Posted by Ankita Tripathi, Community Manager (Dev Library)
Witnessing a plethora of open-source enthusiasts in the developer ecosystem in recent years gave birth to the idea of Google’s Dev Library. The inception of the platform happened in June 2021 with the only objective of giving visibility to developers who have been creating and building projects relentlessly using Google technologies. But why the Dev Library?
Open-source communities are currently at a boom. The past 3 years have seen a surge of folks constantly building in public, talking about open-source contributions, digging into opportunities, and carving out a valuable portfolio for themselves. The idea behind the Dev Library as a whole was also to capture these open-source projects and leverage them for the benefit of other developers.
This platform acted as a gold mine for projects created using Google technologies (Android, Angular, Flutter, Firebase, Machine Learning, Google Assistant, Google Cloud).
With the platform, we also catered to the burning issue – creating a central place for the huge number of projects and articles scattered across various platforms. Therefore, the Dev Library became a one-source platform for all the open source projects and articles for Google technologies.
“It is a library full of quality projects and articles.”
External developers cannot construe Dev Library as the first platform for blog posts or projects, but the vision is bigger than being a mere platform for the display of content. It envisages the growth of developers along with tech content creation. The uniqueness of the platform lies in the curation of its submissions. Unlike other platforms, you don’t get your submitted work on the site by just clicking ‘Submit’. Behind the scenes, Dev Library has internal Google engineers for each product area who:
- thoroughly assess each submission,
- check for relevancy, freshness, and quality,
- approve the ones that pass the check, and reject the others with a note.
It is a painstaking process, and Dev Library requires a 4-6 week turnaround time to complete the entire curation procedure and get your work on the site.
What we aim to do with the platform:
- Provide visibility: Developers create open-source projects and write articles on platforms to bring visibility to their work and attract more contributions. Dev Library’s intention is to continue to provide this amplification for the efforts and time spent by external contributors.
- Kickstart a beginner’s open-source contribution journey: The biggest challenge for a beginner to start applying their learnings to build Android or Flutter applications is ‘Where do I start my contributions from’? While we see an open-source placard unfurled everywhere, beginners still struggle to find their right place. With the Dev Library, you get a stack of quality projects hand-picked for you keeping the freshness of the tech and content quality intact. For example, Tomas Trajan, a Dev Library contributor created an Angular material starter project where they have ‘good first issues’ to start your contributions with.
- Recognition: Your selection of the content on the Dev Library acts as recognition to the tiring hours you’ve put in to build a running open-source project and explain it well. Dev Library also delivers hero content in their monthly newsletter, features top contributors, and is in the process to gamify the developer efforts. As an example, one of our contributors created a Weather application using Android and added a badge ‘Part of Dev Library’.
With your contributions at one place under the Author page, you can use it as a portfolio for your work while simultaneously increasing your chances to become the next Google Developer Expert (GDE).
Keeping developers in mind, we’ve updated features on the platform as follows:
- Added a new product category; Google Assistant – All Google Assistant and Smart home projects now have a designated category on the Dev Library.
- Integrated a new way to make submissions across product areas via the Advocu form.
- Introduced a special section to submit Cloud Champion articles on Google Cloud.
- Included displays on each Author page indicating the expertise of individual contributors
- Upcoming: An expertise filter to help you segment out content based on Beginner, Intermediate, or Expert levels.
To submit your idea or suggestion, refer to this form, and put down your suggestions.
Dev Library as a platform is more about the contributors who lie on the cusp of creation and consumption of the available content. Here are some contributors who have utilized the platform their way. Here's how the Dev Library has helped along their journey:
How has the Dev Library helped you?
“It gave me the opportunity to share what I created with an incredible community and look at the projects my fellow Flutter mates have created. It acts as a great learning resource.”
How has the Dev Library helped you?
“I used to discover new open source libraries and helpful articles for Android development in many places and it took me longer than necessary. But the Dev Library allows me to explore these useful resources in one place.”
How has the Dev Library helped you?
“Dev Library is a great tool to find excellent Angular articles or open source projects. Dev Library offers a great filtering function and therefore makes it much easier to find the right open source library for your use case.”
How has the Dev Library helped you?
"The freeCodeCamp community is excited to partner with DevLibrary to share free learning resources on a variety of powerful programming tools, including TensorFlow and Flutter. Our core team uses these tools extensively for our own projects, and we're excited to teach best practices around them."
How has the Dev Library helped you?
"The Dev Library helped me learn more about Android through the many contributions from other authors. In turn, with community at the heart of what I do, Dev Library helped me reach many developers around the world who learned more about Android through my open-source work."
What started as a platform to highlight and showcase some open-source projects has grown into a product where developers can share their learnings, inspire others, and contribute to the ecosystem at large.
Do you have an Open Source learning or project in the form of a blog or GitHub repo you'd like to share? Please submit it to the Dev Library platform. We'd love to add you to our ever growing list of developer contributors!
