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We went looking for good posts by women on DEV. Not "inspirational," not "diverse" but just genuinely good, the kind you'd send to a friend with "okay you have to read this one" attached. Here are eight, and the honest reasons each one earns your attention.
A note from Mika, SheShips creator
This is the first post from SheShips, soooo hi. I'm Mika, and I started this because I kept finding great posts by women on DEV that and I wanted to bring them the attention they deserved, and I didn't see a space built specifically to change that.
Anna Villarreal — DEV Follower Analysis
This is what a good tangent looks like. Anna was seven hours into an unrelated Node.js tutorial when the thought hit her sideways: what if she scraped her own DEV followers, pulled their public GitHub data via GraphQL, and actually looked at who was reading her stuff?
There wasn't a plug-and-play tool for this. So she built one — a scraper, a JSON export, a chart at the end. What makes the post worth reading isn't the follower-count gimmick, it's that she's honest about the process being genuinely a little annoying to figure out. "There isn't a plug-and-play solution for this, you have to be a tiny bit creative," she writes. That's the whole game, most days.
sizzlebop — I Built a Local AI Music Studio
A working answer to "why do I need a subscription and a cloud account just to mess around with AI music generation." Local-first tools like this get way less airtime than their SaaS equivalents, which is exactly why this one deserves the spotlight — someone did the less-flashy, more-useful version and wrote it up.
sylwia-lask — What If Your AI Agent Never Had to Leave the Browser? (Demo)
Good because it's a demo, not a hot take. Half the AI-agent discourse right now is pure speculation in a thread somewhere. This one just answers the question by shipping the thing and letting you go look at it yourself.
thesnehamk — MCP vs API Explained: Do We Still Need APIs After MCP?
The explainer post that earns its spot by asking the question a lot of developers are quietly unsure about but don't want to say out loud in a meeting. Direct, timely, no padding.
maame-codes — Disappeared Since March: Taking a Long Break Was My Best Decision Yet
Not a build post, and that's exactly why it belongs on this list. Writing honestly about stepping away is harder than writing a project devlog, and rarer. If you've ever felt weird about a gap in your own output, this one's for you.
Ava Barron — Can You Stand the Rain
An origin story that refuses the tidy version. Her path into tech runs through an Alicia Keys concert and fixing friends' computers over AIM as a teenager — not a bootcamp, not a CS degree, not a straight line. It won DEV's own 2026 WeCoded "Echoes of Experience" category, and it earns that win through specificity — nothing in it is generic.
Margarita — It Wasn't Brave. It Was Just Tuesday.
Also a WeCoded winner, and what makes this one work is its refusal to dramatize. Three generations of one family, all pulled toward logic and systems, told plainly — no inflating it into a bigger moment than it actually was. The title does the whole argument by itself.
Ashley Childress — Forged Between Coal and Code
The most technically ambitious thing on this list. A fully narrated, self-voiced web experience about growing up in an Appalachian coal town and finding her way into engineering — backed by 685 unit tests and 220 E2E tests, for what's nominally a personal art piece. It won DEV's Frontend Art category, and honestly, the craftsmanship is doing as much work as the story is.
That's the list. Eight different reasons to click through, eight different kinds of good. Go read one.
Building something? We want to see it.
SheShips is a space for women who build and ship real software — whatever that looks like for you. A devlog, a first open-source contribution, an experiment that didn't work, a tutorial explaining the thing you learned three days ago. If you've got something you're working on, join us on DEV and share it. We'd love to feature you in the next one of these.
Top comments (22)
Thank you so much for including my post, Mika! I'm honestly so happy to be on this list with such amazing women. Spaces like this matter so much for encouraging more women into tech and showing them there's room for every kind of story, whether it's a big build or just an honest update.
Really excited about SheShips! We need more spaces like this. Seeing women build, write and share openly is what makes tech feel possible for the next woman thinking about getting in. SheShips feels like it's going to be that space, and I can't wait to see the builders, stories and projects it brings to the spotlight. Already following along :)
Thank you so much, Maame 💜 This is exactly the kind of energy I hope She Ships can grow around — people building, learning, writing, experimenting, and making the path into tech feel a little less lonely for whoever comes next. I’m really happy your work is part of it, and I’m so excited to see what this community becomes. Thank you for being here from the beginning 🫶✨
Great organization 🔥 I'd love to join 😍
invite sent :) <3
Joined 😍
Mika, 2 names on this list I already know from real exchanges, Sylwia and Maame. Good sign this found people worth reading not just people to fill a slot.
Sina's comment below has the real point. The work should be the reason people stop scrolling not the calendar date.
That’s what I was hoping this could do: point people toward work that’s genuinely worth reading, not just fill out a themed list. The fact that some of these names were already familiar to you from real interactions that feels like a good sign. 💚
And yes! Sina put it perfectly: the work should be what earns the attention, not the calendar date. Thanks for reading and adding this.
Ah girlll!!!! Can you add me to this organization as a guest of honor? 😂
yes girl of course!! I love your pieces, i had to include you! <3
I like the idea behind this, especially because the real value here isn’t the spotlight itself. Good work shouldn’t need a special month, campaign, or occasion to become worth discovering. What stood out to me is the variety: building a tool, shipping a demo, solving a real technical problem, taking a break, telling a personal story. Different work, different reasons to read it. Maybe the better goal is not to spotlight people once a year, but to keep discovering good work all year round.
The work should be the reason we stop scrolling.
exactly this. 💜 I really don’t want SheShips to become a place where people only get highlighted because of an awareness month or a special occasion. The goal is to keep finding great work, interesting builds, thoughtful writing, and people worth following all year long
That sounds like an incredibly great organization. Good job, Mika 👏.
Can i join this organization?
absolutely!! :)
Thanks for the callout, @mikachu. This is a great idea and thanks for including me! Send me an org invite, too, please 😄
Love it and thank you for this curation. Shout out to all the brilliant writers on this list. It has been a pleasure to read their articles and I have learned so much from them. Looking forward to more of these posts!
The line that hit me: "Not 'inspirational,' not 'diverse' but just genuinely good."
That distinction matters more than people give it credit for. I'm a beginner writer — I published my first article about two weeks ago — and the thing I keep noticing is how much "beginner content" gets treated as a separate category from "real content." Like if you're learning, your work isn't worth reading yet.
But the best writing I've read on Dev.to has been from people who are genuinely figuring something out in public. Not experts performing expertise. People showing the actual process.
Anna's "you have to be a tiny bit creative" is the whole game. I wrote a tutorial this week and spent an embarrassing amount of time on a single line of code that would take a senior dev two seconds. But that struggle is what makes the article worth reading — because there's someone else who'll get stuck on the exact same thing.
This list is a good reminder that "genuinely good" and "technically deep" aren't the same thing. A short honest post about taking a break can be more valuable than a 12-minute system design deep dive.
Reading through these now. Thanks for building this.
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