Thanks Vijay. :)

Do you think people still read technical books?

I personally don't read technical books. I mostly go through docs and learn new things while doing. But that is certainly not true for everyone out there. However, this seems to be an excellent question for the whole Hashnode community. So, I went ahead and started a poll here. Let's see what everyone has to say. :)

And why do you want to open-source? Is it to reduce cost or more community participation?

At Hashnode, we strongly advocate openness and transparency. While you can be transparent to a great extent while being closed-source, OS takes it to a whole new level. It's certainly not to cut the cost. Our server bills are still going to be the same, even after open sourcing. As you said, the primary goal is to involve the whole community in every aspect of Hashnode and boost the adoption in the process.

Why Blockchain? Don't you think it is an inefficient way of doing things? Lot of processing power goes waste.

I think Blockchain is an excellent way to provide ownership to your users and become fully transparent. If Hashnode moves to a blockchain based platform, all the code + data becomes public. One can argue that data is public anyway. However, they are not the same thing. A company may provide API based access to their data, but if you don't agree with their philosophy and vision, there is nothing much you can do about it. But if the platform is on blockchain (thereby Open Source), the users of the platform always have an option to create a fork of the platform since both code and data belong to the whole community, not the particular company. However, I don't think the current environment and ecosystem is mature enough to build and sustain a blockchain based community - but I am optimistic and I am closely observing what's going on. :)

Regarding processing power going waste - I think that's a problem faced primarily by PoW based platforms. There are other consensus mechanisms such POS, dPOS, hashgraph etc that don't require heavy computations like PoW. However, there are trade-offs that you should be aware of. IMO, there are too many things going on in blockchain ecosystem and developers are still figuring out efficient ways to do the same thing.

What if someone finds a solution to solve the hashes faster?

It's just a matter of time. :)

What do you think about DEV?

I don't use it personally. But I have heard good things about it. There is definitely overlap and our target audience is the same. This means there is going to be more innovation in this field and developers are going to benefit from it.

it's open sourced

Even we have similar plans. As I mentioned in my other answers, OS takes transparency and community adoption to a different level altogether. We are discussing things internally and will probably have some concrete ideas about OS plans very soon.

It's always good to have alternatives. We have varieties of options in other fields. Why not have that option when it comes to dev communities? At Hashnode, we don't consider them to be our competitor. We have our own vision, plans and goals - So, we'll grow in our own direction. 😀

Thank you Bridget!

do you think Hashnode will be able to out run these two competitors?

Well, Hashnode is more about complementing Stack Overflow than competing with it. Stack's focus is to remain objective and find the the best answer to a particular question/problem. Our goal is just the opposite. We are more conversational in nature. We want to present wide range of perspectives to our readers and let them decide what works best for them. Finally, we are all about welcoming beginners and being friendly towards them. But that doesn't mean one doesn't need StackOverflow. If you are a programmer, you'll find yourself on SO (even unknowingly via Google) to find answers to bugs. That's perfectly fine. But if you want to dig deeper into a subject or want to have conversations with fellow programmers Hashnode is your buddy. :)

And any chance of an android application? Would make things much easier for notifications :)

We'll probably release the iOS app first since that's almost ready. Once iOS app is out, we can ship the Android version in a few weeks after that.

I seem to have random people following me from Hashnode, appearing either on my github/gitlab/twitter feeds and just wondering where they have found me, and they seem to be originating from hashnode when they follow me on here lol!

Lol! Always good to have more followers. If they are originating from Hashnode, even better. Cheers! 🍺

Feel free to ask follow-up questions if you have any. :)

Our codebase is still based on MERN stack. An interesting thing is: we released mern-starter much after building Hashnode. So, we never really rewrote Hashnode using this boilerplate. However, we just took the good parts from mern-starter and incorporated it into Hashnode.

