We’ve just launched Devtalk - a new discussion platform for developers!

Forum Announcements
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And we’d love for you to join us!

Devtalk is a new platform that aims to help you get the most out of your precious time - by not just facilitating meaningful discussion, but also by presenting you with the most active to help identify what’s trending in tech :003:

You can see what’s been happening in the dev world as a whole via our homepage, or catch up with a language or framework via its portal - where you’ll be presented with the most active discussions over the last week, month and year.

But there’s more! We’ll also be giving away over $10,000 worth of prizes in our first year as well as rewarding 50 of our most helpful members with a Members of The Month scheme!

We’ll also be running monthly Spotlights (followed by AMA’s) on book authors, prominent people in the industry as well as Devtalk members, and something that might please many of you looking for meaningful statistics on language popularity; we’ll be tracking portal usage and publishing our findings. We’re excited to see the results of this in terms of Elixir compared to other languages!

Above all, we’re hoping to be one of the freshest dev communities around, and we’d love for you to join us. There’s so much more to talk about but we don’t want this announcement to get too much longer - for instance, we’ll be hosting errata for PragProg and they’ll also be using the platform to engage with prospective book authors - something we’re really excited about!. We’ve even discussed future related projects that we think will be great for languages like Elixir :wink:

If you like the sound of all this, please drop and say hello …we’re really excited about where it might lead and we’d love for you to be a part of that journey :orange_heart:

You can check out the Elixir, Erlang and Phoenix portals below - tho please note we have literally just gone live and are very much in beta - our lists will become more meaningful as more threads are posted):

There’s also one for Gleam:

And now LFE:

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Congratulations on the launch! I look forward to seeing how this develops

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Like the idea, Think you all have some bugs to still work out.

See a post on the index listed as a “members only” clicking it renders an oops page.

IE. https://forum.devtalk.com/t/hows-everyone-coping-with-the-coronavirus-pandemic/247

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Thanks Louis! It’s great that you posted @michaeljones’s screencast on it to help kickstart the Gleam portal :023:

Thanks Josh!

We were thinking about showing Members Only threads in the trending lists but only allowing full access to the thread once logged in. However I agree it may feel a bit odd so have prevented those threads from appearing on the homepage now :smiley:

Great to hear you like the idea and I hope to see you there soon :003:

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Ah, that makes better sense. That said, you need a better way to direct the end user as they may be confused by the 404 vs a general, “hey sign up ya hoon”

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I was sad to see this in the network tab:

Server: Apache/2.4.6

I was hoping that was an Elixir project :wink:

Other then that congrats to the launch :slight_smile:

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Haha well it’s funny you should say that… one of the future projects we’ve discussed with PragProg is more meaningful/real world benchmarks and comparisons on a sister-site, and so along that theme, since we are (mostly) consuming data from the forum this make it easier to swap out the portal system. I’d love us to do Phoenix version, then another in one of the Rust or Crystal frameworks - I think that would be super interesting! :003:

Currently though we’re using Rails since the forum is Discourse (Rails) and they have a Discourse gem (Ruby) that makes it a bit easier working with their API.

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@AstonJ Looks cool. Is the idea here that this is a replacement for ElixirForum? If so, any plans to migrate users/threads or any sort of connection between the sites?

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I’m a little confused by this announcement myself. I poked at the new site a few minutes before realizing it was mostly a pretty face in front of Discourse, at which point I was done. I couldn’t see it as having anything uniquely valuable.

Is this forum expected to be superseded by devtalk?

Is this an attempt to consolidate communities currently run on separate forums into a larger community?

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Thanks David!

In answer to your question, we don’t have any plans to replace this forum with it :smiley:

Currently we think there are essentially three main types of platforms where languages and projects can be discussed. The first are language/project specific platforms and forums like this one, which are, as expected, fairly ‘strict’, because they are often the public face of the community. Understandably, they may feel a little restrictive too (even if that is self-imposed restrictions by members of the community). At the other end of the scale you have platforms like Twitter that essentially have almost zero restrictions.

