Everyone on DEV is lovely, even if you don't think you are. Thank you all so much for your support, comments, reactions, and reads! I have never in my entire development career, met such a wonderful and supportive group of creatives, craftspeople, and innovators! I have tried many many times to get into blogging before and always quite because I felt that nobody cared about the content (yes, I am that insecure 😝). But with DEV, I was continually encouraged and motivated to, not only improve my writing, but my craft as a developer. Thank you all so much to this incredible community, the creators of the platform, maintainers and contributors to its OSS code, moderators who keep trolling to the lowest levels I've ever seen on a similar platform, and everyone else who makes a difference, whether you get paid to or do it for free! I encourage everyone who reads this to please leave a comment talking about their blogging journey, on DEV or off, and whether you are brand new or a seasoned veteran so that we can share our journeys together!
Top comments(10)

- LocationAntibes, France
- WorkSenior Software Engineer at Spotify
- Joined
Congrats, keep up the good work!
I'm not sure what happened for the last few days. In like a week, I had a growth of 25% (with about the same size of followers as you have) and nothing really explains it...
Have you seen similar patterns?

- Joined
I published my first post here on 2nd July and I now have 600 followers - please, please don't tell me they are all bots or something :( It was so exciting to see that someone might be at least somewhat interested!

- Email
- LocationNY
- EducationMount Allison University
- PronounsHe/him
- WorkCo-founder at Forem
- Joined
The main way folks gain followers on DEV is to follow this algorithm:
- Write post that getssomewhat popular in a certain tag
- Get featured during onboarding for that tag
- Gain followers as being a suggested follow
Because our rate of new registrations has been accelerating, anybody consistently posting good stuff in the right tags is getting a lot of followers

- LocationAntibes, France
- WorkSenior Software Engineer at Spotify
- Joined
Thanks,@ben! Do you understand why there are spikes? Do more people join on specific days of the week or is it related to some marketing?

- Email
- LocationUnited Kingdom
- Joined
Instagram, Facebook etc: We can't explain why the algorithm boosts more pages than others, there are a million different variables that go into the decisions our systems make
@ben : Hold my pink DEV merch...

- LocationMassachusetts, USA
- EducationA Master's patient mentorship and insatiable curiosity
- WorkSenior Cloud Data Engineer at SITE Technologies
- Joined
I've noticed that DEV folks tend to engage with content here ALOT more than anywhere else I've posted.@ben lays out the why pretty concicesly! That is awesome you're getting a ton of new followers too!

- LocationAntibes, France
- WorkSenior Software Engineer at Spotify
- Joined
Yeah, I'm just a bit suspicious, when I gain more followers than reads :D

Great. 👌❤️❤️🤗🤗🤗
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