Committing to /dev/null: A Social Network for Developers

A few weeks ago I joined /dev/null, a social network for developers. I haven't enjoyed a social site this much in a long time, so here is what it is and how it has gone for me so far.

What is /dev/null?

It all started as a live stream from the JetBrains office, the creators of the PhpStorm IDE.

On 15 October 2026, Nuno Maduro, Brent Roose, Matthieu Napoli and Pauline Vos opened an empty repository and built a developer social network in 48 hours, publicly streaming the entire process.

It's a PHP app, written from scratch in Laravel, Inertia, React and hosted on Laravel Cloud.

They made heavy use of LLMs like Claude Code, which probably explains most of the rapid progress that was made in such a short time.

The concept is very on theme:

• GitHub is the only way to sign in
• Posts are commits
• The timeline is a log
• DMs are known as remotes

Growth was fast. It passed 1,000 developers on day two and at the time of writing it's now sitting at over 13,000+ developers using the platform.

Plenty of well-known names turned up in the first week or two, and support for GitHub organisation pages has also been added since. Developers can claim an organisation that they belong to and start posting — er, committing — as that organisation.

Added to the common occurrence of new developers being warmly welcomed when they push their first commit, it's starting to feel like a vibrant and supportive developer community.

Nice surprises

Some of my earliest positive impressions were from the little details, which showed a lot of care and attention had been given to this app already in the first week.

For example, writing /dev/null in a commit (a post) will actually render the logo in much the same way as typing X on Twitter/X now does the same thing.

Not long after that noticing that, I also discovered that right-clicking the logo on desktop browsers gives you a menu to copy it as an SVG, grab the official brand assets, and download desktop backgrounds.

If you want the logo, you're going to try and right-click it to download it. Being presented with exactly what you need — and so much more — at that point is just logical. You try to download the low quality logo, and are instead given access to the full brand assets and desktop/mobile wallpapers to boot.

I'm also a fan of the Related commits feature. At the bottom of every commit page is a list of semantically-related commits.

In response to my commit praising the feature, it surfaced Matthew Peck-Deloughry's post, which says much the same thing as I did:

Code blocks in commits

Another feature I really appreciate is support for code blocks in commits. It's not something that social media platforms aimed at a general audience generally add support for, but on a platform built by developers, for developers, it makes a lot of sense.

A code block shows the language (bash in the example below), highlights the syntax, and has buttons to wrap lines and to copy the code to your clipboard.

I used one during Laracon AU to share a tip from a talk by Joel Clermont: you can automatically introduce mutations to your code and check that your tests now fail, using the infection/infection package for PHP.

It's a small thing, but it means you can share the exact command or snippet you're talking about, rather than a screenshot of it.

Where it's heading

I recently shared a clip of Nuno Maduro talking about the future of /dev/null. I went in search for an answer to that question, and it didn't take me long to find it.

The goal isn't to get rich from the new social media app for developers, but instead just to cover the bills, with funding partners helping with the infrastructure costs.

Any individual or organisation can become a funding partner by sponsoring them on GitHub. Assuming the partners provide enough to keep things afloat, there won't be any ads.

I find that refreshing, and it's a big part of why I'm comfortable investing my time there.

Committing live from Laracon AU

I announced that I'd commit live from Laracon AU in Brisbane, and I did.

During the Laravel conference in Australia, I made sure that key quotes and interesting photos from each of the speakers went out as commits throughout the two-day event, and it was a great way to share the event with people who couldn't be there.

It was also a great opportunity to interact with others that were posting about the event, including the Laravel Live Japan co-organiser David Ciulla, and Laracon AU organiser Michael Dyrynda. A few also expressed disappointment at missing the convention, but appreciated the regular updates.

(My main takeaway from the conference? I need more sleep!)

/dev/null vs Twitter/X

I've been posting to both over the past week or so, and I noticed something interesting.

Twitter/X gets me more views, but in most cases /dev/null gets much heavier engagement. The replies are more thoughtful, the audience is made up of fellow developers, and conversations actually go somewhere. In a lot of ways, this new social media app for developers feels like the early days of Twitter.

Occasionally a post that I've cross-posted to both platforms will get more interaction on Twitter/X, but it seems like it's the exception rather than the rule. It likely depends on the post itself, the time of day around the world, and several other factors.

I have 10x the followers over on Twitter, but it's also likely that most of those are now inactive or less engaged. With the newer platform being less than a month old at this point, I'd expect that a larger percentage of users are logging in daily.

Doing the same comparison in a year's time may yield interesting results.

Come and say hello!

If you're a developer, give it a go. You can find me on /dev/null. I'm currently on a 22-day commit streak, so it's definitely a part of my daily routine!