Dev.to is now open source | Hacker News Reader

Dev.to is now open source

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212 pointsagrinman62 comments

I was very surprised to open the gemfile and see a gem I wrote "s3_direct_upload" being used. Especially considering there is native support to upload files directly to s3 in rails 5.

Then I looked at the repo and realized, wow people are still using this gem, maybe I should maintain it.

I think this is a very common experience for maintainers.

I wonder if it would make sense to have a low friction way for people to notify maintainers that they’re using a library? I guess stars are a little bit like that but people star stuff they don’t use.

Or maybe have something that would automatically crawl github for you and find out how many projects depended on your library.

> Or maybe have something that would automatically crawl github for you and find out how many projects depended on your library.

There's already a form of this: https://github.com/waynehoover/s3_direct_upload/network/depe...

I learn something new everyday :)

Too bad the language/manifest support seems to be so limited. I wonder if others are in the works?

I wrote a Java natural language processing library in 2003, which is hosted on sourceforge.

I found out a week ago that HP is apparently has a team not only actively using it, but trying to build their own version which outperforms it. It amuses me greatly to see them publishing, with my stupid toy library citation from 2003 sitting first and second on every benchmark they use.

Not only is the content great on that site, the performance of it is absolutely spectacular. It's amazing how much people will jump to new fangled solutions when this site is a great example of what a well tuned Rails app can pull off from a UX perspective.

It's cool that it's open-sourced, but I've never been impressed with the content. Even when an article is about a topic I'm interested in, it's hard to get past the Buzzfeed-style "How do you do, fellow kids?" tone.

I think the content is getting better, and will continue to improve with time. It makes sense that it starts out geared towards young/new developers.

Yeah, I kinda feel the same way about the content. It's like 'coding, not programming', 'what was your biggest achievement today? Mine was no conflicts ;)' and other silly wholesome comments. But yeah, the performance of the site is phenomenal.

I feel like all the popular posts are from guys who tuck their collared shirts into their jeans.

It's not about tuning, the site just preloads content when you mouseover links, using a background service worker. That's pretty "new fangled" compared to most sites.

It's a bit of column A, a bit of column B. Mouse context is not always available. Tuning + preloading.

Maybe it's just me, but the homepage takes 2.74 seconds to load. I wouldn't exactly call that spectacular.

well tuned Rails app

...with some JS and Preact.

> the performance of it is absolutely spectacular

Hmm you're not wrong. Re the other comments here about preloading from mouse over events, it's very snappy on mobile too, so there's something else going on as well.

Very gratifying to see it's using Preact, since I've just chosen that for a project over React, largely due to smaller bundle sizes. Another post on HN today about Amp makes me feel it's the 90s all over again, with people shaving kB off here and there - and that's no bad thing!

"We run on a Rails backend with mostly vanilla JavaScript on the front end, and some Preact sprinkled in. One of our goals is to move to mostly Preact for our front end."

(what I consider the most interesting part)

It isn't clear what dev.to is, so I was looking for the About page. The link is at the bottom of the page, on a site with infinite scrolling. WTF

Got the same frustration just the other day this was here. Thehack was opening someother page and then was able to get to that link. Still don't understand much what the site is about. It feels like an interface to a specific subreddit.

I got frustrated with it and just tried appending /about, and it worked.

https://dev.to/about

This is a very cool approach to building a developer community: let developers contribute directly to the platform, both in code and in content.

Now somebody should make a PR to get rid of the nag notification for logged out users...

This one? https://github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to/pull/288

Merged.

Just whatever you do on dev.to don't ask hard questions to their AMA people. You'll get shadowbanned for that. (Even if the person handles the question well)

By "hard" do you mean "technically difficult", "socially awkward", "directly critical", or something else?

I've not yet commented on anything I've seen and would like to avoid irking their mods.

Directly Critical.

It's lovely to see a sane backend language being used instead of shitty Javascript.

Instead of just dismissing all Javascript backends, can you tell me why using Ruby is better than Javascript here?

Personally I do prefer Rails over something like Express too, but that's more of a personal preference. I don't see why todays Javascript backends are all "shit"?

