Developer Story beta update: specialties and next steps

Two weeks ago, we invited you to beta test the new Developer Story.

This week's update focuses on the "Specialties" feature.

Specialties summarize the areas of technical expertise where you contribute on Stack Overflow. They are a new and evolving concept, so we want to keep improving them with your help. Right now, a "Speciality” is basically a handpicked grouping of related tags. We want to give life to what this could look like, but also call out that it is still early and the listing and grouping of tags is still on the roadmap to get right. So don't be offended if you don't see your speciality listed anywhere, but please do feel free to let us know.

What changed with specialties

Last week we shipped the following changes:

• By default, we now display at most five specialties - the ones in which you have the strongest contribution history.
• You can choose which specialties will appear publicly on your Developer Story.
  • Heck, if you really want, you can even include specialties for which you do not yet have qualifying contributions. We're displaying these them alongside established specialties in a minimalistic way, but still considering how to distinguish them clearly.

You may have noticed - we're also testing different ways to calculate specialties. Last week some tests caused specialties to change suddenly which may have been confusing. The calculation is not final and we expect more changes to be coming in the next months, based on the community feedback.

What we're considering next

Here's some directions we're exploring:

1. Contribution levels: A specialty would show a contribution level based on the quantity and score of your answers in that area. This would help distinguish areas with considerable contributions from the ones where the user's impact is smaller.
2. More meaningful timeline events: Instead of saying that someone "established a specialty" at a given date, we'd like to record when a user reached a particular contribution level. This feels more meaningful than just "establishing a specialty".
   • This will also fix the bug with incorrect dates of establishing specialties. We're aware of this problem, but the approach we take will be based on the wider feedback we receive about specialities.
   • This approach brings the concepts of specialties and badges closer together. While it's not ideal that we have two parallel progress paths, keeping specialties and contribution levels separate from badges gives us the freedom to experiment for now without changing the well-established badges feature.
   • On the other hand, does establishment of a speciality and/or reaching a specific contribution level belong on the timeline at all?
3. A sustained-specialty marker: This would distinguish specialties with recent, continuing contributions from those based primarily on older activity. We want to be careful not to imply that older contributions are no longer valid, but also recognize that we might not be working on the same tech stack we were 5 years ago.
4. A more complete specialty catalog: The current list does not cover every important technology or subject area. Quite the opposite - it's a small sampling to prove out the concept before we update the whole corpus. One of our priorities is to improve that.
5. Community-curated specialty catalog: Perhaps Moderators and the community at large can help shape the specialty catalog so that it can reflect community consensus.
6. Visible progress: Add the ability to show your current progress within a specialty and point you to actions to advance to the next contribution level.
7. Expand beyond platform contributions: If you have worked with a technology for 15 years, or if you have written books on a topic, those should probably be listed as specialties. But this potentially moves beyond what can be verified by platform contributions, so is it the appropriate place?

We'd like your feedback

I want to call out that a lot of these concepts already exist in badges tag badges and it might feel like we're re-inventing the wheel at times. But we've long lacked any sort of real hierarchy and taxonomy to badges and this is a helpful place to run an experiment to see if we can clump them together meaningfully and make them more fun to engage with. And also be more capable of promoting who you are in your dev story.

If you have tried the beta, we would especially like to hear your thoughts on whether you find the changes from last week helpful and, most importantly, your thoughts on our planned next steps. Which ones would make the biggest difference for you? Do you see any features on Dev Story that would be more important to you than what we have planned?

Thanks for your time and interest! More to come soon!