"Introducing the Ethereum.org Developer Portal" - Sam Richards & Ryan Cordell

awesome so hope you enjoyed a really quick uh break with some lo-fi beats and uh we are good to go on our next talk so i'm super excited to welcome sam richards to ryan cordell we're going to be talking about the new theorem.org developer portal sam and ryan have been very involved in kind of rebranding and bringing ethereum.org to be a lot more user and community friendly and they have a lot more things playing for all of us and just the ecosystem and they're going to be sharing everything that they have in the works um especially about the developer portal today so without further ado please welcome sam and ryan and i'll let them kick off with their presentation awesome thank you kartik and thank you eath online good to be here whoa so what we want to spend the next call 20 minutes or so talking about is ethereum.org um and hopefully provide some resources to all you hackers out there who yeah are looking to get up and running with eath online packtober this month um give you some idea behind just like our vision with this and like the community behind it and potential ways that you could all get involved if you so choose to um so yeah first question you might be asking is who the heck are these handsome young men um so ethereum.org in case you didn't know it's it's a public website it's completely open source all our code and content is on github and accessible and editable by just about anybody um and we're proud to say there's been hundreds of people at this point who have contributed to the content code and translations of the site so definitely a lot of faces that won't get acknowledgement today but ryan and i i'm sam um what you'd call the lead developer of ethereum.

org and ryan here is our lead content designer so we're to the folks i guess who are fortunate enough to work on this full time with support from the ethereum foundation and we're to the heads i guess you can yell at on twitter if you find any bugs or issues um but yeah again whole community behind this website um so thank you to everyone who's contributed so far what have we set out to do with ethereum.org so most of you developers out there i would imagine are familiar with the mozilla developer network or mdn and this is an area where we found a lot of inspiration for what could ethereum.org be um you know it's an open source community it's like a completely open wiki um with a pretty great mission to basically just make the web and its technologies more open and accessible to everybody um so as we kind of went through our journey of like hey crypto's inventing so many things and innovating in a lot of spaces but content and education probably doesn't need to be one we innovate in dramatically you know where else can we look for for just communities and projects that are doing this stuff really well and yeah i'm sure you've stumbled across google and for answers as a developer and hitting mozilla developer network it's just become the mecca of content and education for web developers in terms of you know reference docs tutorials um learning resources executable code examples all that jazz um so as we were you know brainstorming rethinking how could we revamp ethereum.org um hopefully you'll see that this was a strong inspiration for us um and shout out to yeah the mdn team we had the pleasure of like talking to them getting some ideas and tips on like how to help bootstrap this type of open education community so what is the new developer portal and the resources on ethereum.org we'll click through a live example we encourage you to go check out ethereum.

org and see for yourself but a big kind of insight we had from developer interviews and just talking with people in the space and developers and generally like everyone doesn't learn the same way right some people like to read through the reference documentation some people want to just hop in and start experimenting and learn by doing and some people want to get a local development environment set up pull it down feel it in their own computer and environment and go from there so you'll see these are like the three main journeys at least for now that we we've tried to focus on and provide resources for and we talked about how mdn was a big inspiration for us just to give a little more context on you know what were the problems we identified or what are we trying to solve what are we doing here in the first place um for a lot of you developers out there um i know i personally went through this as a as a front-end developer trying to get into the ethereum space um i think ultimately it comes down to just an information problem right like the ethereum ecosystem it's so rich and diverse and incredible and there's so many community resources but that does lead to just a little bit of disorganization and you end up with a lot of different information silos and as someone new to the space who's just trying to google around and find like a source of truth um you know we did find some friction with say like the multiple community maintain wikis a lot of overlapping information and not really knowing where to contribute necessarily running into outdated stack overflow answers um finding tutorials that were outdated with really no way to like help update them um and a big one is translations um you know we now support over 30 languages on ethereum.org we have experimented with some like off-site translation initiatives to help translate third-party content but we found it's just a lot easier to get our community galvanized around just translating one main source so that was a problem we thought we were like uniquely situated to solve as ethereum.org and if you do remember the earlier days of ethereum.org um there was definitely room for improvement um what our developers page was was essentially just a big wall of links that at least pointed people to a lot of the projects in the space that are you know building out a lot of great open source technologies and solutions to make developers lives easier um but it was really hard for someone to kind of piece all the different puzzle pieces together and there wasn't really much background context so a lot of what we were trying to do is just you know set a base level of understanding on the site hey instead of just looking for smart contract testing tools getting some background on what are the available options what does it even mean to test the smart contract what are the different ways of going about it all that stuff so the community was very vocal very helpful in identifying like what aspects we could improved and hopefully with you know this release we're we're getting closer to something useful all right so let's take a quick look at it so yeah if you go to ethereum.org you'll quickly find the developer section this is what we call i guess the home page of this portal here are the three kind of pathways to get started which i just talked about that we'll check out um a bit so you know say you just want to read up on some core concepts get a sense of the documentation what we've built out is kind of just the foundation of a lot of ethereum specific documentation for primarily dapp developers at this point so you can get a sense of hey if you're coming to this and just want to learn how a theorem works at a technical level before building a dap you can do that if there's a specific topic you're looking for say you just want to learn about smart contracts you want to see some code examples that you can copy and experiment around with this is the place to kind of come and check out you will see as you're poking around we do call out a lot of the content is incomplete and you know the way we look at this is it's pretty much always going to be a work in progress the mozilla developer network folks gave us some really good advice in this area you know you don't have enough resources to write all the content but what they found was a successful method of just create the page acknowledge that something is an important topic and just tell the community you need help with it so one thing we've really tried to make as frictionless as possible is if you are an expert on testing smart contracts you know with a click of a button you can hop into github you can see the resource you can edit it directly and open a pull request and get it deployed to the site you know ideally within a day or so so that's the kind of like community and environment we're trying to create you know ryan and i are a very limited resource of knowledge uh thankfully we've had a ton of people already helping out um but we got a long way to go in terms of our ambitions so yeah if you're someone out there who you know wants to participate in hacktober want to take a little break from your ethonline project uh feel free to come our way so going back to the other just like different avenues people could learn about ethereum we try to build out a whole tutorial section um areas that you can filter through like say you want to learn about erc20 tokens you can click around you can you can find community develop tutorials straight on ethereum.

