The Future of Software Has a Lot More Builders. They’re Going to Need a Home.

I have some big news to share today: **Major League Hacking has acquired DEV (dev.to)**, the developer community platform where millions of developers share technical knowledge, learn from each other, and grow together. This is one of the biggest moves in MLH's 12-year history, and it's been a long time coming. When @ben, @jess, and @peter started DEV almost a decade ago, they wanted to build something the internet didn't have enough of: a developer community built on generosity instead of gatekeeping. A place where people didn’t just ask questions, but actually helped each other. Over the years, DEV grew into a community of more than 3 million developers learning in public, sharing expert advice, and supporting one another in their journeys. It's become one of the most trusted spaces in tech, and anyone who's spent time on the platform knows why. The culture Ben, Jess, and Peter built is special. At MLH, we've been building something complementary. Our developer programs (like the Hackathon League, the MLH Fellowship, and much more) are where developers learn by doing: picking up a tool, creating something real with it, breaking it, trying again. Between our in-person events and programs, MLH has served more than 1.5 million developers across nearly 100 countries. If DEV is the library, MLH is the lab. One is where knowledge gets shared, organized, and preserved. The other is where you get your hands dirty and prove you can actually build. Together, MLH and DEV will reach approximately 5 million developers worldwide. These two community-first platforms have been orbiting each other for years, and we're thrilled to finally bring them together. ## Why Now Is The Right Time To Combine MLH & DEV’s Powers If you've spent years honing your craft as a developer, the value of your skills has grown exponentially over the last year. The judgment, taste, and architectural thinking you've built over a career are exactly the skills that matter most when AI can handle the boilerplate. The ceiling on what you can build has never been higher. At the same time, the floor is rising. People who never would have written a line of code (or called themself a developer) are building real software with AI. More software creators, building more things, tackling more problems. The craft of software development isn't shrinking. It's expanding. The number of people who can build software is about to grow by an order of magnitude. But when everyone can build, the skills that matter change. AI generates the bricks, but you still have to build the house. Taste, judgment, knowing what to build, which tools to trust, how to evaluate whether the output is actually good. Those skills don't come from a tutorial. They develop by building real things alongside other people. And traditional institutions can't keep up. By the time a curriculum gets approved, the technology is already six months out of date. The old developer infrastructure was built for a world where people needed answers to technical questions. AI commoditized that. But the need for a developer community didn't disappear. It shifted. People don't need a database of answers anymore. They need somewhere to develop judgment and learn and build alongside others in a trusted space. Together, MLH and DEV are building the core community infrastructure of the next era of technology. ## What's Changing (And What's Not) For Both Communities **DEV will continue to be the community its members know and trust.** The culture that Ben, Jess, and Peter built is exactly why we wanted to do this, and we're committed to protecting it. We're here to invest in DEV and help it grow, not to change what makes it special. Forem, the open source software that powers DEV, will also continue to evolve. This acquisition actually helps clarify the relationship between the organization and the software. We're working toward a structure that supports Forem's independence so it can serve the broader open source community on its own terms. More on that soon. What IS changing is that MLH and DEV can now do things together that neither could do alone. The lab and the library, connected. You experiment with a new platform or tool at an MLH hackathon. You write about what you learned on DEV. That knowledge becomes searchable, permanent, useful to the next person. Whether you're shipping your first project or you're a senior engineer picking up AI skills for the first time, you're welcome here. In the AI era, everyone is a beginner again at some point. MLH and DEV, together, are the place where that's not just okay, but encouraged. ## Looking Forward To A Future of Software Creators The world is about to have a lot more builders. They're going to need a place to learn, to experiment, to develop taste and judgment, and to find their aspirational figures and their collaborators. That's what MLH and DEV are building together. Thank you and congratulations to Ben, Jess, Peter, and everyone who built DEV into the community it is today. And thank you to our MLH community for continuing to show up, build things, and support each other. You're the reason we get to do this work. Happy Hacking, Jon, Swift, and the entire MLH+DEV team _P.S. If you want to learn more about the acquisition or the future of MLH and DEV, my co-founder and our CEO Swift will be hosting an Ask Me Anything (AMA) with me (Jon) and the DEV founders (Peter, Ben, and Jess) on MLH’s Twitch channel on February 19 at 11:30am ET. We'll be answering questions from the community live. We hope to see you there!_