Upcoming Trainee Engineer @ Simform 🚀
Building, experimenting, and writing my way through tech.
AI • Web • Open Source • Challenges
If I find something interesting, I'll probably write about it. 😄
Upcoming Trainee Engineer @ Simform 🚀
Building, experimenting, and writing my way through tech.
AI • Web • Open Source • Challenges
If I find something interesting, I'll probably write about it. 😄
I built using AI a tool that can help send message locally from a device to another.
I'm very proud because I'm trying to understand better how to create automation tools to help devs
Developer educator and advocate who still ships code. 15 years teaching developers at MongoDB, Heroku, Cisco, and Treehouse. Now writing about AI-assisted development, agent memory, and provenance.
And wow, I had some typos and grammatical errors in there. 🤦♂️No editors, no AI to check things, just the ramblings of someone wanting to start a tech(ish) blog.
Great article, it really shows how much difference a well-placed index can make.
It took me back to when I first started working with databases. For the first few weeks, I had no idea indexes even existed. Then I was implementing a CRUD operation, and one of the developers told me, "Hey, you can use an index there."
I looked it up, and the article I found said indexes make queries faster. My first thought was: OK, then why don't we put them everywhere? So I googled exactly that and learned about the trade-off: slower writes. Every insert or update also has to update every index on the table.
That's when I got curious about what an index actually looks like under the hood. In PostgreSQL, the default is a B-tree. It keeps the data sorted like a sorted array, so lookups and range scans are fast, but it splits the data into pages arranged as a tree. That way an insert only touches one leaf page instead of shifting everything around. Seeing that design made the whole read-vs-write trade-off click for me.
I ended up reading about indexes for the rest of the day. Good old days 😄
A truly heartening gesture! One need not be an expert to share valuable knowledge. I sincerely admire your generosity in encouraging budding writers and offering them your time. Such kindness makes a community flourish. Much appreciated!
"If it was interesting to you, it'll be interesting to someone else" is the line every hesitant first-time writer needs to hear. As someone who only started writing here this year, the thing that surprised me most is how kind and specific the feedback is. People don't just say "nice post", they add the tip you missed. Promising to personally read every first article is a really generous way to lower the barrier. Hope you get flooded with submissions!
This is such a great initiative! I still remember publishing my very first article, wondering if anyone would actually read it, and getting excited about every single view! 😊
Technical writer covering Python, AI, and the craft of learning in public. 30 articles on Python fundamentals, projects, and developer education. FreeCodeCamp Author
The line that hit me: "Your first article will probably feel tricky, awkward and hard... but that's a special kind of cringe. It's proof of how far you've come."
I remember feeling exactly this way. When I started, I thought I needed to be a senior expert to write anything worth reading. I'd stare at a blank page and think, "Who am I to write a tutorial on this?"
The advice I wish I'd been given earlier is this: You don't need to be an expert. You just need to be one step ahead of the person reading it.
If you just figured out how a for loop works, write about that. The person who is still confused by it will learn way more from you than from a senior dev who forgot what it feels like to be a beginner. You don't have to be a guru; you just have to be a good guide for the stage you just passed.
I also love your rule about writing it yourself. AI can structure an article, but it can't feel the frustration of a bug that took three hours to fix. That human element is the whole reason people read blogs.
This is a great initiative, man. I'll be reading through the comments to support the new writers!
Thanks! I’m so looking forward to seeing what people come up with. Their ideas are especially interesting, cause they’re new to all this and their perspective is much different.
Developer, maker, and perpetual project starter. I build web apps and dev tools mostly, things that I think are really useful and should exist and be simple to use. I also like to experiment with AI.
I love this. I wrote recently about whether the tech community is really as welcoming to beginners as we say it is, and this is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about. It's one thing to encourage people to put themselves out there, but actually offering to read their work and give thoughtful feedback is something else entirely. That first bit of encouragement can mean so much to someone who's nervous about sharing their work. I really hope a bunch of new writers take you up on this.
