Ken W Alger’s DEV account tells a story about two very different stretches of writing—but it is one creator’s history, not a benchmark for the platform. In his September 24, 2026 article, Alger reports that 44 posts published from 2017 to 2019 received 32,474 views. After returning in March 2026, he published 86 posts in six months. Pulling account data through DEV’s API helped him examine that history, while also exposing important limits: current-follower records cannot recover people who unfollowed, and older daily analytics are less complete.
What nine years of account data revealed
Alger began publishing on DEV in April 2017, then had a four-year stretch with almost no posts before returning in March 2026. The figures he reports make the contrast concrete:
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| Period | Publishing activity | Reported result |
|---|---|---|
| 2017–2019 | 44 posts | 32,474 views |
| Six months after his March 2026 return | 86 posts | View total not stated in Alger’s article |
Alger also reports having a little over 18,000 current followers. These are figures from his account as reported in his 2026 article, not independently audited statistics or typical outcomes for DEV authors. His account history also does not establish why the results differed between periods.
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Alger’s reason for using the API was specific: “There is an API. It will tell you things about your writing that the dashboard will not.” He wanted to chart follower growth with article publication dates overlaid, to see whether particular posts coincided with changes in the line.
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DEV is part of Forem, and its current official reference is the Forem API v1 documentation. Authenticated endpoints described there cover a user’s articles and followers, analytics totals and historical series, follower engagement, and a dashboard bundle. Access depends on the endpoint: many require an API key created in account settings.
For current API requests, the official API documentation recommends v1 and specifies the Accept header that selects its response format. Alger says that omitting it can silently return older v0-shaped responses. His workflow used an API key in the api-key header and accept: application/vnd.forem.api-v1+json in the request headers. Check the current endpoint documentation before coding, since the docs themselves note that they may be out of date.
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How follower pagination affects a data pull
A follower list can be large, so pagination settings can determine how many requests a script needs to make. The API documentation gives a default of 80 followers per page for the followers endpoint and says per_page can support up to 1,000 by default. An instance can lower that maximum, so 1,000 is not guaranteed everywhere.
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One free scan finds every outdated or missing driver and matches the right update for your exact hardware.Free scan · exact hardware matchIn his own pull, Alger reports that requesting the default 80 per page took 227 requests, while requesting 1,000 per page took 19 requests and 31 seconds. Those timings and counts describe his account and run; they are not a performance guarantee for another account or instance.
- Request a larger page size where the endpoint and instance allow it, then inspect the response to confirm the batch size actually returned.
- Continue through the pages rather than assuming the first response contains every follower.
- Handle HTTP 429 rate-limit responses and avoid sending requests more aggressively than the API allows.
- Save progress as you go so a long pull can resume without starting from scratch.
Why current follower records are not a historical follower chart
The API’s follower records are a snapshot of people who currently follow the account, along with their follow dates. Sorting those dates can show when today’s followers joined, but users who followed and later unfollowed are absent. That means the list cannot reconstruct historical net follower counts or reveal retention over time.
As a result, a line built from those follow dates will only accumulate; it cannot show past losses. Comparing it with publication dates may help identify timing worth investigating, but an apparent increase after a post is observational. It does not prove that the post caused the growth.
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Why the two writing periods are hard to compare
Post counts and views are not interchangeable measures. The 2017–2019 posts had more time to accumulate views than posts published after the 2026 return. A sound comparison should keep the publication window and the metric visible, rather than treating total views as a direct measure of writing performance.
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- Time available: Older posts had longer to collect views than newer ones.
- Metric: Views, reactions, comments, and follower acquisition answer different questions and should not be substituted for one another.
- Completeness: Alger says historical analytics become less complete farther back in time, so daily data is not equally reliable across the entire nine-year span.
- API behavior: Use the v1 response format and account for pagination when collecting data; otherwise, the dataset may be inconsistent or incomplete.
The API can make an account’s past easier to examine, especially when the dashboard does not offer the view a writer wants. It cannot turn incomplete analytics or a current-follower snapshot into a complete history. Alger’s numbers are interesting as a personal record of a publishing break and return, not evidence that the same pattern applies to other DEV writers.
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