This post is about the collaboration of my company, Skynox Tech, with DEV. Yes, this very platform you're reading this post on. This post is one I've been dying to write for months!

A Serendipitous Discovery

It all started in 2016 while I was involved in my first venture. One of the developers in my team received a letter. As he opened it, I saw some stickers come out. I was instantly curious and asked him what it was all about.

"These are from Dev.to. They're sending stickers to everyone who signs up," he told us.

That was the first time I heard about DEV. Even though I didn't sign up right away, I remember thinking how cool it was. I really loved those stickers. 😍

Up until a few years ago, I used to write articles on Medium only. In mid-2018, however, I decided to contribute more to open source development and document my experience in the form of articles as well. Around the same time, one of my friends suggested that Dev.to is a much better platform than Medium if one wishes to write for developers. I recalled the stickers from 2016 and finally made an account on Dev.to in August 2018.

I soon published my First post.

But my first hit was:

First Interaction with the DEV Team

Till this date, I have written 50+ posts on Dev.to. I always felt a very special connection with this community, and I believe that's what the DEV team tries its best to make us feel. My first interaction with the team started when I wrote this post:

Why Dev.to is winning over Hashnode?

Sarthak Sharma ・ Nov 27 '18

#webdev #discuss #career #startup

Folks from the DEV team commented on my post for the first time, and it was so special to me. 😅 From that very moment, I wanted to work with the DEV team and make this community better. So I started making small tools for the community. I made these two projects, which I think turned out pretty cool and were received very well by the community.

I really enjoyed working on them so I decided to take my open source contribution to the next level. I publicly committed to making 12 products in 12 months in my new year resolution for 2019. Two of these products were, of course, DEV10 and DEV-CLI. In fact, the DEV team even helped us by hunting DEV10 on ProductHunt for us.

The Start of Something Great

On May 22nd 2020, I founded Skynox Tech, a company that helps startups get their MVPs out in the market fast. After years of working in the startup ecosystem, I realized that executing your vision accurately and testing your hypotheses quickly is extremely important, and that was the core belief of Skynox. We have helped a few startups launch their MVPs so far.

WeCause is one of the oldest ones, based in Canada and the brainchild of my friend Pallavi Panigrahi. In a sentence, WeCause helps NGOs and causes connect with young volunteers. Volunteers sign up for various gigs and tasks put up on the platform by said NGOs and causes. The startup has been especially very helpful in the past few months with the COVID-19 pandemic looming over us.

Another one we worked on recently is Comicer, which is an Indian startup and currently in closed beta. Comicer is an end to end GRC (Governance, Risk & Compliance) tracking solution which aspires to bring change in large organizations by helping them easily deal with a large number of compliances. Not gonna bore you all with any more details but it was a really exciting and challenging project for us. First time for us working in the domain.

And over the last year, we've worked on a number of projects like this, each time getting better and delivering something greater.

But the biggest breakthrough for Skynox was this message sent to me by Jess:

"On a totally separate note, we'll have contractor roles opening up soon. What would it look like to work with Team Xenox?"

That was the happiest day for Skynox ever since its inception, I'd say. I told Jess that we'd love to be involved with the DEV platform, and soon enough, we started discussing the legal terms. That didn't take too long, and on Monday, 18th November 2019, we started officially working with Dev.to. After a year of dreaming to work with this brilliant team, I finally wrote my first line of code for DEV.

Our Work So Far

We started working on the DEV Connect module first thing, and I was actually quite thrilled to be the developer leading its development. DEV Connect has come far since then, and there are a bunch of really cool features (mentioning users via @handles, group chats for organizations, video chat, etc.) that we've worked hard to develop in the last few months. If you haven't given it a try, you definitely should right now!

Check out a couple of my favorite PRs so far!

Feature🚀: Ability to mention anyone in open chats and notify them #5460

sarthology posted on Jan 12, 2020

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [ ] Refactor
• [x] Feature
• [ ] Bug Fix
• [ ] Optimization
• [ ] Documentation Update

Description

Pheww! After working and tweaking for more than a week this feature is finally out. This is description will be a bit longer, as this PR has some bug fixes as well. So Let's get started

1. Ability to mention someone in open group

2. Get a notification if you got mentioned

3. Ability to mention all in the group and Notify them

4. Mentions get converted into a clickable link to open info in Sidecar

Tweaks in the Notification system

5. Message count will increase if there is a new message in the open group.

You will get notified only if mentioned in the group

6. Message count will be decreased only if the unread message is read

7. Message chat will increase even if you are on the connect page

But no notification will be shown

Added to documentation?

• [ ] docs.dev.to
• [ ] readme
• [x] no documentation needed

[optional] What gif best describes this PR or how it makes you feel?

View on GitHub

🚀 Feature: Ability to search discoverable channels and send request to join #7385

sarthology posted on Apr 20, 2020

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

• [ ] Refactor
• [x] Feature
• [ ] Bug Fix
• [ ] Optimization
• [ ] Documentation Update

Description

1. Mod will be able to make their groups discoverable is the channel setting.

2. These groups then can be searched from the search option in the chat channel list.

3. One can slick and send the request to join.

4. Mod can accept and reject the request.

Added tests?

• [ ] yes
• [ ] no, because they aren't needed
• [ ] no, because I need help

Added to documentation?

• [ ] docs.dev.to
• [ ] readme
• [x] no documentation needed

View on GitHub

After an initial period of about 3 months, both our teams decided we had good synergy and could take this partnership further. So I had a call with Ben and the team, and they shared their long-term vision for the platform with me. We decided to put more developers on this and officially sign a longer-term contract in March. I couldn't be happier about this turn of events. Suffice it to say, there are a lot of fantastic things planned for DEV that will blow your mind. 😉

Expect More Great Things!

And Skynox Tech is going to stay right beside the DEV team, supporting them in this vision in every way possible. Watch out for this power-packed partnership as we bring more amazing features to you month after month. 💪💯

P.S.

1. Leave a comment suggesting some cool features you want to see in DEV Connect!
2. Inspired by the DEV team, we've decided to start a podcast of our own very soon! If you were a fan of the Ultra List series and miss it, you will most definitely love the podcast, so look forward to it! Join us on the newly launched Team Xenox subreddit so you don't miss the announcement!