Nice motivation to promote people who want to write 😀
Love the idea. I too have this regret of not posting on social since a couple of years. I wanted to start in around 2022, but fear took over me I guess 😅
Sometimes it's fear, sometimes it's lack of time, and dozens of many different reasons. But once you start, you find out they weren't good enough reasons. 😄 But starting at some point is billion times better than not starting at all.
This landed at a good time. The line that stuck with me was "If it was interesting to you, it'll be interesting to someone else" — that reframes a first post from proving expertise to simply documenting something you actually wrestled with. I also agree with the rule about writing it yourself: AI can tidy grammar, but the useful part is usually the specific wrong turn you took, like a bug that took far too long or a concept that only clicked after you tried it in a small project. Do you find short first posts get more useful feedback than longer ones, or does length not matter much as long as the problem is concrete?
My one piece of advice for first-timers: we write more easily when we picture one friend reading, so pick that friend first and explain the bug to them. Thank you for offering to read everyone's first post, that's a lovely way to welcome people.
"I'm a fast-paced person: I eat quickly, walk briskly, and make decisions in a snap." That very first sentence totally resonated with me 😄 I'm a calm and quiet person, but when it comes to walking, I'm basically an F1 car. I just can't walk slowly. Same goes for eating and for decisions for the most part, cause some decisions do deserve a bit more time to make them right.
And most importantly, slow apps drive me absolutely crazy. Even though I'm not a front-end developer, I found the tips in this article fascinating and absolutely useful for anyone dealing with performance issues in their apps.
Thanks for sharing! Solid first article back in 2023! 👏
I think some of the most valuable technical articles come from problems that didn't go as planned.
Take Google's SRE postmortem about a routine infrastructure decommissioning that went wrong. A retry after a partial failure, combined with an API treating an empty filter as no filter, ended up triggering disk erasure across satellite machines. That's a pretty serious failure caused by an assumption that probably looked harmless during development.
What makes a write-up like this valuable isn't just the final fix. It's explaining the chain of events, the assumptions behind the implementation, how the issue was investigated, and what changed to prevent it from happening again.
You don't need to publish groundbreaking research to write something worth reading. Sometimes documenting one difficult debugging session can save another developer hours of investigation.
@georgekobaidze Hey Giorgi! I'm pretty new to writing on DEV. I've been sharing some of my projects and experiments, but I still don't really get how views work here.
It's not even about likes. Some articles barely get any views at all, and that's a bit demotivating when you've put a lot of work into them.
Is that normal when you're just starting out? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
That is absolutely normal. My first article just got 4 likes in its entire existence and very few views. Same for some of those that I wrote even later.
You just got to keep writing, keep trying and think of the creative ways how you can engage with the audience. Sometimes it takes weeks, sometimes months and it might take more than a year, but eventually you'll get there if you're persistent enough.
This is a great initiative! Many beginners hesitate to publish because they feel they need years of experience or a perfect topic, but sharing what you've learned is how you grow as a writer and developer. I especially appreciate your offer to give honest feedback. A supportive community like this can make that first step much easier. Looking forward to seeing what new writers share!
This is the nudge a lot of people need. My first posts were awkward and I still cringe at a few lines, but that cringe is useful — it means I can see how much clearer I've gotten. Advice I'd give past-me: write the bug that wasted your Saturday, not the tutorial you think seniors expect. Short is fine.
A small team building web games that run inside Telegram, in nine languages. Here we share what we learn along the way: localization, phone performance, React and .NET.
I needed this. I've been terrified of posting ever since we created our app, and I kept finding reasons to wait until I had something worth saying.
I've finally decided to give it a try and share all my embarrassing mistakes and what I learned from them. It still feels awkward, but "it's proof of how far you've come" is a nice way to think about the cringe.
So yeah, to anyone else sitting on a draft: don't be afraid. If I can do it, you can too.
