What I like about dev.to... and what I dont (DEP 0)
Tags: discuss, dep, meta
Published: 2018-08-22 10:46:40

---
title: What I like about dev.to... and what I dont (DEP 0)
published: true
description: 
tags: discuss, DEP, meta
---

## What is DEP?

As we have PEP in the python community (Python Enhancement Proposal), it might be a nice idea to have some DEPs (Dev Enhancement Proposals) from the dev community.

## How would this DEP look like?

In a nutshell, it would be a mere of:

* Current
  * What I like.
  * What I don't like.
* Future
  * What I hope to see.
  * What I hope to not see.

#### So let's start!
---
## What I like

* Dev nature

I see dev as "Facebook for developers", you communicate with developers, share ideas with devs, crack jokes with them, and most importantly **know the trends of developing**.

* Super fast

Dev brings **great user experience** when searching/browsing, today I was searching about the testability of serverless architecture, so I wrote "tdd serverless" and voila it brought the result in the **very exact second**!


## What I don't like

* Notification links

When you open a notification on someone-has-commented, you click on it and darn! it opens a small window of his comment, you wanna check/read the context of his comment, you open the full topic and play the scrolling game to reach his comment... duh !

Why not opening his comment in the full topic window and auto-scroll to it, then do some yellow highlighting over his comment ?!

* Adding pictures

Uploading above => Copying the link => Pasting the link in the editor => meh !

Why not copying the pic (from the clipboard) and pasting directly on the editor?

And keeping that button for the phone/tablet users.


## What I hope to see

* Emojis

Seriously speaking, how can you interact with others where written words are the only medium, and there isn't an easy-to-use emoji like in Discourse (you just write a colon and they all appear in front of you).

* Markdown live-preview

Isn't it better to just check what I'm writing in a live-preview as in Discourse, instead of jumping from tap to another (Markdown / Preview) to just check how it looks :|

* More organized/simpler UI

The main page UI is a bit cluttered, and can be much simpler

Example: which one feels better for you left one or right?

![ui](https://thepracticaldev.s3.amazonaws.com/i/bethi92q0su6g02oylbh.png)


## What I hope to not see

* Native iOS/Android/Whatsoever app

Yeah, I'm serious... even they've already started with the iOS app [in their repo](https://github.com/thepracticaldev/DEV-ios)!

There is always a technical debt for every repo you start, every software you write, and every small idea you wanna apply.

It's a burden that the dev team will have (for two extra repos: iOS & Android), and bugs will surely occur, and they gotta fix it.

PWA is more than enough and much more pleasant in so many ways **especially the updating thing**... I don't wanna see a buggy, need-to-update-via-app-store, burdensome-for-dev-team app for dev.to.

* Hostile environment

No (dislike / anger face) reaction to posts... just because you don't like someone's ideas, doesn't mean you gotta show an anger face to them, ignore it and be happy without spoiling other people happiness.

* Localization/Internationalization

I know this is a social network... but let's not forget, more languages means scattering the community into smaller portions of different language speakers :(

And yeah, "English is the lingua franca of programming", says the great Jeff (co-founder of stackoverflow) [in his article here.](https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-ugly-american-programmer/)

* Job platform

Most people here are pointing to there LinkedIn accounts in their profiles, so what's the point of adding a hiring platform (with annoying emailing/notifcations) in dev... given that HRs can check their posts/comments/github.

We all saw how stackoverflow got a bit spoiled with the job thingy.

---

Having said all that, tell us what do you think about it?

And, feel free to write your own DEPs ;)