Hi all, I hope it’s ok to post this here :-)
We’ve been running Devtalk in beta for the last three months now, slowly building out features and getting a feel for the direction of our community. We’ve just pushed our portal stewards (and core teams) feature and I’m reaching out to ask whether any of you would like to help steward our Swift portal - I am personally very excited about learning Swift and would love to see some of you on board
If you’re wondering what it might entail, we’re simply looking for people who can:
- Represent the Swift community in the best possible light in the wider dev community
- Help those interested in Swift (such as by recommending learning resources, etc)
It’s generally about being a good ambassador, and hopefully a way for you to get more people interested in Swift too. All on a platform with similarly high standards.
If you’re wondering what Devtalk is, we aim to help developers network and get up to speed with what's trending in tech. We do this via the activity on Devtalk as a whole, in our language and framework portals, and by the various types of development (frontend, backend, mobile, embedded, etc).
We do this in a number of ways:
- We post updates about what’s trending on prominent dev sites (such as Hacker News, Lobsters, Tech Republic, Opensource(.com) as well as other well known tech sites and blogs) and we post these throughout the day in a special members-only section. If a member thinks any of the items included in those alerts are worth posting on Devtalk, they can do this simply by clicking on the item.
- We post links to official language and framework news automatically - either via the language or framework’s GitHub release info (if they use them) or their blog’s RSS feeds.
- Members post on the forum directly too. In fact if you are a blogger and you post a link to your blog post directly, we remove the ‘rel-nofollow’ attribute when these feature in the trending lists on our front-page (we love bloggers - and want to help them as much as possible!)
Once posted on Devtalk, everything gets ranked by activity (number of comments, likes, views, inbound links, etc) and we then present these in our trending lists. Eventually, we’ll offer daily, weekly or monthly snapshots of these by email. All this will (hopefully) make it easy for people to see what’s been hot not just in the dev arena as a whole, but in individual languages and frameworks too, making it easy for people to catch up or get up to speed with any tech that interests them.
Ok, but what’s in it for me?
Hopefully you’ll think Devtalk will add something of value for you too, but we also have:
- A number of monthly giveaways where we give away 6 prizes a month - currently you can win books from the Pragmatic Bookshelf and Manning, or a video course from the Pragmatic Studio or a years with of AppSignal.
- We have a monthly Members of the Month scheme, where each month we select 4 of our most popular/helpful members and give them a book as a thank you.
- Discounts! We currently offer 35% off PragProg and Manning books as well as 25% off the Pragmatic Studio courses and 10% off AppSignal.
Even when you don’t win one of our 10 monthly prizes, you kindof win anyway, because other people winning books about tech will hopefully lead to better devs in the community, which in turn will hopefully lead to better docs/libraries/tools/workmates/friends/etc - that benefits all of us :D
There's lots more to Devtalk and we have lots of cool stuff planned, but I don’t want this to get any longer than it is (sorry for it being so long already!) however if you have any questions, or would like to become a steward, please let me know!
For those interested, here’s our Swift portal:
If you got this far, thanks for reading!
Aston