IMO, Next.js does an amazing job at helping people build server rendered React apps that just work. It's well maintained and has amazing docs/support. Plus it's nothing but React and Node.js. So, when we rewrote Hashnode in early 2018, we just went with Next.js as it was simply the best option out there. So, my recommendation is to go with Next. :)

Hi Loke! Thanks for stopping by.

jQuery (slim) is primarily there because of legacy reasons. When we launched Hashnode (2015), we used a few jQuery plugins and took help of jQuery's xhr to make API calls. After that when started using React heavily, we tried to minimize the usage of jQuery and at one point we made it a point not to use jQuery for new features and started rewriting old bits of code that were using jQuery. For example, all the XHR calls were replaced with fetch with a polyfil. Some widgets were rewritten using vanilla JS. Today we don't use jQuery for new features. However, we still have a few areas that are dependant on jQuery and we'll need some more time to fully rewrite them. :)

We have cached all our static assets in Service Workers. So, for a logged-in user there won't be any network delay because of jQuery bundle (after the first visit of course). But yes, we'll get rid of it soon. 🙌

We launched Hashnode on Product Hunt and probably acquired 100+ users from there. Since we didn't want to spend money on marketing, we relied on word of mouth and organic traffic to build audience. A few things that worked:

• Friends and family, of course. We invited them and they invited some of their friends.
• AMA sessions - This was a big one
• Quality discussions and stories

We always made sure to share our discussions/stories on twitter, reddit and other social media platforms. Honestly, we didn't do anything extraordinary to acquire first 1000 users. I guess good content and attractive design got people hooked. Moreover, our primary value proposition was "friendly and inclusive" community. So, that resonated with a lot of folks who were frustrated with the toxicity on other platforms.

• Your team will make or break your business. I couldn't understand this before running a company. Now I know that assembling a top notch team is the biggest responsibility of any entrepreneur. If you fail here, you can't win.
• Have good investors who believe in you. When things become rough (which will definitely happen), they will back you.
• Always underpromise and overdeliver.

Hope this helps! 😃

Yes, we do have plans, but there is no timeline yet. We are discussing a few things internally and I should be able to give a concrete answer in next couple of months.

Our initial idea was to acquire a large audience and then think about monetization. As of now, we have several ideas for the same, but we don't want to implement anything in hurry. So, we will wait a bit to improve our user retention, acquire more users and then introduce a business model. :)

I too have been thinking about it. That would be really nice. Maybe some leaderboard or something like typingbolt.com/leaderboard

I know Hashnode is not a gaming platform. But it gives a great feeling to devs

Haha.. Well, first things first: I am a Cat person. 😃

How did you manage to do so much in so little time and how do you learn new stuff?

When I look back at my career graph, I still think I could have done more. :) I should have wasted less time in my college (CS100 program) and learned the amazing stuff I finally picked up in 2014.

But in general I usually pick things fast and I directly delve into the problem instead of reading books or watching video tutorials. Although I have a Computer Science degree, I never learned any of the real world stuff from college or books. I learned them by doing. :)

Do you use some special learning techniques, or do you naturally pick up stuff very fast?

I don't have any special abilities when it comes to learning. I just make sure that I don't fall in love with a particular language. I look at the problem, understand what to use and then I just go ahead and do it.

I like to keep things simple and keep myself away from overengineering. :) IMO, if you just follow these two things you will actually move faster and build things that create value.

Good day Christian and thanks for the question!

Our mission is to build the friendliest and most inclusive dev community. All our efforts are channeled towards that. As far as future is concerned, here are some planned things:

• Closely observe what's working and remove things that aren't being used much.
• Introduce new ideas that will help developers blog more on Hashnode. The goal is to produce more dev content that will help engineers get better in their career.
• Help engineers monetize their knowledge effectively. This is a big one in our list. We briefly pursued this idea in 2018 and explored blockchain tech to make this happen. However, we are brainstorming more ideas and will soon introduce something.
• We don't want Hashnode to turn into reddit or Stack Overflow and become hostile towards beginners. So, we are going to focus more on helping beginners advance in their career through Hashnode.
• Jobs. We want to shape Hashnode in such a way that recruiters can easily identify good potential candidates by looking at their Hashnode contributions. This will take time and demand a lot of efforts, but we'll get there.

All in all, Hashnode will remain a friendly dev community that takes social aspects of programming into account and helps developers become better in their career.

Does that answer your question? 😃