Thanks for asking this question Ajar. I'll first talk about the motivation behind building Hashnode. We'll write about engineering, dev stack etc in a separate answer.
Fazle and I love writing and teaching people how to code. We have written many tutorials, books and articles for SitePoint. While doing this we realised that there should be a network for developers which helps them learn new things and stay relevant in software development. Stack Overflow already does a great job at solving specific errors and issues. But where is that platform which is welcoming to beginners? Where should a developer go if they need opinions from experts or need help with a specific technology? We want to be that platform. That's why we focus more on subjective and opinion based questions rather than specific errors/issues.
Hashnode was previously known as Devmag which was launched in late Jan 2015. After the launch, we saw good response from the developers' community. Also it was very nice to see so many interesting people from around the world discussing stuff on Devmag. We didn't do any marketing or run any campaign to get sign ups - everything was organic and natural.
Back then we were just two people working on it. So, we realised that we need to form a company and build a team to scale things up. So, we registered a company (in Delaware, US) and became a legal entity. After that our focus was raising money so that we can operate without thinking about immediate monetisation. Fortunately, we raised a seed round of funding from a top VC firm (undisclosed as of now). We'll announce the funding news some time soon. :)
Once funding was done, we went ahead and searched for people who shared the same passion and vision as us. It was difficult, but soon @prank7, @mayank, @alkshendra joined us. So, we are now a 5 member team and all of us are developers. We gathered many useful feedbacks and insights from active users of Devmag. We then worked on those feedbacks, improved a lot of things and relaunched as Hashnode on Dec 17, 2015. We believe the name Hashnode connects with Developers and matches our goals and future plans.
Our goal is to help software developers stay relevant and connected. We are expanding the team slowly. But we make sure that we are doing something meaningful everyday to take the community one step further. We are still in very early stage and the platform needs many improvements. We are working on (and fixing) some important things and you are going to see many useful additions to the community very soon.
Feel free to ask any questions you may have. I'll add a new answer where we'll talk about Dev stack, execution, engineering etc.
co-founder, Hashnode