There is a new feature in town 😅

You can export your dev.to posts, you'll receive an email with an attached zip file containing a JSON with all your posts.

How do I do that?

You go to https://dev.to/settings/misc and select export, but I also prepared some screenshots so bear with me:

then after submitting the form this happens:

and after a little while you get an email like this one in your inbox:

This is an example of what's inside the file:

I'm a developer, how did you accomplish that?

The feature is quite simple in a sense:

• you request the export
• the backend takes note of that
• a background job starts, collects the posts, converts data and metadata in json
• creates a zip file in memory and adds the json file to the zip
• the zip file gets attached to the email
• the email is sent

Some backstory about this feature

A few months ago, prompted by a feature request, I started working on a pull request to do the above. Then I forgot all about it, then I submitted it but it wasn't that great because I didn't know that much about the code (still don't really :D) and because it could have been better in general.

My PR nonetheless started a conversation with @ben, @maestromac and @jess and after a refactoring and another round of reviews (yay for pull requests!) what has been merged today is something... just better.

What about the rest of the data?

I know the dev.to team is aware of that, this is just a first step.