[Decentralized Futures] PaperMoon - October 2024 Update

Ecosystem
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Hi all,

A few months have passed since we provided our first update on the work we’ve been doing since our Decentralized Futures work started. I wanted to update you on our work earlier, but I needed more time. Apologies for that!

As a refresher, our DF grant had four main verticals:

Polkadot Developer Hub Coordination

With the help of Parity and W3F, we went through all the different pieces of content from the Polkadot Wiki and Substrate Docs to understand what is relevant and what is outdated. This step was crucial because (as you’ll note a bit later on) we needed to understand the status of things before we started migrating content to the new site.

After another Informational Architecture (IA) exercise, for which you can find the report here, we put a lot of effort into coming up with a high-level structure of the documentation site. This is still a work in progress because things can change a bit as we port content, but you can find the high-level overview here. We’ve divided the top level sections into:

  • Polkadot Protocol - This section includes everything from a conceptual perspective developers should know when building on Polkadot. The main top-level sections here are:

    • Architecture: it covers the high-level architecture of the Polkadot chain, system chains, and parachains

    • Basics: goes through some core concepts on different things like accounts, networks, transactions, blocks, among other things

    • On-Chain Governance: a dedicated section to OpenGov, but more on how developers should see on-chain governance

    • Polkadot-SDK: a high-level page/section on the Polkadot-SDK. This is not a documentation of the SDK itself, which Parity will own

    • Glossary: a list of ecosystem-relevant words

  • Infrastructure - This section covers everything relevant to the infrastructure side of Polkadot. We’ve split it into running a node and running a validator. We are still discussing whether we should have a collator section here or not

  • Develop - This section targets developers who want to start building on Polkadot. The main top-level sections are:

    • Development Pathways: probably the most important page of the section, that helps developer choose their development path: building a custom appchain, deploying an appchain template, building with smart contracts, or working with toolkits to create tooling/applications

    • Networks: this page/section will cover the different networks Polkadot consists of, with primary endpoints and details. It should include the relay chain per network, system chains, and parachains. A system will be created so that chains that want to be included can add themselves to a page

    • Blockchains: describes how a developer can deploy an appchain with the Polkadot-SDK. The objective is to keep documentation somewhat high-level without going extremely deep into concepts, which should be covered in the Polkadot-SDK docs. Currently, it consists of a getting started section, how to build custom blockchains, some pages around testing, how to deploy, and how to do some of the main maintenance tasks

    • Integrations: includes some of the main integrations around Polkadot, mainly indexers, wallets, and RPC providers (that provide such services). It can be expanded to Oracles, Multisig providers, among other things

    • Smart Contracts: showcases two pathways for developers: native WASM/ink and EVM contracts. We will include the main things on how to get started, but we won’t cover all the details and rely on the external ink! Resources and plenty of the existing EVM resources

    • Interoperability: goes through anything related to interoperability. It is not included in any of the other sections because interoperability involves many developer types. The section starts with just basics, but ideally, it will be expanded to include XCM configs and how you can use libraries around XCM, among other things

    • Toolkit: describes all the different tools developers can use for other things. For example, blockchain developers can find docs on Zombienet and Chopsticks. For API Libraries, you will find pages on Polkadot.js SDK, PAPI, Sidecar, and PY-Substrate-Interface

  • Tutorials - As the name suggests, this section will include many tutorials that should describe specific processes from 0-100%. A few examples that we are already working on are how to register a Local Asset in AssetHub, or how to register a foreign asset in AssetHub

Besides the Informational Architecture, we’ve also been working with Disctractive on a first iteration of a landing page and applying the general Polkadot branding of the new Polkadot.com site. This should be done later this week or throughout next week.

We’ve also worked on a roadmap for the launch that includes all the major milestones we should hit before launching the site. We are targeting having an initial draft for review by the end of November, with the site going live in December.

Ecosystem-related Documentation

The group of DevRel engineers who were originally working on this shifted their focus to work mainly on content porting from the sources mentioned above.

To check on the pieces of content that the team worked on before moving to content migration, you can check this list of GitHub PRs.

One cool thing we also worked on is configuring Vale to create a custom dictionary for Polkadot. This allows you to standardize certain things across different contributors. One very simple example is to force writers to type “Relay Chain” and not “relay-chain/relay chain/Relaychain/ Relay chain.” This seems like nitpicking, but it ensures consistency across pages and produces a more cohesive documentation portal.

Ecosystem-related Support

In the past months, we’ve been actively supporting treasury-funded events/hackathons:

We are open and will continue to support treasury-funded events with technical presentations, hackathon support, and any other DevRel-related duty.

Polkadot China DevRel Initiatives

On this front, we’ve also been busy working with OneBlock+, mainly creating Polkadot-SDK basic and advanced courses.

The basic course consists of 33 videos. It was designed to teach non-blockchain developers how to build their first Web3 project with Polkadot-SDK. It was developed in collaboration with Parity Chinese DevRel and OneBlock+. The course also had weekly office hours, and tasks were managed and reviewed by the PaperMoon DevRel team. You can find the course playlist on YouTube.

A total of 109 people registered for the basic course. Once it was over, we also created a survey to get the general feedback of participants so we could improve subsequent courses in the future.

The advanced course consists of 16 videos. It covers topics such as an introduction to Polkadot 2.0 concepts, XCM, Pallet development, testing module, and ink! Smart Contracts. It was developed in collaboration with Parity Chinese DevRel and OneBlock+. You can find the course playlist on YouTube.

112 people registered for the advanced course. Similar to the basic course, once we have completed the survey, we will create another to gather participants’ feedback on improving the content for future courses.

We’ve also created localized content and reviewed OneBlock+ content from a technical perspective. Such content was shared through different channels. For example, some of the content can be seen below:

We also worked closely with OneBlock+ in the Token 2049 Singapore Hackathon, helping guide the hackathon from a technical perspective, mentoring hackers, and judging, among other things.

Closing Thoughts

It is tough to summarize in a few words all the work and progress we’ve done in the past few months. The idea of this post is only to provide a glimpse into this. I’m very excited about the progress we’ve been making around the Polkadot Developer Hub, and hopefully, in the next update, the site is already live. We already have a list of tasks we’ll need to complete as soon as we launch the site, like adding missing content that will not be delivered for launch, creating a test suite for code snippets to ensure they are functional, and expanding the tutorial section.

On the other hand, I’m also very optimistic about our team’s impact in hackathons and general event support, but I always focus on the technical side of things. We’ve received really good feedback on our contributions and are open to helping any other treasury-funded initiatives.

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