We welcome a wonderful influx of new members from Japan
Ben Halpern
Nov 15, 2017
We're not totally certain what the sequence of events was, but dev.to has received a lot of positive attention/publicity in Japan in the last 12 hours or so. It has meant a lot of new members and a lot of new posts.
This has been awesome and most of the posts have been great. It's also stretched us further into the territory of "how exactly do we serve the right multilingual experience". We don't have a lot of fully baked features for this yet. The good thing is, we've been thinking about this for a while and should be able to ship some new support soon.
I was already able to quickly ship up one simple adjustment that improves the Japanese language experience, based on this post.
Serving different languages well is a big part of inclusivity and we're excited to improve this part of the platform. Once we're open source, we should be able to do this more effectively as well. We're targeting the beginning of January for the open-sourcing of our code.
Ben Halpern
Creator and webmaster of THIS WEBSITE, I is a software developer living in New York City..
bendhalpern
benhalpern
benhalpern.com
First monthly dev.to progress report
Jess Lee on November 01, 2017
I'm very interested in integrating asciinema "natively" in dev.to
Ben Halpern on October 30, 2017
So who owns what?
Ian bradbury on October 25, 2017
Twitter
GitHub
The main cause of recent influx from the Japanese community is this post Making dev.to insanely fast being retweeted 1000+ times in Japanese twitter.
Recently, the famous financial newspaper The Nikkei has revised their online website. The news got many reactions, mostly thanks to their usage of state-of-the-art CDN/ServiceWorker technology; the very same infra behind dev.to.
I'm personally glad to see more and more non-backend devs getting interests on website backends and infra system.
Ahhh interesting. Much of the initial traffic was not listed as referral in Analytics and I could not find the links when I searched Twitter myself.
Probably weren't listed as referral because of how short the URL is? I mean I myself came from itmedia.co.jp/news/spv/1711/15/new... but I'm sure people on Twitter woulda just typed out "dev.to" because it's like what, 6 presses on the screen/keyboard.
ようこそ 🇯🇵！
Hello, I'm a frontend engineer in Japan.
Perhaps yesterday's buzz in Japan started from my tweet to dev.to . twitter.com/mizchi/status/93065073...
I'm sorry that I just mentioned dev.to's speed without what dev.to is. People posted annoying test tweets.
I used to work qiita.com , Japanese knowledge share site for programmers.
In that development, I was suffered from very slow social widgets and legacy codes bootstrapped by rails. I dreamed to rewrite them someday but I coundn't do that by many political reasons. dev.to is just I wanted to be.
I quitted job of qiita.com but I thing programming knowlegde share is a feature.
I really appreciate what you've done. Thank you.
I'm very glad to see a warm welcome for Japanese tech community.
Actually, my timeline went crazy about dev.to yesterday and I was also excited and turned to a fan of dev.to!
Let me tell the truth of this viral. The beginning is this user's tweet. He is a developer of qiita.com which is biggest tech knowledge sharing site in Japan. In his first tweet dev.to was introduced as a similar site of qiita. But his followers were much more interested in a speed of your site. they said why is dev.to so fast!? This is like native app! how fast is it?
Then Someone said this is because of next-generation CDN(fastly?). Other guy pointed this is by ServiceWorker and prefetch. Then this news rapidly spreaded across tech community in Japan( you know, Japan is very small island🗾) I think CDN makes a significant difference, right?
Anyway, web performance was one of biggest trends in Japanese tech community. So I would happy to see more about why your site is so fast.