You don’t have to be beautiful on DEV, Hashnode, Medium and so to be useful and successful.

Quite a sister post of the Recycled Developer saga.

One of my biggest frustration around the developer community today, is all about the modern “developer social tools”, made and guaranteed by developers to work for every developer.

Let’s be honest, that tools also include DEV/Forem, Hashnode, and Daily.dev. And it’s funny yet ironic that I’m passing this blog post to their platforms, too.

Today, I’d like to pass a message for devs around the world. And it all started from a heated debate emerged from this specific DEV Community post: 17 Compelling Reasons to Start Ditching TypeScript Now.

One other dev questioned technical things, like, “how is TypeScript unfamiliar to learn?”, or “are type-safety important?”

And there’s one reply from the post author which makes me questioning about this dev.

Thank you for your comment. I strive to provide quality content that is both informative and enjoyable to read. I am sorry to hear that you felt the article was not up to par in terms of your agreement with my opinion, which is ok. …

https://dev.to/wiseai/17-compelling-reasons-to-start-ditching-typescript-now-249b#comment-23okh

And now, I’m thinking, “what kind of developer are you?”

“Are you a JavaScript developer, or a JavaScript blog post developer?”, looking at those badges on his profile.

And three days later, another user on DEV decided to publish a new post, provokably titled 18 Reasons to Use Typescript SINCE YESTERDAY, mostly filled with counterarguments.

“Oh no, what again!? A TypeScript blog post developer posted this!?”

What the heck! Their Table of Contents… is… sus…

GitHub’s co-founders: A personal blog story.

I’m sure that most of you are in love with GitHub, right? So here’s a story.

GitHub was originally founded by four co-founders. Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett are two of them, who neither have a blog site nor a DevCard.

chriswanstrath.com and hyett.com, shown side-by-side.

How about the other two? Well, Scott Chacon and Tom Preston-Werner have their own personal blog sites (hooray!), but don’t expect their blog sites look like this:

A glimpse of daily-dev-tips.com.

Instead, they are just some plain old boring blue links:

scottchacon.com and tom.preston-werner.com, shown side-by-side.

Something is kinda off here. Daniel Stenberg, aka. the creator of the infamous cURL software, also opts for these boring blue links.

And while Brendan Eich and Guido Van Rossum, the respective creators of JavaScript and Python, moves away from these boring links, they never put their content on the JavaScript and Python post collections over DEV and Hashnode, although they are the creator of these languages.

What else? Linus Torvalds? Meh. Pieter Levels? Same set of blue boring links. Solomon Hykes, the original creator of Docker? None, just Twitter and the Fediverse.

It feels that everyone who are OG creators of these great software are still staying away from the so-called “developer’s best social media (or blog)” platforms. Many of them are way more experienced than those featured on the Hashnode’s front page, for making that programming language, that trending libraries and frameworks that are still being discussed over these platforms.

The Featured Developers list on Hashnode’s homepage.

As a software developer, your main purpose is to solve problems through programming your very own software. Not making more content, publish them on the happiest place for devs, and beg for likes, Notion saves, and follows.

You don’t have to be beautiful on DEV, Hashnode, Medium and so to be useful and successful. If you would like to be like them, focus on writing quality code, not quality content.

There are still many ways where content could be improved, like updating your favorite framework’s documentation, updating wikis, or adding more demos and tutorials, but engagement-hungry posts won’t help you and people in the long-term.

That two devs who are still living without a blog site today had built a product and company which have been bought billions by Microsoft. Now how about you, an (ex-)user of that platform?