I Pulled Nine Years of My Own Dev.to Data. The Numbers Were Not What I Expected.
There is an API. It will tell you things about your writing that the dashboard will not. I have been publishing on Dev.to since April 2017. There is a four-year hole in the middle where I posted almost nothing, and then a return in March 2026 that has produced eighty-six posts in six months. That shape turns out to be useful. Two distinct bodies of work, on the same account, separated by a gap…
A Dev.to user has pulled nine years of their own data and discovered that the numbers were not what they expected. The user had published on Dev.to since April 2017, but there was a four-year gap in their activity. Then, in March 2026, they resumed posting and have produced 86 articles in just six months. This long gap and the platform's changes created a natural experiment that the user did not plan.
The user wanted to create a chart of follower growth with their article publication dates to see if certain posts moved the line. However, the API provided them with an uncomfortable education on what the numbers actually meant. The API key was required to access most endpoints, and the default page size for the followers endpoint was not the maximum. The pagination range actually ran to 1000, allowing the user to retrieve all their data in fewer requests.
The user found that the /api/followers/users endpoint returned a created\_at timestamp for every follower, which was a valuable detail that was easy to overlook. This timestamp allowed the user to reconstruct the entire follower growth curve retroactively, even if some followers followed and later unfollowed. However, this curve only represented the current followers and did not show any declines that had actually occurred.
Additionally, the user discovered that the analytics endpoints existed and were barely documented. There were endpoints for lifetime views, reactions, comments, daily series over a date range, hourly data, referrers, follower growth, and bundled analytics for articles. The responses were nested, not flat integers, and the historical data degraded over time, which affected the calculation of half-lives for each post.
The user had to implement a coverage gate to ensure that the half-lives reported were accurate and meaningful.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