Thanks for encouraging! I am new here. I was searching for a community to belong too, so here I am! Next week I will publish my first article and since you promise to read, I am looking forward for my first reader😀
This is such a generous offer, Giorgi — especially the promise to read every single first article and give honest, thorough feedback. The line about a first article feeling tricky, awkward and hard really resonated, and I liked your reminder that a bug that took way too long to fix is a perfectly good first topic. What made you decide to turn this into the Hall of Fame idea after that first round?
Putting yourself out there and hitting publish the first time is brutal. Reminds me of our team drafting our first digital SOPs over at The Printing World. Glad I took the leap!
Backend engineer exploring distributed systems, AI, developer tools, and security. I build things to test ideas and write about what worked, what failed, and what I learned.
Here's my first technical article on DEV. I was curious about what MCP servers could actually do beyond what was mentioned in their README so I built a scanner and tested it against the top 50 MCP repositories.
What started as a small experiment eventually grew into a project which I'm still actively working on.
Full-Stack Developer building practical web apps with React, Node.js, Express, and PostgreSQL. Currently learning, building, and sharing along the way.
Documented a little experiment I did to learn about network protocols before I had taken a computer networks course.
I'd really appreciate if you'd take some time to read. Thanks!
Open edX core contributor, maintainer of five packages. Python/Django upgrades at ecosystem scale. Building OSSvitals, a daily health grade for open-source orgs
I've published my first article a few weeks ago and no one seems to care so far. So you're still gonna be my first reader. I would be happy about your feedback. :)
AI testing storyteller. Writing the 36 Stratagems series — ancient Chinese military tactics meet modern AI system meltdowns. 16yr QA → building AI test framework.
Actually, a technical article is something I have been planning to publish for quite a while now. I've been stuck on what topic I should do. Been thinking about how fascinating the world of backend is while I was learning it, maybe I should write one small and focused topic first. I particularly liked how React's website teaches new devs, maybe I'll adapt the caricature pics (hope my drawing skills are still fine hahaha).
i'm a backend developer. mostly write python, and lately some rust. i'm also into embedded systems and and building things from scratch. outside of code, i'm a big fan of f1, tennis and football
Just published my first one!
"Shey light dey house?" (is there power at home) is a question every Nigerian asks daily. so I built a small device that answers it for me. The article covers the whole thing, from the ESP32 firmware to the Rust server and dashboard.
What made me hit publish: It's my first time writing about something I built, and I wanted to see if I could explain it clearly.
A month ago, I started writing about an LLM inference system I built: dev.to/lun0522/series/45136. They haven't got many readers, though. Would appreciate any feedbacks!
Hey, I'm learning Java and Test Automation, and I decided to write about my approach, thanks for the opportunity! dev.to/lenzz920/building-my-dream-...
@georgekobaidze Sir, you already know my first technical article but this one is latest:
A humbling reminder that passing tests can lie
I'm Not on the DEV Team. I Still Debugged Their Missing Badges From Public Code. (And My First Test Was Wrong.)
Have A Great Day!
Thanks for sharing, I'll read it! However this one's dedicated only to first articles and first-time writers. 🙏
No worries Sir. I'll be just glad for you to read it.
Have A Great Day!
This is actually great. I'm happy you're finding these issues. That's the first step towards making this platform better.👏
Thank you for this ✊.
I built using AI a tool that can help send message locally from a device to another.
I'm very proud because I'm trying to understand better how to create automation tools to help devs
today I did my second post related to Cthrone my project:
dev.to/fiwon123/cthrone-v0191-2jio
Really interesting concept. I wonder how you'll solve the "not in the same network" problem. Well done!👏
Ty very much, rly appreciate that 🙂
Though this clearly isn't your first post, is it?😄
Not the first one, but my post I considere more. I started posting on the 25th of last week just letting you know.
My first one was more a experience then something useful: dev.to/fiwon123/my-experience-usin...
Well, this takes me back more than ten years.
kenwalger.com/blog/css/numeric-inp...
