm facing, the solutions I'm coming up with, and the different concepts I'm learning, but I don't know if I can speak with enough authority on these topics yet to do so.

So don't speak with authority about it. Speak to what you're doing and showing your process instead.

If you spin it as "This is the learning process I'm taking and what I found - what feedback do you have?" I think it'd do great. You'd be framing it as seeking advice and sharing your experience instead of coming off like you're trying to be an expert on something. People working on cars do this all the time on older forums where they find an issue, try a couple options, then present what they did and ask what others have done. You don't have to be an expert on a specific car part to try out a couple things and bumble around to make things work better. Same goes for programming.

Asking for feedback is a good way to engage the experienced audience too. Even if you solved your problem and met your requirement of making the thing work, someone else could chime in with "Hey, next time give (this other method) a go" or "You may want to look up (other thing) to try". Even just getting the name of something to Google can kick you way ahead in progress.

There were so many thoughtful, helpful comments posted to this prompt that it's really hard to choose just one. It's awesome to see how kind and encouraging the community has been in response to new devs writing while they're in their early days of learning. Marissa's comment really shines here as it's particularly instructive on how a new dev might shape their content to fit the stage that they're at. It encourages folks that are new to development to be honest & open in their writing and reminds them to show their work & be open to instructive criticism. All great advice!

That's all

Again, we hope you enjoy this new series! Keep the helpful discussions & thoughtful comments coming, and stay tuned to this series for next week's picks.