DEV's CodeNewbies Acquisition: More newbies than ever
DEV, an online platform where developers can share original content, acquired CodeNewbie, a community for new developers who are learning to code.
Background: DEV describes itself as a "platform where software developers write articles, take part in discussions, and build their professional profiles." The DEV platform, which is entirely open source, emphasizes transparency and openness.
With nearly 6 million unique visitors per month and upwards of 250,000 registered users, DEV is building an influential global community. At the end of 2019, DEV announced that they had raised their $11.5M Series A round of funding.
A rich ecosystem: DEV joins an increasingly diverse ecosystem of developer communities—including sites like Stack Overflow, Hashnode, Reddit, FreeCodeCamp, HackerNews, and HackerNoon.
CodeNewbie, however, caters to developers who are early in their engineering careers. It created a series of popular podcasts for beginners and runs a developer conference, CodeLand.
Finding their voice: CodeNewbie's rise to prominence shows that newbie developers are a fast growing segment in the developer community.
This influx of people learning to code is driven by (1) people interested in becoming software developers and (2) existing workers whose roles are becoming more technical. More jobs today—like data scientists, machine learning engineers, and cybersecurity specialists—are integrated more deeply into development workflows.
Experts project there will be 27.7 million developers in the world by 2023, up from 23 million in 2018. That doesn’t include millions more that code in some capacity: GitHub alone welcomed more than 10 million new developers to its community in the last year and is now home to over 40 million users.
Why newbies matter: They play an outsized role in shaping the future of software development. Among other things, new developers can drive language and framework adoption toward more beginner-friendly developer tools.
As we enter a golden age of software development, expect it to be increasingly shaped by this rapidly expanding community of new developers—and the online platforms they support.
