It’s been three years and ten months since we “officially” started building dev.to. At the time, our Twitter account was much more widely known than the fledgling community platform, so we interchangeably referred to ourselves as the team behind The Practical Dev or dev.to. Eventually, we settled on the name “DEV” and our organization morphed into a single identity -- “The DEV Team.”
One of our company’s guiding principles is to “constantly evolve.” In that spirit, I’m happy to share that the DEV Team is now the Forem Team.
What is Forem?
Forem is the underlying open-source software that powers DEV. As we shared in our “For Empowering Community” announcement post, our goal is to generalize the software so that anyone can stand up a community that is modern, safe, and independent.
While we could have continued on as the DEV Team that maintains Forem, we want our deep belief in and commitment to Forem to be reflected in our company identity. In embracing this name, we’re empowered to think big, and to make decisions that serve Forem’s ambitions beyond the scope and needs of one community.
We recently updated the name of our open-source repo from /thepracticaldev/dev.to to /forem/forem, too:
For empowering community 🌱
Forem 🌱
For Empowering Community
Welcome to the Forem codebase, the platform that powers
dev.to. We are so excited to have you. With your help, we can
build out Forem’s usability, scalability, and stability to better serve our
communities.
What is Forem?
Forem is open source software for building communities. Communities for your
peers, customers, fanbases, families, friends, and any other time and space
where people need to come together to be part of a collective
See our announcement post
for a high-level overview of what Forem is.
dev.to (or just DEV) is hosted by Forem. It is a community of
software developers who write articles, take part in discussions, and build
their professional profiles. We value supportive and constructive dialogue in
the pursuit of great code and career growth for all members. The ecosystem spans
from beginner to advanced developers, and all are welcome to find their place…
There’s more work to do before we can seamlessly stand up a new Forem community at scale, but we are getting very close. To stay updated on Forem progress, please join our recently launched meta-forem community: https://forem.dev
What about DEV?
Though we’re evolving our team identity, we’re not going anywhere, and not all that much will change on a day-to-day basis. Software development is at the core of what we do, and we will always be DEVs at heart. The DEV Community will continue to be a major part of our focus and operations, and you should expect the same level of commitment from us in supporting and growing the community. We’ll still be here to cultivate an inclusive and positive environment, to share amazing posts through our social channels, to run fun campaigns, to respond to your needs, and otherwise support the community any way that we can.
DEV has become its very own standalone brand, and decoupling the priorities of Forem from DEV allows more room for exploration and creativity within DEV-specific initiatives. The same is true for CodeNewbie, CodeLand, and all of the work being invested into our podcast network (now spanning DevDiscuss, DevNews, and The CodeNewbie Podcast).
Next Steps
The biggest evolution here is a mindset shift -- self-identifying as the group working on Forem allows our team to prioritize and think through the prism of Forem and how we can support communities beyond DEV. We’ll be continuing this transition over the next couple of weeks and months so expect some updates in places like our “about page” or jobs site.
Thank you all for being part of the journey <3
Jess Lee
