this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2026
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Programming
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I joined Medium before dev.to... that's the reason. But I have to ask, why dev.to? To be honest I don't care one place or the other.
I used to write articles on medium too, but dev.to was where I ended up because I witnessed it being founded. As for why I mentioned it specifically? Not entirely sure to be honest. I think it’s the first thing that stuck out when I thought of medium because it’s literally the opposite in many ways… less focused on profits and ads. No non-negotiable paywalls for valuable knowledge that I can recall, developer/tech focused with a great and supportive community, easy access/exposure for new authors, and a whole gamut of other small but positive differences that aligned with me personally. These were the first things I noticed from my experience publishing stuff there.
There are many other sites with communities like that that I’ve come across, for example: writeas.com as an alternative to tumblr/blogger and such, devRant is great as a venting space for developer-specific trouble/humour/jokes and interesting stories. Etc.
I have a soft spot for small independent sites like that. The ones trying to revive the 2000s internet spirit/experience. No shareholders or algorithms to dictate what becomes popular and what gets buried based on profit-driven logic/metrics to steer the masses or influence opinions for the sake of ad revenue or sales.
That was one of the reasons why I recently move from Twitter/X, Instagram... to the fediverse. And honestly I didn't pay attention to Medium as I don't write so often. I will take a look at dev.to and proably I will move my (three) Medium articles here. Thank you so much!
You’re welcome. :)
I just overcame my aversion to medium to read your article, then I read the rest. I have to admit I’m very impressed, not only with what you were doing back then, but the fact we were exploring the same corners before modern “data science” was even a thing! My parallel journey was on a different track from NLP though. I was exploring spike-train-based neural net architecture, unsupervised learning, and how to give neural networks “tools” to work with (not tool calls, actual tools like a paint brush and a virtual canvas, etc). Damn… I think I still have ancient videos of that on my YT channel.
My Intel Celeron(tm) CPU could never handle more than 4 layers of ~512 neurons maybe? I don’t really remember the specifics, but I think that’s why I stopped back then.
I think that’s why the 2000s were magical for me, although your “grandpa” comments are now hitting me right in the soul. Damn it. :P
I'm glad that you like it but sorry for taking you to the dark side :-)
You are completely right, in the early 2000 and before, sites where built to share, help and learn. The word "enshitification" describes perfectly the current landscape. Luckily there are some oasis, like the fediverse and other places, where we can still feel Internet as it should be.