Dev.to's Underused API Can Reconstruct Your Full Follower History in One Pull

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A developer who has been publishing on Dev.to since April 2017 used the platform's largely overlooked public API to analyse nine years of their own writing and audience data. By querying the followers endpoint with the correct v1 accept header and a per_page value of 1000, they reduced a 227-request operation to just 19 calls. A key discovery was that each follower record includes a created_at timestamp, allowing the entire follower growth curve to be reconstructed retroactively from a single API pull rather than daily snapshots. However, the dataset only reflects current followers, meaning anyone who unfollowed is absent and the resulting curve rises monotonically, masking any real-world declines. The author notes that omitting the v1 accept header silently returns older v0 data with no error, a subtle gotcha that can cause documented fields to appear missing.

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