Devtalk's first birthday update!

Can you believe it’s been a year since we went live!? Time certainly has flown by but what an incredible year it’s been: in the last 12 months we’ve served over a whopping 4M pages and have also managed to implement several key features making us a compelling platform, that, hopefully, helps us stand out from the crowd :sunglasses:

Here’s some of those features, along with how we’ve compartmentalised things to accommodate the needs of devs with their varying degrees of interest and time:

  • Hot-lists on our front-page and portals - particularly useful for those who prefer to follow or catch up with things as and when they get time.

  • The forum focused on our most active discussions - perfect for our most active members!

  • Automated news posters for official language and framework news (as well as semi-automated news posters for news from across the web) - these help ensure there’s always something new to look at or get your teeth into.

  • Book portals and a dedicated errata section for our friends at PragProg.

No matter how much time you have or whatever your dev needs or interests are, hopefully Devtalk has something for you!

Now that we’re off to a great start and have these key areas of Devtalk in place, we can shift attention to our next area of focus: our book clubs, learning initiatives, and building community!

As stated in our Mission Statement we really want Devtalk to help you be the best you can be and many of you will know in this industry a huge part of that is a continual quest of learning.

We’re hoping we can help by supporting a significant number of book clubs per year :grin:

To begin with we’ll be focusing on books from the Pragmatic Bookshelf, so if you (and perhaps a friend!) would like to take part in a book club or journal centred around a PragProg book, just let us know and we’ll get you set up with a copy! While we haven’t worked out all the details yet (whether to have one large book club per book per year or several smaller ones) PM @AstonJ with your interest and we’ll add you to the list.

Book clubs are great not just for those taking part, but can be fun and interesting for everyone following along too - just as we’ve seen with some of our existing ones! This focus on learning also helps differentiate Devtalk from other similar sites out there as well as helping shine a light on the hard work done by all those talented authors (many of which are members here!) so it really does benefit us all. While speaking of initiatives like this, they are only possible because of our wonderful partners and sponsors - if you get a moment, please check them out here.

We’re also at the stage where we can now start thinking about future related projects. One such idea is building an open source blogging platform - one that we could host at blogs.devtalk.com but also one which could be self-hosted, easily and economically. We love independent blogs and bloggers - they have much more personality than more generic platforms that we see a lot of these days.

It’s just one of many ideas, but needless to say we’re very excited about the sort of things we, as a community, could potentially work on together!

While talking about updates, we’ve also made a few to our front-page. Our homepage will now show the hottest threads per period but restricted to threads posted in those periods - so only items posted in the last week can show in the ‘hot this week’ section, in the last month for the ‘hot this month’ section, etc. This makes it easier for users who view the homepage to see what’s the most interesting things that’s happened within those time-frames (rather than what the most active have been in those time-frames). The language and framework portals hot-lists will still be based on activity as that makes more sense for those interested in specific languages or frameworks (but we’ll see how things go).

Some of you may also recall that our longer term plans are to build a replacement community platform from scratch, and to help with that we were going to port our front-end/portal system over to a couple of other sites. One of those is now pretty much complete (just has to go live) and after that it should be a bit easier to port it to the other - when both of those are done we’ll finally have to time to get stuck into things like book clubs properly ourselves! That’s also when we’ll reach out to other communities to ask whether they would like to get involved with some too (but if a book club interests you please PM Aston sooner rather than later - as an existing member you’ll be put at the top of the list :wink:)

We are always beaming with ideas, but we better wrap things up before this update gets too long!

We’re really looking forward to seeing what the next 12 months holds for us and can’t wait to see where we all go from here… a year might well have passed, but this really is just the beginning!

Thank you all for being a part of our community - we can’t wait to talk, a whole lot more! :blue_heart:

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I am very pleased with the development and I really like the welcoming atmosphere and help of @AstonJ, author books @ferd. I really like the Journal functionality too.

I would like to describe the idea for implementation. It is microblogging based on reading a book. My example which I am develop right now. Now I am reading the book “Property-Based Testing with PropEr, Erlang, and Elixir” of The Pragmatic Programmers publisher and making notes to the Journal. It would be more correct if it was possible to make a personal microblog (journal) inside the Journal section of a certain book. Thus, readers can form microblog based on the material of the book and would contribute to improving own understanding, expanding (detailing) the author’s ideas, testing additional hypotheses, posting additional examples and illustrations of sometimes difficult topics to understand by that book reading.

My second idea. Within the functional programming language community, we have weekly book discussions using Discort. It would be great if the communities are aware of the opportunities that Devtalk offer. It would be correct if the readers of the books knew about such a possibility. To do this, in the mailing lists of publishers and on the pages of books, you need to place an information section about this possibility.

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Has it really only been a year? I feel that Devtalk has been part of my daily routine forever already! :smiley:

4M page views in 365 days ≈ 10,960 per day ≈ 7.6 per minute :exploding_head:

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So pleased that you like it here Anatolii - you’ve certainly settled in and very quickly become part of the Devtalk crew :sunglasses:

The custom rebuild will make making ‘micro’ posts a lot easier :wink: :smiley: (tho we probably won’t see it for a while yet)

You’re very much part of the furniture round here too Mads! :blush:

On the Elixir Forum we serve 1M a month… it’s 5 years old now but in its first year it served 1M for the whole year :nerd_face:

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I am very happy about that, @AstonJ ! :slightly_smiling_face: :+1:

We will look forward to this action. :blush:

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Can I contribute to this? If it is open source or otherwise?

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