A developer survey with no questions about coding š¤
- From
- Josh W. Comeau
- Reply-To
- me@joshwcomeau.com
- Sent
- May 2, 2025
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Hey friends! Happy Friday. š
In previous newsletter issues, Iāve shared my thoughts(opens in new tab) on the āState of JSā and āState of CSSā dev survey results. These community surveys tend to focus on the tech, asking which JavaScript frameworks we like or what modern CSS features weāve adopted.
That stuff is interesting, and there can be some useful nuggets in the results, but they donāt really capture much about us.
Well, I just learned about a new survey that takes a different approach. Itās called The State of Devs 2025(opens in new tab), and all of the questions are about who we are, how weāre feeling, and what weāve experienced working as developers.
The questions are things like:
- What are your hobbies?
- What global issues are currently most concerning to you?
- How has your total income evolved over the past 12 months?
- What methods have you tried to improve your sleep, if any?
There are also some more serious / heavy questions, like:
- How happy are you with your current job?
- Have you ever experienced discrimination in the workplace?
The survey was created by Devographics, the same organization behind the other āState of...ā surveys. The survey is currently accepting submissions, and the results should be published later this month.
If you have a few minutes to spare today, it would be awesome if you could take some time to answer the survey. The more people submit their responses, the more trustworthy the insights will be. ā¤ļø
This isnāt paid promotion or anything like that. I saw this on Bluesky yesterday, and thought it was worth sharing! I know that things feel particularly fraught right now, and Iām really interested to see what the results are.
In other news, Iāve been working on the SVG module in my upcoming course, Whimsical Animations(opens in new tab). This module has so many little demos so far, showing how various SVG attributes work. For example, this one shows how corner radiuses are calculated:
And because I just canāt help myself, there are a couple of little easter eggs within these demosā¦ Certain parameter configurations do surprising things. āØ
Iām planning on extracting several blog posts over the coming months based on stuff from the course. This is a very standalone lesson from early in the module, so the odds are very good that Iāll publish it in the coming weeks. Keep an eye out for that. š
Thatās all Iāve got for you today. Hope youāve had a good week!
PS. Speaking of sleep-improving methods, I recently learned a new trick that Iāve found helpful for falling asleep. Itās called cognitive shuffling(opens in new tab). Hereās how Iāve been doing it:
First, pick a random word like ājavascriptā. Take the first letter, and try to come up with words that start with that letter. So, in this case, I might come up with ājuiceā, ājungleā, ājacketāā¦
For each word, spend a few seconds picturing that thing. When you canāt think of anything else, move onto the second letter. For ājavascriptā, the second letter is A, so I might come up with āappleā, āanteaterā, āamberāā¦ Do this for every letter in the word, skipping duplicate letters.
The idea, as I understand it, is to generate a bunch of random, disconnected thoughts, since this tends to be what happens when we fall asleep. Weāre mimicking that natural process, essentially.
Itās not a miracle insomnia cure or anything like that, but Iāve been using it for a couple of weeks now and I find it works better than the other standard suggestions. So, if you have trouble falling or staying asleep, I hope it helps!
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