dev.to is a thriving community for programmers. Since 2016, a lot of good contents are created, shared and liked.
As a newcomer, I am curious what people care about on dev.to since I want my posts to be relevant.
So I decided to analyze the top 500 posts ever created on dev.to.
data gathering
There is no API provided by dev.to. But they do already have the ranked posts on this page https://dev.to/top/infinity. All I needed to do was to scroll down until I get 500 posts and scrap the data. Here is the script and data.
There are so many things we can extract from the data. I am interested in the following questions:
- which author is most liked?
- which author gets the most comments?
- which tag is used most frequently?
- do popular posts have numbers in their title?
- vim vs emacs?
And I wrote a script to answer them. Are you also curious? Drumroll, please!
which author is the most liked?
Ali Spittel with 23 posts in top 500 is absolutely the darling of dev.to! I personally find her posts on the topic of blogging really informative and actionable.
Here are the top 10 most liked authors on dev.to!
| name | likes | rank |
|---|---|---|
| Ali Spittel | 9570 | 1 |
| Ben Halpern | 8876 | 2 |
| Alex 👨🏼💻FullStack.Cafe | 3099 | 3 |
| Sarthak Sharma | 2288 | 4 |
| Max Antonucci | 2156 | 5 |
| Nikita Sobolev | 1987 | 6 |
| Emma Wedekind ✨ | 1941 | 7 |
| Blaine Osepchuk | 1698 | 8 |
| Kim Arnett | 1691 | 9 |
| Isaac Lyman | 1594 | 10 |
which author gets the most comments?
As the founder of dev.to, Ben Halpern gets the most comments. Thank you, Ben, for your effort to create such an amazing community!
It should not be surprising that 5 out of top 10 here overlap with top 10 most liked authors.
| name | comments | rank |
|---|---|---|
| Ben Halpern | 1355 | 1 |
| Ali Spittel | 1114 | 2 |
| dev.to staff | 895 | 3 |
| Kim Arnett | 452 | 4 |
| Andrew Davis | 301 | 5 |
| Saurabh sharma | 301 | 6 |
| David Wickes | 271 | 7 |
| Sarthak Sharma | 269 | 8 |
| Dan Abramov | 244 | 9 |
| Max Antonucci | 214 | 10 |
which tag is used most frequently?
Turns out that the most popular tags of the top 500 posts are very similar to the tags on https://dev.to/tags.
It seems folks on dev.on are relatively new to programming #beginners. Also, front end engineering is very popular here #javascript, #react.
Aha! I think I can create some react related posts for beginners to get more likes.😜
| tag | used | rank |
|---|---|---|
| #javascript | 128 | 1 |
| #beginners | 126 | 2 |
| #career | 116 | 3 |
| #webdev | 106 | 4 |
| #productivity | 75 | 5 |
| #programming | 49 | 6 |
| #discuss | 39 | 7 |
| #learning | 29 | 8 |
| #react | 26 | 9 |
| #git | 2 | 10 |
do popular posts have numbers in their title?
About 100 posts out of the top 500 have numbers in the title. There does not seem to be any strong correlation between numbers in post title and popularity.
vim vs emacs?
There are 6 #vim and 0 #emacs posts in top 500. For all the vim users out there, I want to say WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS on dev.to!
Just kidding. dev.to is a very inclusive community. It seems neither vim or emacs are very popular topics in the community. I think modern editors like VC code are much more popular, especially among new programmers.
conclusion
After analyzing the top 500 posts on dev.to, I found that web developers on their early career are the predominant members on dev.to.
That’s it! And may the best posts win!