One answer: left-pad.

Seriously though, the language itself is a matter of preference, but you can’t dismiss that the ecosystem sucks. Projects with hundreds of packages in their dependency graph seem common. I’ve worked on a (front-end) React project with 1,7k packages involved in the build process. That’s madness.

I agree, left-pad was a mess, but while the huge amount of dependencies is the thing people most complain about, is it actually unique to Javascript? Looking at the Gemfile for this project, it seems like you're also going to have to install hundreds of gems if you want to get this up and running.

That's react's fault more than anything. Use Mithril.js and reduce that number to only a few.

After reading your comment, I was underwhelmed when I found out that they are using Ruby on Rails.

For some time I was looking for a discovery mechanism in database topics.. so combining the usual tags yielded already a good blog I can follow. People can use their blog rss to crosspost, and the text contrast is friendly.

Awesome! Dev.to is a really nice community - I’m excited to see how this goes :).

This is all great, but their Readme.md doesn’t even explain what it is — they are just assuming that the reader knows!

To be fair, the url to the site is in the name and at the top of the repo

But the name doesn’t tell me anything! It’s generic!

Are the politics necessary?

https://github.com/thepracticaldev/dev.to/blob/65110550d8c22...

"<3</p>"

kay.

Why the web sucks in a nutshell.

Did you try hitting the edit button and submitting a PR? If only to spark the discussion with the maintainers.

Causing more politics. It's a catch-22. Once politics are brought up, it's hard to get rid of without causing more politics.

I don’t want my github history to show any hint of politics.

Potentially upsetting 50% of people seems like a silly move.

It could be that they simply don't care for that 50%, in which case, no skin off their backs.

Well if they are trying to grow a platform then it is skin off their backs. They don't have cooties.

Yes, politics are necessary.

this looks like HN for devs in their 20's

I'm in my early 20s and can confidently say this is the first I've heard of Dev.to and hopefully the last. I like emojis as much as the next millennial but this website looks awful.

... HN is for devs in their 20s.

No, it is not. I am 49 and I have no problems using HN. Also often it is clear, that some of the amazing answer found here, are from people way older than in the their 20s, because some of those answers requires the poster to have many many years of experience in order to come up with that answer.

There is a great mix of young and old here :)

Sorry; I didn't mean exclusively at all. I meant "why have a site for 20something devs when they (and everyone else) already have HN?"

HN is for everyone I think, not only devs, not only 20s ...

I think he meant "HN's average user is a dev in their 20s".

I wonder if that is actually true. It feels like the average might actually be early 30s.

The problem with HN is that it has too many content not related to tech, like lots of politics and also is too american focused. Anybody not from america gets a feeling of being a little weirded out by some of the things and morals discussed around here. At least for me that's a problem. If that dev.to gets nice content and doesn't get all these america specific morally political stuff going around maybe I'll use it.

I've been following Dev.to before it became a website and was only a twitter handle. I found it to be a less hostile version of HN at times. It also is a bit more beginner focussed (helps by being more friendly). Also, most posts and comments are quite positive :)

The problem with "beginner-focused" sites IMO is they preach wrong advice. Just because experienced people tell you hard truths doesn't mean you should run away and hide in a beginner-friendly corner. I mean you can do that, but don't complain when you realize that the experienced guy was right and your mistakes cost you your entire business.

I don't think it is the hard truths or wonderful knowledge here, it is the often condescending tone that usually makes me just watch from a distance.

Congrats guys! Great move to open source the code.

Looks like the standard rails mess :/ Don't get me wrong. From time to time i am going to look at other peoples rails code to learn, how they solved common problems in grown rails apps. Most oft the time i leave rather disappointed...

I like the spec for Comment#id_code_generated ;)

Can you be more specific? The modeling/models don't look TOO insane - need some refactoring, but not too far off.

If you think this is a rails mess - you haven't seen anything yet. I am still able to hop in and reason about what this codebase does with no onboarding - a key benefit of rails. I've worked on codebases where all those niceties were thrown out the window.

What is Dev.to?

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