We talk with Ben Halpern the founder and webmaster of dev.to — a community for developers to talk about software. Last Wednesday they open sourced the codebase of the dev.to platform, so we wanted to talk through all the details with Ben. We talked through the backstory, how Ben realized this could become a business, how the team was formed, their motivations for open sourcing it and why they didn’t open source it from the start, the technical stack, and their vision for the future of the site.

Join the discussion

Changelog++ members support our work, get closer to the metal, and make the ads disappear. Join today!

Sponsors:

• Hired – Salary and benefits upfront? Yes please. Our listeners get a double hiring bonus of $600! Or, refer a friend and get a check for $1,337 when they accept a job. On Hired companies send you offers with salary, benefits, and even equity upfront. You are in full control of the process. Learn more at hired.com/changelog.
• Linode – Our cloud server of choice. Deploy a fast, efficient, native SSD cloud server for only $5/month. Get 4 months free using the code changelog2018. Start your server - head to linode.com/changelog
• GoCD – GoCD is an on-premise open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks that lets you automate and streamline your build-test-release cycle for reliable, continuous delivery of your product.
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com.

Featuring:

• Ben Halpern – GitHub, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X
• Jerod Santo – GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

• dev.to is now open source
• thepracticaldev/dev.to
• dev.to roadmap
• O RLY Cover Generator
• Saron from Codenewbie
• Making dev.to insanely fast
• RailsConf talk on making dev.to fast

Something missing or broken? P