This week’s highlighted project comes courtesy of a community of developers who hope that their codebase will be used to foster communities like theirs, focused on education and collaboration among peers of any skill level. Dev.to’s codebase is open-source as of last week week and the community-building platform’s developers think that further community involvement in development will lead to great things.
“If you are coming from elsewhere on the web, and are not familiar with dev.to, we are a large online community of software developers committed to teaching one another, building our careers, and generally making software development a more collaborative, humane endeavor,” Ben Halpern, founder and webmaster at DEV explained in the blog post announcing the release. “We host articles and discussions that span from beginner to advanced, and as we grow we always work to foster a constructive environment that supports diverse use cases. As long as it is about code or the developer experience/life, all forms of blog posts and discussions are welcome.”
Halpern made sure to clarify in the post that this release is not simply a library for creating the types of community-driven communication platforms that dev.to embodies, but the for-profit company’s entire codebase. “However, that is a perfectly valid use case in the future,” Halpern wrote in a post leading up to the release. “If you are interested in contributing such that we can eventually help people stand up their own version of this platform for their own business or society, we’ll definitely welcome that input.”
The platform is a Ruby on Rails app with a Preact front-end. The company is hard at work on native apps for iOS and Android but say its technology choices are fluid.
“We are far from devotees to any one style, and while we are not going to change too much over night, we will encourage healthy discussions and debates over the choices along the way,” Halpern wrote. “We also have hard dependencies on some of our external services, but it’s all up for change as we grow. These discussions will be half the fun!”
The project’s source can be found at it’s GitHub repository under the GNU General Public License, which the company says fits its ideology and use cases well.