We think Devtalk will complement language specific forums by providing an avenue where users can post a little more freely should they wish to. By that we don’t mean the freedom to be rude or abusive, but the ability to discuss things such as fundamental aspects of a project - indirectly - and with little or no risk of contributing towards burnout of project maintainers. This is because the conversations on a platform like Devtalk are more likely to be broader and more general - even threads about a specific project may quickly expand to other similar projects… because there will be a greater variety of possible participants.

There are of course benefits for projects wanting to focus their community efforts on a platform like Devtalk. The first is it would free up a lot of time. It is incredibly time-consuming managing an online community, particularly one that is seen as the public face of a project. Not all of them run as smoothly as this one …in fact some projects have even done whole talks on problems within their (online) communities.

The other major benefit is the potential to reach a greater audience. If Elixir topics are continuously trending on Devtalk, then there’s a good chance it could help with adoption - this was what we meant in our 2020 announcement when we said we see the next phase in Elixir’s growth as reaching ‘far and wide’ :003: (although admittedly back then we thought it was just going to be a polyglot forum!).

Speaking of a change in plans, we have our partners, and in particular, PragProg to thank for that. They have incredibly supportive of the project and their excitement is really what made us want to do something a little different, be something more than just a forum. As you’ve probably read we’ll be hosting errata for them and, depending on how things go, I think it would be nice to create portals for their books too (though don’t tell them yet! I’m not sure how it’d work yet).

There are so many different possibilities we can explore and it really will depend on what the community wants :smiley:

What’s wrong with Discourse? :lol:

Admittedly the portals will feel more useful as more threads are posted but they’ll (hopefully) act as a good hub for languages, frameworks and other tech, allowing people to quickly get a glimpse of what’s been happening in those areas. That’s not really possible at the moment. If I want to catch up with say, Ruby, to see what I’ve missed over the last year there isn’t really anywhere to do that quickly and easily. Going to its portal I could quickly see what’s been happening, look at the best blog posts, hot news and most interesting discussions, etc, and as mentioned in my reply to David, you’re less likely to get a filtered picture of things.

Not really. We don’t really have any kind of agenda at the moment and what you see at Devtalk is really just an original concept; it can develop in all sorts of ways :slight_smile: It really does depend on how things go and that’s one of the most exciting things about starting a new community… you never really know where it’s going to lead.

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Awesome domain name and I think it’s the best looking Discourse instance I’ve seen so far. Congrats on the launch!

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Very nice design!

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Can we get a Nim area on devtalk?

Congrats on the launch but I think discoverability is an issue. I can’t find my way around. Clicking on a thread it seems a thread belongs to something like Hybrid App Dev Forum, and I can click that tiny link and there’s a full-on subforum for this, but it’s not listed on the homepage.

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Thanks @sfusato! We worked pretty hard on that design - glad you liked it :blush:

Thank you! Have you seen our Dark and OLED themes btw? We also have Retina versions for those with HiDPI screens :003:

Sure can! Just help us Nim’s details and we can get it set up :023: (details in this thread in the ‘Help and Support’ - it’s members only so won’t show unless you are logged in.)

Thanks!

I am not quite sure what you mean Sergio - do you mean that when you are on the forum homepage, and where it says ‘categories’ in the top left, only the parent categories are showing? If so this is as intended, as otherwise the list would be too long. If you click on a parent category you can then select a sub-category :smiley:

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Wow, I had only seen the mobile version. The desktop version design is spectacular.

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Thanks David! :orange_heart:

Do you mean the forum design or the homepage design btw? (Just curious, haha!)

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The forum design is nice, but I guess the homepage design is what I’m really finding to be striking. I’m also curious if there is a story behind the procurement of that domain name. Doesn’t seem like an easy one to get.

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This is what the website looks like when the browser is half width (like I normally browser websites):

image
image904×940 100 KB

If I zoom out, or make the window bigger I can see more stuff. Now it makes more sense!

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Added a request for Nim!

https://forum.devtalk.com/t/info-required-for-portals/729/5?u=sergio

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That’s music to our ears, thank you!

The story behind the domain… as soon as I heard it may be available I just knew we had to get it! It’s actually the most I have ever spent on a domain :see_no_evil:

Awesome… added :003:

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