And wow, I had some typos and grammatical errors in there. 🤦♂️No editors, no AI to check things, just the ramblings of someone wanting to start a tech(ish) blog.
First on Dev.to: dev.to/kenwalger/indexing-in-mongodb
More typos and grammatical errors.
I've learned a lot over the years, not just in technology, but in the content generation and publication process.
Great article, it really shows how much difference a well-placed index can make.
It took me back to when I first started working with databases. For the first few weeks, I had no idea indexes even existed. Then I was implementing a CRUD operation, and one of the developers told me, "Hey, you can use an index there."
I looked it up, and the article I found said indexes make queries faster. My first thought was: OK, then why don't we put them everywhere? So I googled exactly that and learned about the trade-off: slower writes. Every insert or update also has to update every index on the table.
That's when I got curious about what an index actually looks like under the hood. In PostgreSQL, the default is a B-tree. It keeps the data sorted like a sorted array, so lookups and range scans are fast, but it splits the data into pages arranged as a tree. That way an insert only touches one leaf page instead of shifting everything around. Seeing that design made the whole read-vs-write trade-off click for me.
I ended up reading about indexes for the rest of the day. Good old days 😄
A truly heartening gesture! One need not be an expert to share valuable knowledge. I sincerely admire your generosity in encouraging budding writers and offering them your time. Such kindness makes a community flourish. Much appreciated!
Thank you! I’m here doing what I can to help the community.🫡
"If it was interesting to you, it'll be interesting to someone else" is the line every hesitant first-time writer needs to hear. As someone who only started writing here this year, the thing that surprised me most is how kind and specific the feedback is. People don't just say "nice post", they add the tip you missed. Promising to personally read every first article is a really generous way to lower the barrier. Hope you get flooded with submissions!
Thanks! I really hope so. I want this to reach more and more people.
cooking... in mind.
I appreciate this initiative.
Thank you!
This is such a great initiative! I still remember publishing my very first article, wondering if anyone would actually read it, and getting excited about every single view! 😊
I had the same experience, I got a handful of views and ~2 likes. And I was like: oh my goodness, someone's actually liked my post!😂
What a rookie I was.
The line that hit me: "Your first article will probably feel tricky, awkward and hard... but that's a special kind of cringe. It's proof of how far you've come."
I remember feeling exactly this way. When I started, I thought I needed to be a senior expert to write anything worth reading. I'd stare at a blank page and think, "Who am I to write a tutorial on this?"
The advice I wish I'd been given earlier is this: You don't need to be an expert. You just need to be one step ahead of the person reading it.
If you just figured out how a for loop works, write about that. The person who is still confused by it will learn way more from you than from a senior dev who forgot what it feels like to be a beginner. You don't have to be a guru; you just have to be a good guide for the stage you just passed.
I also love your rule about writing it yourself. AI can structure an article, but it can't feel the frustration of a bug that took three hours to fix. That human element is the whole reason people read blogs.
This is a great initiative, man. I'll be reading through the comments to support the new writers!
Thanks! I’m so looking forward to seeing what people come up with. Their ideas are especially interesting, cause they’re new to all this and their perspective is much different.
I love this. I wrote recently about whether the tech community is really as welcoming to beginners as we say it is, and this is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about. It's one thing to encourage people to put themselves out there, but actually offering to read their work and give thoughtful feedback is something else entirely. That first bit of encouragement can mean so much to someone who's nervous about sharing their work. I really hope a bunch of new writers take you up on this.
The community is definitely welcoming. But I feel like we need to do a better job encouraging newcomers to start creating their own content.
I’m happy to contribute to it!✌️
Nice motivation to promote people who want to write 😀
Love the idea. I too have this regret of not posting on social since a couple of years. I wanted to start in around 2022, but fear took over me I guess 😅
Sometimes it's fear, sometimes it's lack of time, and dozens of many different reasons. But once you start, you find out they weren't good enough reasons. 😄 But starting at some point is billion times better than not starting at all.
