Dogecoin was developed by Jackson Palmer and Billy Markus in 2013, when altcoins were becoming increasingly popular among cryptocurrency speculators, so they decided to mock them.
Dogecoin was originally a type of "meme coin" used to mock the hot trend of New Mountain Village Coin entering the market. Initially, Dogecoin had almost no value and was used as a tip, thanks to users on social media and online forums such as Reddit.
One noteworthy aspect of Dogecoin is that it borrows the scrypt based Proof of Work (PoW) consensus algorithm used by the now defunct Luckycoin, which borrows most of Litecoin's technology.