feat: add blog post on welcoming questions in dev communities

2026-06-10 20:43:10 -07:00
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+title: "a dev community where people are scared to ask questions is not a community~"
+date: "2026-06-10"
+summary: "if people are scared to ask questions, it is not a community."
+---
+
+a dev community where people are scared to ask questions is not a community~
+
+i run the community spaces for a charity in the developer education space if people are not comfortable asking questions the entire thing falls apart
+
+so like it is not just making people feel welcome and comfortable and happy but it is also ensuring that the friction of participating does not outweigh the benefits
+
+in our industry it is especially important to be cognisant of this because like we have a history of gatekeeping and treating knowledge like its wealth or something yknow how sometimes the way new developers are met is with condescension
+
+anyway communities that wanna be chill vibes still end up with vibes that are kinda hostile towards the next generation a lil so i encourage you to keep that in mind~
+
+so how do we fix it naomi well that is a very good question lets do some ideation!!!
+
+my first thought is that having a strong (volunteer) moderation team who can help address the more hostile or aggressive developer feedback to ease some of the internal tensions that we face would be a huge boon
+
+strong and explicit community policy is a must like you gotta have a good code of conduct and such but also your team need to *embody* that policy they gotta walk the walk with consistent and effective moderation and talk the talk in the way they conduct their interactions in the community
+
+depending on how many your community is you may benefit from having dedicated spaces for the newer generation of developers to ask their questions in a judgement free space without having to see the seniors asking much more complex questions if that makes sense
+
+naomi we have kpis and some other thing we have to do numbers!!!! okay that is fine let me help you do some numbers~
+
+first one is member retention - more specifically, what percentage of your members who ask their first help question return to ask another????
+
+second one is community driven engagement - are the help questions being answered by community members before you can even respond?????
+
+and how about your diversity in participants especially across skill levels (and marginalised identities of course) are the folks who are oft under-represented more equally distributed in your demographics?????????
+
+without these in place your community will never be able to thrive~