Why I Moved Off Dev.to

2 years ago I moved all my blogging to Dev.to. Today my main blog is on Github Issues and I’ve just launched DXTips on Hashnode.

Dev.to still has the widest readership, which is great for beginners. But the experience has stagnated since the big move to Forem (which it now actively promotes via a popup on mobile).

Dated UI

The brutalist design of Dev.to was appealing in 2017-2020, but now feels a little dated. It has received no updates and I felt like I wanted to see if I could offer my readers something better.

No editor UX

The editor is just raw markdown in a text box, and though I like markdown, I like the niceties of using keyboard shortcuts to add links or bold/italicize text. Also paste-to-unfurl would be nice, but the shortcode syntax required too much customization when I should simply be able to paste in a url (this would also degrade more gracefully)

Weird limitations on posting

Neutral: performance?

dev.to is famously notable for their speed so i tossed it into pagespeed insights and was surprised to find a bad score. its probably because of the media heavy nature of the blogpost i picked so not a big deal

However, webpagetest complained a lot less

my swyxkit-based mirror page showed marginally better performance, with the js weight hurting because of the youtube embed.