 Hey everyone welcome back to the state of the web this week We have Jess Lee and Ben Halpern two of the co-founders of dev2 They're gonna tell us about their developer community and what they've observed about the state of web development. Let's get started Right Jess and Ben thank you both for being here, so I want to ask you first What is dev2 and how did it all get started? Yeah, so a couple years ago Ben started a Twitter account called the Practical Dev and He used it as a place to just share his like programming woes, you know But also a lot of helpful resources that he found across the internet and through there He developed lots of really great relationships and realized that there was a really beautiful community on Twitter people who want to just talk about You know the news and in software development and their perspectives, but didn't necessarily Like I feel like they had a community where they could do that And so Ben started dev2 where he could blog about daily life of being a developer share resources and people started asking if they could Blog with him and that's really how dev2 was born and now Lots of other like it's it's a community full of developers publishing And just like connecting with one another on on web development anywhere from You know like career stuff like interview questions to really deep dives into certain tutorials on You know technologies that only a few people would know about yeah That's super well put the community is really broad and ranging and that just so much we thought we could do with our own platform There's people creating their own programming languages, but also people just kind of starting with HTML for the first time it's really a broad ecosystem and It's really really excited to kind of go to work every day and try to make it better So what sets dev2 apart from other developer communities and how does that play into the name itself dev2? You can think of dev2 like dev together We also loved having dev as the URL Because you can like if you want to find my my my profile and dev2 you just go like dev2. Just so it's really about like the developer And as for how we're different from other communities I joined this community like join the software developer community as a whole Through by way of like being self-taught and through bootcamp. So I didn't really have a traditional background or a computer science degree and it was very isolating and also as like, you know a woman attack I was in a minority and also a person of color And I just didn't feel like there was an existing community that was like really welcoming that I could find like other faces that looked like me So that's like one reason but also a lot of there's like lots of useful Software developer communities out there from like question answer sites to places where you can really talk about projects and Different apps, but there wasn't a place where you could just talk about everything related to web development Like you know you can ask Questions to the community that are really specific But then you can also ask like, you know general trend questions And there really wasn't a place where both those types of content lived I've also heard you describe it as a meet-up or like a conference. What does that mean? Yeah, we try to really sort of mimic the awesomeness that happens sort of when software developers come together when they When they meet when they sort of I have off-the-cuff discussions It's really sort of you know people gather this flies on the walls. There's discussions that happen There's a lot of illuminating ideas that happen We really think when we think about our product and our community and our platform We really think of that as our sort of metaphor like if we were gonna have a conference that kind of went on forever And people could really kind of share ideas Meeting in the hallways like presentations and also respect one another as if they were sort of in the same room together We really sort of think of these ideas as like guiding lights for like all these ideas have Been around forever. They just haven't really existed very neatly on on the web and on these sort of platforms Yeah, if you think about web like in the early days There's a lot of anonymity and people Are you know can become more passionate about certain subjects when they can be anonymous? And so on dev2 we really encourage people like when you're commenting on a post like really think about like would you say this to somebody? After they spoke at a conference like you know It's this how you would engage with them and that's the attitude that we want people to take when engaging with one another So you run a community for web developers, but of course you are web developers yourselves How has being a part of this community helped you grow as web developers and at a meta level How has that helped dev2 website itself? It's helped me grow a whole lot Especially as somebody who came from a bootcamp. I it's amazing I wrote this article about just how lucky I am to get to like dog food every single day Because I'm just like learning as I go and my product literally informs like how I work Yeah, I don't I don't think anyone uses and benefits from the platform in development as much as we do because we really sort of like We really know how to sort of make use of it how to really foster the right discussions I mean just today we had a we had a database issue with with postgres and we We went to the site to To kind of look for answers and people actually they understood the context from which we were coming because we've talked about a lot of This stuff before we sort of developed a canonical relationship with the people who might actually now have the answers for us It's been it's been really really fantastic and in fact that sort of little help feature We talked about it for a while, and then I finally built it because I really needed help on something so It's really funny that way we we really come to work and we can genuinely say that our team Our small team, there's just a handful of us But we we go to work really like feeling like we care about what we're building which is just not easy to say if we were building You know real estate insurance software I've also seen you're planning to open source the code for your website. What's the significance of that? We think there's something really beautiful about community that can literally build itself And I actually feel like that helped us today because we've invited some early contributors into the repo and they've won already so many contributions, which is awesome, but you know the people who are in in In our code base like just messaged us like immediately when they know something was wrong and like we just have more eyes on the code now That's really great Yeah, yeah open source is just it's just wonderful And it's just great to be a part of and we really know that the value of our community is in the humans So if we want to we don't want to hoard our code we want to share it with everyone and if if they want to sort of build interesting things that fit their own sort of Use cases that maybe just us as a small team We wouldn't ever get around to but people really care about using this platform in this community So we really think the opportunity there is gonna be really really fantastic and we're just excited about like what could come of this They're like magical unknown So the members on your community are constantly publishing new content What are some of the themes you're seeing developers discuss and is there anything? That they are talking about more or like trending today people love talking about get It's like one of the most popular topics on the platform probably because almost every developer uses get as version control So that that's always like a ongoing popular topic Yeah, on the web development frontier specifically There's a lot of areas of like general sort of like piqued interest like anytime this topic comes up people People really kind of want to know where people are coming from web assembly Progressive web apps People have a lot of opinions on things like accelerated mobile pages and just kind of the web API How it's evolving and how people are thinking about it because these are areas where like there's not always a yes or no answer There's a like what are people thinking about this kind of answer and there's a lot of you know Like does this bring more complication to my life or less complication? Is it worth learning all this new technology or or not like? It's sometimes not just the API is where people have questions It's the like how should I even be thinking about this and the web is so Move so quickly, but there's a lot of stuff you might not need to know so you really need to kind of like keep your ear down and And try to kind of keep up with what you should be learning and and it's definitely People just definitely want to kind of keep up with some of these newer web technologies So just what are some of the pain points that developers are experiencing like what's causing the biggest headaches? I've seen a lot of articles around PWAs. I think there's a lot of clarity that needs to be Given surrounding service workers Different browsers are supporting it in different ways And I think that's kind of a like a pretty big headache for people right now So on the show the state of the web we like to look at big data about websites themselves that developers are building But what's really interesting is that you've started a survey of the web developers So now we can learn a lot about them themselves. So what are you finding in this data set? So we asked a huge range of like 40 questions and some of them include how well a developer feels like they understand GDPR From there to What kind of frameworks do you have experience in yeah, and we asked a lot of questions about people's sort of opinions about which web technologies are moving faster than others which are better understood things like that and So probably the information that the responses are really interesting and we're seeing a lot of interesting correlations But we probably shouldn't get into too many specifics so we don't bias the answers too much That's right. So the survey is still active, right? Where can people take that? Yeah dev to slash survey And it's it's about 40 questions But we tried to make it streamlined enough it should only take four or five minutes and we'll learn Whether or not dog people prefer certain frameworks or whether or not cat people prefer certain frameworks That will definitely open up to certain interesting correlational Analysis it's great to have this pulse on the developer community I think it's so important for this feedback loop so where we can make developers lives easier and of course improve the Experiences of the users Jess and Ben. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having us Yeah, thanks so much Rick So if you'd like to join the dev2 community visit them at dev.to and of course take the survey at dev to slash survey Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time