Summary: I have updated the Substrate Build a Blockchain tutorial in an effort to begin the process of maintaining Polkadot educational documentation.
Hello! I am a longtime DOT HODLer/lurker, and recently I left my job to explore opportunities within the Polkadot Ecosystem. Coming from 15 years in a low-Tech industry, I knew I had some learning to do, and have spent many months working from the ground up.
After some introductory education, I dove into the Rust manual and was excited to work through that while concurrently exploring Substrate documentation and tutorials. I ended up spending many long, frustrating hours banging my way through the official Substrate Build a Blockchain tutorial and after that the Build Application Logic tutorial. A big thanks goes out to the Substrate StackExchange. I never would have made it without them. When I got to the Collectibles Workshop and could not get the chain to build, I decided to branch off and attempt some other tutorials I had found. I quickly found that most of the tutorials were outdated.
I’ve seen that I’m not alone. Across all Polkadot related social media you can find posts made by frustrated could-be devs. It appears to me that 2 or 3 years ago there was a push for developer-centric education, and some really good material was created. Unfortunately, as Polkadot matured and upgraded, a lot of these materials stayed stagnant.
Using what I have learned up to this point, I have forked the Substrate-Docs from the Substrate Developer Hub and ammended the Build A Blockchain tutorial so that it points to the Polkadot-SDK and builds.
I also started making changes to and eventually managed to get the Interactive Substrate Tutorials from Polkadot.study to build. It’s going to take more work to get it to a functional state, but it’s a start.
I understand that the developers in this ecosystem are hard at work with big things.
I also think that it is important for us to keep these front-facing documents up to date, so I am presenting these changes to the community in hopes to assist with that process.
If this work can be used to help update the documentation and the community sees value in it, I would be happy to continue and am looking for some feedback on where to go from here.
-hippiestank