On January 3rd dev.to turns 2 years old. But it was 2017 when Jess and I took the plunge and began working on it full time, with Peter joining as the third founder. This past year where we saw a lot of the hard work from the previous year show itself in terms of growth and exposure. In reminiscing on a great year, I want to mention a things that stood out for us.

The Ask Me Anything threads were a lot of fun. It's been a great way to engage some of the personalities in our industry doing fascinating work.

The way the community has adopted the attitude of constructive commentary has been wonderful. In order to have a healthy community, we need humane dialog, and we are consistently amazed by the community's general respect for the code of conduct and regard for one another. We have had several threads like this one where folks have expressed a lot of gratitude for the environment and it warms our hearts. It's clear people came here with shared values. We still have work to do, but none of this would be possible without the community embracing the need for better spaces for collaboration across all skill levels, identities and backgrounds.

The global nature of the community has been an amazing learning opportunity and a lot of fun. Traffic to the site comes from all over the world and we've done everything we can so far to accommodate this, technically and socially. The big influx of Japanese users recently was very exciting in particular, and it is wonderful to see people from all backgrounds and cultures come together based on their shared interest in the craft. Of course, there is a lot more work to do and we are excited to keep up the journey in 2018.

The #SheCoded celebration we kicked off on International Women's Day, where 163 women from our community shared stories and advice. Our team worked really hard to make this event genuine and impactful. With the help of our wonderful community, it was a huge hit.

The community grows by word of mouth and spreading the good word about our inclusive values on the platform. This was all on display in a recent Twitter thread where Dan Abramov asked about whether he should be on dev.to and the community responded wonderfully to convince him to sign up and offer React help. We certainly hope he and other great teachers keep it up in 2018.

Seriously, check out all the natural responses to this tweet:

On to the new year 🍾

Indicators of health and success on the platform continue to be strong and we expect a lot of growth in 2018. We have a few key initiatives we are launching early in 2018 in order to continue the growth and sustainability of the platform, including open-sourcing the code. We are very excited to keep up the journey with all of you and recognize the amazing, but yet-to-be-fulfilled, potential of an inclusive global community of software developers.

Coding has become a lot more fun for me with the whole community here to learn from and share with. I know it's the same feeling for the early adopters of dev.to. I hope as we improve the little things about the platform together we can spread this feeling further in 2018 and beyond.

Thank you so much for being a part of this so far.

Happy coding ❤️