org here you can see we tried to make it easy to submit a tutorial and the reasons for this somewhat like i mentioned is you know like really trying to give more exposure to a lot of these community developed resources like there's a ton of amazing tutorials out there unfortunately not all of them are like gonna pop up as the first result on you know google when you're poking around um and for the ability the ability for the community to like see a typo see an outdated version of the solidity compiler and to be able to edit that page and update it we're just hoping this is a good way to kind of just maintain keep these resources fresh and up to date and translate them as well which we talked about we built out a learn by coding section um still very young and early but giving you the ability to find hey what are you know these tools from the community where i can hop in and test out some code without doing any sort of setup whatsoever interactive games some of these you guys are probably familiar with but what are different projects and learning resources where i can just get up and going and play around and finally a big big piece of feedback we've gotten and i know i've struggled with is just like okay i have a project idea i just want to get up and running with a local development setup how can i do that this we have a lot of ideas to improve this page but for now we're hoping this is helpful for you from day one as a hacker looking to get up and going you know what are projects that i can just grab get clone yarn install and i'm off to the off to the races so that is the portal as it exists today yeah feel free to check it out um and i'll pass it over to ryan to talk a little bit about the future as a a great little whirlwind tour that you just gave sound thank you yeah hopefully not too fast for everybody all right it's good it's good um yeah so i just want to chat a little bit about um i guess our thinking about the future when it comes to this sort of initiative and the the sort of the overarching design and vision um that we have um so like as i think you'll have seen from going through the platform just then like this is very much a sort of a foundation for this platform um we definitely want to do some things around um bringing more web three into the space so not just sort of you know um telling people about like how to write smart contracts how to test them like with code examples but actually bringing as much of web3 into the learning experience as possible so actually integrating parts of ethereum.org with you know web3 technologies um and as sam has touched on like this is definitely designed to be a community initiative we want to build up very much like the mdn inspiration that we spoke of um at the beginning you know an army of devoted contributors who want to you know help us promote ethereum education um wants to sort of you know spot errors improve things as much as possible this is something that we're you know actively working on in terms of thinking about how do we how do we build up this community around this this platform i think a third point that's really important to talk about is this idea of continuous iteration i think um in the web um especially in terms of just just content you know there's this um this idea that once you publish something like that's the job done um we don't think like that and you know we are we have the team in place and you know we're asking the community to help us with this as well um but we want to be you know this content needs to live and breathe ethereum moves at an absolutely blistering pace and we need um the help of everyone to to make sure that we have this information that helps everyone is accurate um and you know we have a team in place to um help build on this platform from like a ux and design point of view as well so we can build out new features as and when they become sort of necessary based on sort of community feedback and stuff so we want to make sure this is something that we're you know focusing on for the future we haven't just launched it and you know wiped our hands of it etc um next slide please thank you um but you know there are definitely some challenges um when it comes to creating something like this um ethereum.org is in this very sort of unique um spot where we want to be as sort of agnostic as possible you know there's a lot of amazing work that's done in this space um and it is a it's very much a constant battle with a project like this in terms of like how much um you should speak about certain projects over other projects because there's also this desire to provide the best experience to the reader or to the user at the end of the day um and you know there are projects that are better funded and better um you know have more people actively working on them but there's a real balance that we have to strike in terms of being opinionated versus um agnostic in that sense um i just mentioned it but i think community engagement is a massive challenge um working out ways to incentivize um the community to contribute to this effort i think everyone could admit they would love um a really robust set of resources like mdn when they start out and i think we need to figure out ways to make sure that people are sort of incentivized to to help out with this effort and to um you know get involved as much as possible and finally i think um i think this is a peril in general with open source technology but like making sure that the information that we do put out there is accurate and is helpful and trying to encourage as many people many as experts that are out there as possible to to help us ensure that the information that we're supplying is accurate and we have a qr code there on the screen um which should link to our discord so if anyone out there who's watching this or listening to this right now has um any thoughts or you know wants to get more involved like please do um jump into our discord and let us know um yeah so i i i wanted to put this slide in um not only because of my love of the film field of dreams but um i think this perfectly epitomizes like our stance on this like we on the ethereum.org team understand that we are we're a very small team you know we have expertise in design and development but there's you guys out there hacking today you know and for the rest of the month that have the real expertise and knowledge when it comes to building with ethereum and we wanted to make sure that we built out a platform and you know the foundations for something um that makes it very easy for you guys to come in and help us and you know help the rest of the community and really embody that sort of open source spirit um and make sure that you know we take this in any direction that like the community needs and that we realize that works best for the ethereum community because you know as we as a you know i've tried to stress this is very much a community initiative open source um we want to help as many people start building with ethereum as possible so yeah i think this the field of dreams energy works quite well so if you are wondering how you might be able to help um i have noted it all down in this one handy slide so take a photo if you uh if you're feeling generous but so i think the main ways that we are asking for for help at the moment is is generally around contributing content if you have expertise on any of the topics that we talk about we spoke about i mean you might not have seen them all from the sort of quick demo that we gave but pretty much any part of the ethereum development stack or you know the background of ethereum technology we need content for um the content can always be improved and tweaked so if you have um you know expert knowledge on any of those or a desire to sort of get involved and start writing content on any of those topics uh let us know um as sam showed you there's like a bunch of tutorials so maybe consider instead of considering you know popping something on medium or hackernoon or whatever like um we're now accepting submissions of tutorials on ethereum.org um we will be getting them translated um as and when our sort of translation cycle happens but it's a really good place to sort of get your get your content out there we're not just open source in the terms of our of the content on the site like we welcome ideas on the design the ux if you have any like insight in terms of research of you know if you have any insights about um how ethereum developers learn or you know anything like send us your ideas um and we can work together to improve this platform and make it you know a better way for new devs to enter the space um again one of the challenges we have is the uh the checking of information so any reviews of content on the site or of open prs is massive for us um you know everyone that contributes to a page is like credited on that page on um within these developer resources so and we're working on ways to like properly you know credit people and incentivize more feedback so it's um we definitely would be very very grateful and we're working on ways to like make that a better experience for everyone um and finally um like yeah send it to your friend if you've got people that are interested in building with ethereum if you've got friends who are already building with ethereum but have never you know never been to ethereum.

