Welcome to our annual update everyone 
2023 can arguably be seen as the year of AI (perhaps in particular, ChatGPT) and that has certainly been reflected here on Devtalk with the number of AI and ChatGPT related news/threads (which in turn has been reflected in our stats - we broke another one of our records last year, where we served over 750k posts in a single month!)
We’ve also seen more lawsuits against AI related companies too (again, mostly against the creators of ChatGPT) and this of course once again raises the question of ethics and who these new technologies will ultimately benefit. Like most of you, we love technology, but we also recognise that the state of the world right now currently operates against most people - this, in part, is why we run platforms like this, to (along with the the obvious stuff like to chat and learn about dev topics!) to help encourage ethical developers, startups and companies. We feel this is incredibly important because out of almost all professions, you, believe it or not, may have more influence in how humanity progresses than you might imagine - far more than most other professions.
The power of future technology is mind-boggling, and you’re at its helm! We hope you use that power wisely, and as always, we can’t wait to see what you’ll all be getting up to in 2024! 
Here’s what we’ve got in store for you ourselves…
Our 2024 Giveaways!
We’re back with our awesome giveaways, giving away 5 prizes every month!
-
Win ANY ebook from PragProg - Two winners every month!!
-
Win ANY ebook from Manning - Two winner every month!!
-
Win a course from The Pragmatic Studio - worth up to $200
For those of you who want even more chances to win, we have similar giveaways on the Elixir Forum and the Erlang Forums too!
Discounts
Can’t wait? We got you covered!
-
35% off any ebook published by PragProg!
Simply use coupon codedevtalk.com -
45% off any ebook, print book or video published by Manning!
Simply use coupon codedevtalk.com -
20% off ANY Pragmatic Studio course!
Simply use coupon codedevtalk.com
Don’t forget to check out our amazing sponsors who help make all this possible! 
In The Spotlight!
Proudly in association with our friends at The Pragmatic Bookshelf, we’ll be hosting more Spotlights in our Spotlight section. These will consist of an interview followed by the thread being opened up to questions from you, the Devtalk community.
But there’s more!
One participant from the thread will be randomly selected to win one of that author’s books if the Spotlight in about a PragProg author or one of PragProg’s books if it’s a non-author Spotlight.
As a highly community-orientated platform we love things like this! Thank you PragProg for helping make it happen!
Members of the Year
Platforms like this would be nothing without helpful members like you. Whether that’s through keeping members updated by regularly posting news or other interesting threads, documenting your learning journey or encouraging others to, welcoming and posting in other people’s threads or simply helping them the good old fashioned way by answering questions. If you consistently add value to the community we are likely to notice - and we aim to recognise and reward another 50 of you this year too - with the prize of an eBook of your choice from PragProg or Manning!
Last year’s MOTYs
We’ve got so many awesome members here - all of you adding value in your own way, whether it’s by being active, helpful, or using the platform to announce blogs and podcasts - it all helps and we’ve tried to recognise as many of you as we can. If you’ve posted content that has received attention or helped in some way then it’s a good chance we noticed …but it would be impossible to include everyone so please forgive us if you didn’t make the list. (We’ve also just focused on the main Devtalk areas, rather than the book errata sections.)
If you’re named here thank you and well done - and please read the bit at the end as we have an ebook for you!
As a thank you, we have an ebook for each of our winners! We have 25 books from PragProg and 25 from Manning so if you are listed above, please PM @AstonJ with your first choice from one publisher and your second choice from the other (please also include your full name, email address and country of residence) - we’ll then allocate these on a first come first serve basis 
Book Clubs
If you’ve been interested in learning something but haven’t got to it, or love the idea of reading a book with others or documenting your journey in a more solo journal - let us know! We have a number of books to give away as part of this initiative and would love to see more book clubs going, and if you have some friends or colleagues to join you even better! PM @AstonJ with your interests and we’ll see what we can come up with 
Devtalk Plans for 2024
With the forum and community growing we moved to a bigger and better server a few weeks ago, and this was also in part in preparation of our future projects!
Since Discourse is in the process of adding some of our most-wanted features, such as thread fields (to help enforce proper submission of threads in certain sections) and the ability for mods to provide feedback for items in the review queue, this has given us some breathing space and got us thinking about how best to add even more value to the community - and we’ve got a few projects in mind!
If you like what we’ve done here and on the other forums we manage then we think you’re going to love what we’ve got in store for you, and while we’re not quite ready to give you the full details just yet, here’s a sneak peek of one of them:
Intrigued? Excited!? We hope so! 
Keep an eye on our members only sections as we’ll be posting more details soon!
Thank you for being a part of our community everyone, we hope you all have a happy, healthy and prosperous 2024 …and we look forward to dev-talking more with you this year!
Thanks alot! 