Home Sweet Home Screen: Developers Need Their Own Fun Social Place

Developers are a passionate bunch. Ask one of us which front-end JavaScript framework is the best and you’ll get a long rant about the latest soup du jour. Listen to a programmer work on a stubborn bug and count how many “wtf” mutterings slip out. Watch a developer in the zone, coding like a boss, react to a product manager hovering over their shoulder to “see how it’s coming along.” It’s not that devs like to complain (ok, maybe sometimes) it’s that we really, deeply care about what we do and how we do it, so much so that we devote a fair amount of our free time to do even more programming. How many accountants do you know who start accounting side-projects on the weekend because of their love of tax code? Not many. Software engineers are a different breed, and you can’t treat us like any other profession. That’s why we created devRant, a community for software developers to share and bond over our successes and frustrations with tech, code and life as a programmer.

Unlike Stack Overflow or GitHub or Hacker News, devRant isn’t about the technical aspects of your job, it’s about being a person who also happens to be a developer. So we share programming work stories, jokes that are lost on your non-technical friends and the always popular dev memes. Since our launch in March we’ve had over 20,000 developers post over 40,000 rants, and with that we’ve collected lot of interesting data about developers.

We recently took a look at social behaviors that suggest personality types, separated out by developer language. The personality types we examined were “Most Friendly” which is the average number of comments a dev (of that language) posts on other users’ rants, showing how social and chatty they are in the community. PHP developers led the pack with the most comments, and Objective-C trailed, being the least social language with right around half as many comments per user as PHP. Then we looked at “Most Critical” which is the average number of downvotes on other users’ rants. Swift programmers were the most critical of others, a full two times more critical than Ruby, the least critical group of devs. Finally, we examined devs by “Most Verbose” which is the average number of words in each rant they post. C# devs were the most wordy while Objective-C came in last, with about 20% fewer words per rant than C#. Below is the full infographic:

You can check out devRant in the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store, and also our beta website. We’ve also started a web cartoon series based on popular user rants and a podcast interview series with top-tier developer guests such as DHH and Andy Hunt. More information can be found on devrant.io.

Happy ranting!