We went looking for good posts by women on DEV. Not "inspirational," not "diverse" but just genuinely good, the kind you'd send to a friend with "okay you have to read this one" attached. Here are eight, and the honest reasons each one earns your attention.
A note from Mika, SheShips creator
This is the first post from SheShips, soooo hi. I'm Mika, and I started this because I kept finding great posts by women on DEV that and I wanted to bring them the attention they deserved, and I didn't see a space built specifically to change that.
Anna Villarreal — DEV Follower Analysis
This is what a good tangent looks like. Anna was seven hours into an unrelated Node.js tutorial when the thought hit her sideways: what if she scraped her own DEV followers, pulled their public GitHub data via GraphQL, and actually looked at who was reading her stuff?
There wasn't a plug-and-play tool for this. So she built one — a scraper, a JSON export, a chart at the end. What makes the post worth reading isn't the follower-count gimmick, it's that she's honest about the process being genuinely a little annoying to figure out. "There isn't a plug-and-play solution for this, you have to be a tiny bit creative," she writes. That's the whole game, most days.
sizzlebop — I Built a Local AI Music Studio
A working answer to "why do I need a subscription and a cloud account just to mess around with AI music generation." Local-first tools like this get way less airtime than their SaaS equivalents, which is exactly why this one deserves the spotlight — someone did the less-flashy, more-useful version and wrote it up.
sylwia-lask — What If Your AI Agent Never Had to Leave the Browser? (Demo)
Good because it's a demo, not a hot take. Half the AI-agent discourse right now is pure speculation in a thread somewhere. This one just answers the question by shipping the thing and letting you go look at it yourself.
thesnehamk — MCP vs API Explained: Do We Still Need APIs After MCP?
The explainer post that earns its spot by asking the question a lot of developers are quietly unsure about but don't want to say out loud in a meeting. Direct, timely, no padding.
maame-codes — Disappeared Since March: Taking a Long Break Was My Best Decision Yet
Not a build post, and that's exactly why it belongs on this list. Writing honestly about stepping away is harder than writing a project devlog, and rarer. If you've ever felt weird about a gap in your own output, this one's for you.
Ava Barron — Can You Stand the Rain
An origin story that refuses the tidy version. Her path into tech runs through an Alicia Keys concert and fixing friends' computers over AIM as a teenager — not a bootcamp, not a CS degree, not a straight line. It won DEV's own 2026 WeCoded "Echoes of Experience" category, and it earns that win through specificity — nothing in it is generic.
Margarita — It Wasn't Brave. It Was Just Tuesday.
Also a WeCoded winner, and what makes this one work is its refusal to dramatize. Three generations of one family, all pulled toward logic and systems, told plainly — no inflating it into a bigger moment than it actually was. The title does the whole argument by itself.
Ashley Childress — Forged Between Coal and Code
The most technically ambitious thing on this list. A fully narrated, self-voiced web experience about growing up in an Appalachian coal town and finding her way into engineering — backed by 685 unit tests and 220 E2E tests, for what's nominally a personal art piece. It won DEV's Frontend Art category, and honestly, the craftsmanship is doing as much work as the story is.
That's the list. Eight different reasons to click through, eight different kinds of good. Go read one.
Building something? We want to see it.
SheShips is a space for women who build and ship real software — whatever that looks like for you. A devlog, a first open-source contribution, an experiment that didn't work, a tutorial explaining the thing you learned three days ago. If you've got something you're working on, join us on DEV and share it. We'd love to feature you in the next one of these.