This landed at a good time. The line that stuck with me was "If it was interesting to you, it'll be interesting to someone else" — that reframes a first post from proving expertise to simply documenting something you actually wrestled with. I also agree with the rule about writing it yourself: AI can tidy grammar, but the useful part is usually the specific wrong turn you took, like a bug that took far too long or a concept that only clicked after you tried it in a small project. Do you find short first posts get more useful feedback than longer ones, or does length not matter much as long as the problem is concrete?
You just answered yourself. Length doesn't really matter as long as the problem is concrete and the article addresses that problem directly.
My first post here came out in 2023, about keeping a React app fast day to day: dev.to/epilot/how-to-maintain-the-...
My one piece of advice for first-timers: we write more easily when we picture one friend reading, so pick that friend first and explain the bug to them. Thank you for offering to read everyone's first post, that's a lovely way to welcome people.
What a great tip. Love it!🔥
@kate_astrid great article, by the way!
"I'm a fast-paced person: I eat quickly, walk briskly, and make decisions in a snap." That very first sentence totally resonated with me 😄 I'm a calm and quiet person, but when it comes to walking, I'm basically an F1 car. I just can't walk slowly. Same goes for eating and for decisions for the most part, cause some decisions do deserve a bit more time to make them right.
And most importantly, slow apps drive me absolutely crazy. Even though I'm not a front-end developer, I found the tips in this article fascinating and absolutely useful for anyone dealing with performance issues in their apps.
Thanks for sharing! Solid first article back in 2023! 👏
I think some of the most valuable technical articles come from problems that didn't go as planned.
Take Google's SRE postmortem about a routine infrastructure decommissioning that went wrong. A retry after a partial failure, combined with an API treating an empty filter as no filter, ended up triggering disk erasure across satellite machines. That's a pretty serious failure caused by an assumption that probably looked harmless during development.
What makes a write-up like this valuable isn't just the final fix. It's explaining the chain of events, the assumptions behind the implementation, how the issue was investigated, and what changed to prevent it from happening again.
You don't need to publish groundbreaking research to write something worth reading. Sometimes documenting one difficult debugging session can save another developer hours of investigation.
💯
@georgekobaidze Hey Giorgi! I'm pretty new to writing on DEV. I've been sharing some of my projects and experiments, but I still don't really get how views work here.
It's not even about likes. Some articles barely get any views at all, and that's a bit demotivating when you've put a lot of work into them.
Is that normal when you're just starting out? I'd love to hear your thoughts.
That is absolutely normal. My first article just got 4 likes in its entire existence and very few views. Same for some of those that I wrote even later.
You just got to keep writing, keep trying and think of the creative ways how you can engage with the audience. Sometimes it takes weeks, sometimes months and it might take more than a year, but eventually you'll get there if you're persistent enough.
This is a great initiative! Many beginners hesitate to publish because they feel they need years of experience or a perfect topic, but sharing what you've learned is how you grow as a writer and developer. I especially appreciate your offer to give honest feedback. A supportive community like this can make that first step much easier. Looking forward to seeing what new writers share!
Thank you! And how about you? Are you gonna use this chance and write your first article?👀
This is the nudge a lot of people need. My first posts were awkward and I still cringe at a few lines, but that cringe is useful — it means I can see how much clearer I've gotten. Advice I'd give past-me: write the bug that wasted your Saturday, not the tutorial you think seniors expect. Short is fine.
Totally true!
I needed this. I've been terrified of posting ever since we created our app, and I kept finding reasons to wait until I had something worth saying.
I've finally decided to give it a try and share all my embarrassing mistakes and what I learned from them. It still feels awkward, but "it's proof of how far you've come" is a nice way to think about the cringe.
So yeah, to anyone else sitting on a draft: don't be afraid. If I can do it, you can too.
This is awesome! Please post it once you put the article together. Looking forward to it.
