The Developer Community I Wanted to Exist

About two years ago I started building something I wish had existed years earlier: a private WhatsApp community for UK software developers.

Not another noisy group. Not another place full of recruitment agents pretending they “just want to connect”. Not another dead Slack workspace with 400 channels, three active people, and one bot cheerfully announcing updates nobody asked for.

Just a simple, invite-only space for UK devs to talk to other people who actually understand the industry.

Developers need better rooms

A lot of online spaces for developers become one of three things.

• A job board wearing a community costume.
• A self-promotion channel where everyone is shouting and nobody is listening.
• A giant Slack workspace that looked exciting for about six days and then slowly turned into digital tumbleweed.

The problem is not that developers do not want community. Most of us do. The problem is that useful community needs trust, relevance and a bit of curation.

You want somewhere you can ask about contracts, rates, tools, clients, bad recruiters, technical problems, products you are building, weird industry shifts, and whether everyone else is also quietly wondering what AI is about to do to the job market.

You do not want every conversation interrupted by someone asking if you are “open to an exciting opportunity” that mysteriously pays less than your current day rate and requires three days a week in an office near nowhere.

The rule is simple: no recruitment agents

That is the one hard rule.

No recruitment agents.

There are already enough places online where developers are treated like CVs with legs. This one is for the people actually building the software.

That does not mean jobs and contracts are off limits. Quite the opposite. Contract opportunities are useful when shared by people in the community, especially when there is context, honesty and no weird sales theatre.

But the room has to belong to developers first.

Quality over quantity

The goal was never to build the biggest group.

Big communities often become impossible to use. Too much noise. Too many incentives pulling in different directions. Too many people joining because they see an audience rather than a room.

I would rather have a smaller group with better conversations than a huge one where everyone slowly mutes it and forgets it exists.

The community has dedicated spaces for general UK dev chat, contract opportunities, developer marketing, memes, industry news, regional conversations and the occasional unfiltered Wild West discussion, because apparently civilisation can only go so far.

It is for software developers, freelancers, contractors, indie hackers, SaaS builders and people trying to build more than just client work.

Why WhatsApp?

WhatsApp is not perfect. No platform is. But it has one massive advantage: people actually use it.

Communities do not work if they live somewhere everyone forgets to check. Sometimes the boring, familiar tool is better than the perfect community platform nobody opens.

The point is not the software. The point is the connection.

Developers need places where they can speak honestly, share opportunities, compare notes, and remember that the industry is not just companies, job ads and LinkedIn theatre. It is people building things, figuring things out, and occasionally helping each other avoid stepping on the same rake.

That is the community I wanted to exist.

So I started building it.

Draft adapted from Brad’s LinkedIn post from 2026-06-17. Source: LinkedIn post.