The content that you do get is not targeted towards beginners.
It's hard to differentiate between Code Newbie and DEV.to content.
I agree with everything that has already been said. Here are some of my other thoughts:
Could we utilize the reactions more to sort posts? Posts with more reactions are at the top of your feed more. And you can sort these best posts via dates (week, month, year...). You should also have a way to sort by new posts. The purpose is to bubble up posts that are going to be the most valuable to early in career devs. This point may have already been made in the comments!
Can we have weekly threads on what people are learning or struggling with. I think we do this on Twitter already. Having this thread could help build community bonding, and can provide topics for people to write about. The latter point is what I'm excited about the most. We could start building content around what people are struggling with.
Better tag curation - right now we have 200 posts listed under #beginners. And a lot of these posts might not actually be for beginners. Maybe we should look into breaking apart this tag into more concrete tags.
Tony Cimaglia has already mentioned pre-requisite - but I'd take this a step further and make the pre-requisites link to supporting "official" code newbie documentation that people could contribute to (through comments or PRs). I think it would be super awesome to build a library of CodeNewbie knowledge that is the one stop place to go. I know when I was first learning, I was super overwhelmed with all the different resources out there. And this knowledge bank becomes a key differentiator from DEV.
I think that all of the above are great suggestions, especially the CodeNewbie knowledge library, provided that it’s well-structured.
Regarding the beginners tag, we could have language-specific tags and sub-tags within those. It would also be nice to eventually be able to tailor your feed based on those tags to help people focus.
The amount of resources out there was also one of my biggest problems when I first started learning. And even now, I would find it very helpful to be able to adjust my feed based on what I’m learning. E.g. following the React tag when I’m learning React, and then switching to Vue when I’m learning Vue. That way there is less of a risk of getting sidetracked, and people can even form study groups based on that.
There could then be weekly threads on what people are learning or struggling with based on those tags. Same with coding questions or challenges for beginners. Because when I’m learning React, I want to read about and discuss React, and too much context-switching would distract me and make me less willing to engage. So having a cleaner, customisable feed would help a lot in that regard.
Reading through the comments, I see some trends:
I agree with everything that has already been said. Here are some of my other thoughts:
ABSOLUTELY
I think that all of the above are great suggestions, especially the CodeNewbie knowledge library, provided that it’s well-structured.
Regarding the beginners tag, we could have language-specific tags and sub-tags within those. It would also be nice to eventually be able to tailor your feed based on those tags to help people focus.
The amount of resources out there was also one of my biggest problems when I first started learning. And even now, I would find it very helpful to be able to adjust my feed based on what I’m learning. E.g. following the React tag when I’m learning React, and then switching to Vue when I’m learning Vue. That way there is less of a risk of getting sidetracked, and people can even form study groups based on that.
There could then be weekly threads on what people are learning or struggling with based on those tags. Same with coding questions or challenges for beginners. Because when I’m learning React, I want to read about and discuss React, and too much context-switching would distract me and make me less willing to engage. So having a cleaner, customisable feed would help a lot in that regard.
Ooo I love this suggestion! 100% agree that there's just so many resources out there and it can be overwhelming.