Substrate Seminar, a Polkadot ecosystem developer learning hub

Substrate Seminar is a place to bring the Polkadot developer community together around learning and sharing knowledge that’s relevant to builders in the ecosystem. It’s currently both a resource in the form of archived videos and lesson plans, as well as a bi-weekly live streams for anyone to join and ask questions. And I’d like to get more of us engaged and aware about its potential.

Today

This repository exists to allow anyone to propose a topic that they’d either:

  1. Like to present
  2. Want to learn more about

And also to keep an archive of past seminar lesson plans.

Once scheduled, anyone registered to the calendar link on this page will be notified about the topic, plan and link to join the stream. We’ve previously done most seminars on Crowdcast ([1] and [2]) but have very recently moved to Twitch to further our reach and improve production quality.

Note: only topics get scheduled if they are useful to developers building in the ecosystem (see closed issues here).

Vision

My vision for this repository and the content created around it is that it becomes a community resource where lesson plans could eventually be re-worked as tutorials that can be linked back to original video recordings and used freely in the docs of relevant projects. Authors, like presenters, can be recognized for their contributions in ways yet to be explored (e.g. tips, bounties, nfts). Beyond that, it’s a platform for developers interested in building in the Polkadot ecosystem to learn from other developers building here and share what they’re learning.

All of what’s stated above is based on the current version of Seminar. But with the growing number of developer advocates and teams in the community, it wouldn’t be too far fetched to start thinking about generalizing this platform as a common good resource for participating and contributing to an open source repository of learning material for developers here (both written and video).

Tomorrow

I think that Seminar has proven to be a place where developers in this ecosystem (including core developers at Parity) want to share knowledge, as it has proven to be a place that new comers seek to learn about things built here (see the playlist on Youtube of past Seminars). I also think that we could make it a place for adding community tutorials and guides as implied here.

How would you like to see this initiative evolve?

5 Likes

Thanks for the seminars, maybe an option is also to upload recordings on ThetaTV, there is also a lot of people.

Example: THETA.tv: Watch LIVE Streams, Earn TFuel, and support Streamers

1 Like

Thank you for organizing Sacha, it has been very helpful!

From my side it will be very helpful for the youtube video quality to be at least 1080p, because otherwise the text on the IDEs cannot be read.
Also when the presenter has slides, they should be included in the comments.

I am aware after a conversation with you that this seems to be related to crowdcast not having good enough quality, so hopefully the move to Twitch will solve this.

I think the idea of converting useful lessons to text tutorials that get straight to the point is the best take. Sometimes the seminars take too long to get to the main point that a developer is stuck on, and there is no other resource available to get the info from.

I am interested in giving a lesson myself, so I created an Issue on GitHub just now :smile:

Thanks for suggesting a lesson topic​:muscle:. Video quality is a big priority going forward. As well as getting more milage out of a seminar (e.g. tutorial or blog). Thanks for your feedback! :pray: