Developers are the future of Steemit - let's start encouraging them more!

It seems every week a new app or website pops up in the Steemit ecosphere. Looking at the #steemdev tag there's always some announcements or updates of a bunch of Steem apps, and just looking at the plethora of projects listed on steemtools.com makes me dizzy.

So where do all these apps come from? They are made by Steemians, of course!

Coders on steemit

For the past weeks I've been actively curating and commenting on posts in the #steemdev and #programming tags, and I see a lot of potential there. From experienced coders to newbies who are just starting to learn how to program – and every level in between – people are writing tutorials, coding challenges, questions and answers about the languages they work with and more.

I try to engage with as many good posts in these tags as I can. Partly because they are the subjects I'm interested in the most, but also to encourage developers to keep writing about their passion. The more people write about code, the more other people can read those posts and increase their own coding skills. Because here's an interesting thought:

The best Steem app hasn't been made yet

Who knows how long Steem will be around, what kind of features will be added or removed, and what kind of interesting data can be accumulated from that? We've just started, and we've got a whole future ahead of us. Looking at the current trend, this can only mean that more and more Steem-related apps will be developed. Again, by Steemians. But here's another shocker:

The developer of the best Steem app may not even know how to program yet

Yup. Maybe some guy or gal reading their first programming tutorial on Steemit today will turn out to create the greatest Steem app next year. And even if we forget about something being the best app for a moment, there will be lots of great apps in the years to come that all provide a different kind of service to us Steemians. It's very probably that 99% of those apps have yet to be written. So let's make sure we do everything possible to make that happen.

How do we encourage developers?

This is a question I ask myself regularly, and now I'm asking you too. Let's get a discussion going about what we can do to get the best out of our community and encourage people to write that next great Steem tool.

Curation

One possible answer is quite straightforward: encourage them. Upvote their articles, resteem them if they're very good, but also leave comments to show your appreciation, ask questions about their projects and provide feedback where applicable. Make sure that those who already know a programming language (or more) feel welcome here, and that people who want to learn how to develop a Steem app can find the resources they need.

Hive account@transisto has been doing a great job curating the #steemdev tag, regularly upvoting promising blog posts with an upvote worth over $40. If that doesn't encourage people to write about Steem development I don't know what does. But lately he's been a little less active, and I see a lot of great posts gather only a handful of upvotes and just a few cents. We can't rely on just one person to keep developers engaged. We all have a responsibility to keep programmers around and encourage them to share their knowledge.

Tutorials

Another answer could be writing more tutorials, to make sure anyone who runs into a problem when developing for Steem can find the answers they need. Hive account@jfollas is a great example of someone diving deep into the mechanics of Steem and sharing his findings with the community. His posts have saved me and many other developer hours of digging through documentation to make stuff work.

...and more

And of course there's plenty of other ways to facilitate a healthy developer community. Channels on steemit.chat like #programming, #dev and #steemjs where questions can be asked, tools like SteemJS, Piston, SteemSQL and SteemData that facilitate developers in building their apps with more ease, et cetera.

All those things already exist and serve their purpose, but maybe there are more ways to facilitate and encourage aspiring Steem developers. Do you have any ideas? What do you think can be done to help grow the Steem ecosystem to maturity?