Blogging for Devs Trends: How it Works

Blogging for Devs Trends is meant to be a fun way to discover excellent tech blogs, made by and for developers! Here's how it works.

What problem are we solving?

Discovering great technical blogs is difficult.

Twitter is more noise than signal. The lists you'll find on Google are outdated, filled with links to companies and large publications, and written by people who don't read technical blogs themselves. If any developers' blogs are included, they're usually abandoned.

Our lists are an attempt at solving these problems: Blogs on Trends are created and recommended by developers, curated for quality, and constantly being re-ordered based on conversations happening on Twitter.

Our two goals with Trends

1. Surface great blogs written by individual developers
2. Inspire more developers to create discussion-worthy blogs

How do the points work?

Points are awarded to a blog based on:

• Counts the least: Retweets and likes of a tweet containing a link to an article on the blog
• Counts the most: Replies and mentions of an article on the blog by other people

In short, we try to reward content that sparks the most discussion as opposed to blindly boosting based on low-effort engagement.

Our main Trends page is based on 2-day trends, and our Topics pages are based on 30-day trends. You can change the time periods to explore more recent trends.

How you can vote for your favorite bloggers

Share your favorite bloggers' articles and chime in with your thoughts when they post something new. Simple as!

Are these blogs really "the best"?

Best is, at best, subjective. We hope that by combining the human element (curation) with an algorithmic element (sparks discussion on Twitter), we can create a unique, and living resource that surfaces different "bests" at different times.

So far, we've also seen that this results in plenty of room at the top for people who are creating new stuff consistently to rise through the ranks.

Why can each blog only have two topics?

We want each list to be as unique as possible, and give more people room to reach the top in topics of their focus.

Technical details

This project is built with Gatsby, Google Cloud Functions, and Firebase. The website rebuilds itself every hour using a GitHub action. Screenshots are taken via Puppeteer, both when a blog is added and when it feels like time for a refresh.

Data is fetched from Twitter every 15 minutes via API and stored. Since we currently use Twitter's free 7-day history API, it's possible some tweets are missed. This also means, new blogs will take time to rise on Topics pages given the 30-day default filter. However, newly submitted blogs have an immediate chance to appear on the Trends home page, since this uses a 2-day filter by default.

Questions, comments, feedback, ideas?

Share them on Twitter @monicalent, I'd love to hear your ideas!

Read to discover some great blogs?

Go back to Trends