  Software developers are social creatures: they communicate, collaborate, and
promote their work in a variety of channels. Twitter, GitHub, Stack Overflow,
and other platforms offer developers opportunities to network and exchange
ideas. Researchers analyze content on these sites to learn about trends and
topics in software engineering. However, insight mined from the text of Stack
Overflow questions or GitHub issues is highly focused on detailed and technical
aspects of software development. In this paper, we present a relatively new
online community for software developers called DEV. On DEV users write
long-form posts about their experiences, preferences, and working life in
software, zooming out from specific issues and files to reflect on broader
topics. About 50,000 users have posted over 140,000 articles related to
software development. In this work, we describe the content of posts on DEV
using a topic model, showing that developers discuss a rich variety and mixture
of social and technical aspects of software development. We show that
developers use DEV to promote themselves and their work: 83% link their
profiles to their GitHub profiles and 56% to their Twitter profiles. 14% of
users pin specific GitHub repos in their profiles. We argue that DEV is
emerging as an important hub for software developers, and a valuable source of
insight for researchers to complement data from platforms like GitHub and Stack
Overflow.