Thanks for encouraging! I am new here. I was searching for a community to belong too, so here I am! Next week I will publish my first article and since you promise to read, I am looking forward for my first reader😀
Hey fellow .NET dev! I’m looking forward to reading it! Take your time! Make it special💥
This is such a generous offer, Giorgi — especially the promise to read every single first article and give honest, thorough feedback. The line about a first article feeling tricky, awkward and hard really resonated, and I liked your reminder that a bug that took way too long to fix is a perfectly good first topic. What made you decide to turn this into the Hall of Fame idea after that first round?
Thanks! The idea of turning into the Hall of Fame just came to my mind itself.
Putting yourself out there and hitting publish the first time is brutal. Reminds me of our team drafting our first digital SOPs over at The Printing World. Glad I took the leap!
It is brutal. I remember my heart racing like crazy before hitting that submit button😄
By the way, this was my first article ever:
Understanding Your Audience as a Software Engineer
Love this initiative, Giorgi!
Here's my first technical article on DEV. I was curious about what MCP servers could actually do beyond what was mentioned in their README so I built a scanner and tested it against the top 50 MCP repositories.
What started as a small experiment eventually grew into a project which I'm still actively working on.
I scanned 50 MCP servers to see what they can actually do — here's what I found
Hey :) This is a link to my first technical article: LINK
I also write on other platforms like Medium, but Dev remains the best and most friendly to beginners.
Here's my first article (as a computer science student):
dev.to/fatimaaqaisar/what-my-termi...
Documented a little experiment I did to learn about network protocols before I had taken a computer networks course.
I'd really appreciate if you'd take some time to read. Thanks!
published my first article a few days ago after thinking for so long and saw your post now. Here it is
dev.to/mehar_usama_6/from-upgrade-...
I've published my first article a few weeks ago and no one seems to care so far. So you're still gonna be my first reader. I would be happy about your feedback. :)
dev.to/dyedwiper/integration-testi...
dev.to/xulingfeng/i-cut-my-ai-test...
Kinda feels like digging up my old messy work, haha 😂
Here it is. Thank you so much!
dev.to/l1vra/i-built-jwt-auth-with...
I was thinking of publishing it a lot and thought that maybe some people have faced these problems, so I pressed it!
Thank you for the encouragement and the opportunity! @georgekobaidze
Here is my first article on DEV:
Building an Explainable ICD-10-PCS Recommender with Constrained LLM Traversal
Actually, a technical article is something I have been planning to publish for quite a while now. I've been stuck on what topic I should do. Been thinking about how fascinating the world of backend is while I was learning it, maybe I should write one small and focused topic first. I particularly liked how React's website teaches new devs, maybe I'll adapt the caricature pics (hope my drawing skills are still fine hahaha).
Just published my first one!
"Shey light dey house?" (is there power at home) is a question every Nigerian asks daily. so I built a small device that answers it for me. The article covers the whole thing, from the ESP32 firmware to the Rust server and dashboard.
What made me hit publish: It's my first time writing about something I built, and I wanted to see if I could explain it clearly.
Shey Light Dey House? How I Built an ESP32 Power Monitor for My Home
My first one: dev.to/lucascz/c-undefined-behavio... I published it because it took me lots of time to find out that behauviour of C++
Hmm, Okay so here is my first post on dev.to about the product I'm building:
dev.to/hs_sandesh_d38f900f7bfc25/h...
A month ago, I started writing about an LLM inference system I built: dev.to/lun0522/series/45136. They haven't got many readers, though. Would appreciate any feedbacks!
dev.to/kickz1nn/building-an-embedd...
dev.to/sazzad90/rendering-json-dri...
dev.to/sumanth_kumarkotagudem/fine...
Thank you. First Article. Thanks for the push
Hey, I'm learning Java and Test Automation, and I decided to write about my approach, thanks for the opportunity!
dev.to/lenzz920/building-my-dream-...
Mine......
Encouraging reception from fellow young coders
Hello world!!
Thank you for the offer! Here is my first post. dev.to/jpshettyai/the-software-lif...