Clever Ways to Find Good Developers

Is your company looking to hire a few more developers? In addition to adding your postings to job boards or hosting a careers page on your site maybe you should consider reaching out where web developers live and breath!?!

I’ve seen developer messages hidden in a browser’s Elements, Console, and Network DevTool tabs. Not only are these fun, but if a developer comes across one of these messages then chances are they might be the right material you are looking for.

While you are at it, why don’t you brush up on your DevTool skills with Secrets of Browser Development Tools, Chrome DevTools Overview, or the Explore and Master Chrome DevTools free course by codeschool.

Examples

Etsy

One such company that has employed all of the above is Etsy as seen in the below animated gif. They utilize the meta html tag, console.log, and a custom HTTP Header to highlight…

“Is code your craft? https://www.etsy.com/careers”

For those of you who enjoy the command line experience, here is an animated gif of me curling for the dev messages ;)

curl https://www.etsy.com > etsy.html
vim etsy.html
curl -I https://www.etsy.com | less

Mozilla

The Mozilla webpage is another good example of this technique and they go the extra mile and use ASCII art… and who doesn’t like ASCII art?

Markup

Console

I like that they extra effort to disable the console.log message with Tabzilla.disableEasterEgg().

Have you ran across any other interesting or clever ways to find good developers? If so, leave a comment. Thanks!

P.S.

You may be wondering how I made my Chrome DevTools have a nice Dark Theme. If so, I installed the ZeroDarkMatrix Theme for Chrome. Once installed you’ll need to follow the instructions on the GitHub Repository in order to Enable Developer Tools experiments from chrome://flags and Allow custom UI themes from the DevTools ▶ Settings ▶ Experiments tab.