I’ve decided to migrate my new content to dev.to, and have been publishing there over the past few months. Brandon Weaver - DEV Profile Ruby, Javascript, Lemurs, Puns, and Art. Aspie, He / Him. Currently Ruby Infrastructure and Frameworks @Square…dev.to
Autism in Technology
You can find new articles like my writings on Autism in technology: Tales of the Autistic Developer - The Ecstasy of the Void For those who don’t know me, I’m autistic. Asperger’s Syndrome to be precise. I’ve been a developer for the better part…dev.to Tales of the Autistic Developer - The 10x Engineer For those who don’t know me, I’m autistic. Asperger’s Syndrome to be precise. I’ve been a developer for the better part…dev.to
The Future of Lemur Talks
The lemurs are still very much alive, and are going on even more grand adventures than before in “Tales of the Ruby Grimoire”: Tales of the Ruby Grimoire - Part One - The Grimoire This is a text version of a talk given at Southeast Ruby 2019, and the first of many tales of the legendary Ruby…dev.to
If you’d like to see how this talk was made, also check out my article detailing just that: How it’s Made - Tales of the Ruby Grimoire I’ve done a post like this once in the past for the initial run of “Reducing Enumerable - An Illustrated Adventure”…dev.to
Why Move Though?
So why is it I’ve decided to move to another platform?
The answer has multiple points to it:
All of my content is free
While Medium allows for non-paywall content, I choose to avoid all confusion on the subject by writing on an explicitly free platform.
I write to teach and to spread joy, and will always seek to have free options to all of my content that I produce.
Code Formatting
Code formatting on Medium is, quite frankly, bad. This is true from the perspective of both a writer and a reader, as it can be hard to work with the editor and even harder to read without syntax highlighting.
The alternative option to use Gist feels like an excuse to not implement first-class functionality for this.
Medium is not geared for Developers
Code formatting makes this a clear point, but presenting code resources on Medium is a tedious endeavor. The editor and associated tools are not geared towards developers as a primary audience.
dev.to provides a Markdown editor as the primary interface, making writing a lot quicker for code. I will grant that the image uploader is a bit cumbersome in some cases, but overall the experience is better.
Exporting content from Medium makes this abundantly clear as half the code is mangled with escape sequences and requires a great deal of cleaning. This is about the only reason I don’t port my current content over.
Community and Involvement
Medium has very constantly felt like a black hole with rare comments and interactions, unless I happen to write about something particularly controversial.
I feel this is because it can be difficult to register for Medium, and the site tends to harass anonymous users to log in which is also counter to the type of community I’d like to have. Anyone should be able to read, full stop, registered or not. Throwing popovers is in poor taste to me.
dev.to is involved, consistently so. Even as a fairly new writer I have a decent amount of interaction and interested parties reading and interacting with articles.
Their activity on Twitter and highlighting of community members is really inspired, and something I’d be interested in working with and being a part of. Bottom line, dev.to is actively involved and participates with developers. Medium not so much so.
Closing Thoughts
Medium has overall been a decent platform to write on, but I feel that dev.to more closely matches my style of writing and the community I’d like to be a part of.
These are my personal thoughts. Perhaps you have different ones, and that’s perfectly fine. For me, Medium is not an ideal match any more, so I’ve moved on.
You can find all future posts over at dev.to: Brandon Weaver - DEV Profile Ruby, Javascript, Lemurs, Puns, and Art. Aspie, He / Him. Currently Ruby Infrastructure and Frameworks @Square…dev.to