org i think it'd be amazing if you could send them our way and you know give us any feedback that they have um this is the way that we can learn and improve and you know make this the best possible platform for developers that we we possibly can um so yeah that's a a really quick overview of um the new you know well the last two or two or three months of our lives and also uh the new developer portal on ethereum.org um again there's the qr code if you have any questions or thoughts or ideas like yeah jump in and let's let's chat about it we're also um obviously in the ether online discord there's our handles um we'll be around for the entire hackathon so if you know if you have checked it out and there's any information that you're after that we're missing let us know and we can try and make that happen um but yeah other than that thank you for having us and if there's time for any questions we'll happily answer them thank you uh so much sam and ryan um this is great so we have a couple questions coming in um the first one is just in general how do you are how do you collect feedback for what should go on the dev portal are you kind of waiting for people to email you about things that they would like to see or is it just entirely relying on the community is there a wish list that people can kind of point to where they can just get really cool and really up to the documentation and how do you think about that um yeah sam jones um i was just gonna say yeah i think it's you know it's a mix of like reactive and proactive feedback gathering i mean like i said the repos on github that's typically been our best way we also have an ethereum.org twitter handle um we've opened up our public discord where people can come in and drop comments what we're really trying to do is just me meet you where you guys are um we're in a lot of the discord channels whether that's like crypto devs or eath um so yeah like feel free to contact us in whatever way is easiest um we're also doing like recurring what we call tiger teams of groups of developers in the space who like have established themselves know the landscape to like regularly help us audit the site and kind of improve it from their perspective so i think it's a mix of like getting that beginner's mindset and that usability feedback as well as the pros who are just like hey this is structured wrong or what have you got it and uh is there anything that's uh next on the roadmap for ethereum.org that you are able to share we got a lot of ideas that's for sure i mean i'd say in short we'd love to hear back from you guys i think ryan dropped some teasers on the web 3 stuff i think that's where we take it to the next level right like we went from a list of links to external sites to now we have native content and resources similar to mozilla now can we make it ethereum native and you know give people a gamified learning experience can we issue nfts for people who are contributing um we'd love to hear ideas and yeah if projects are kind of helping building those tools we'd also love to talk to you like ultimately we want ethereum.org to be a sandbox to be dog fooding our own technology so i think that's what we're most excited about in like the months and year to come on this um awesome and uh last question that i have is uh i understand that both of you are also hacking at the at the event so uh curious to uh to hear what you are planning on working for uh for the next three weeks for the sakathon or the million dollar question or however much the prize money is like um uh we've got a few ideas of stuff that we want to be working on uh it's it's all based on sort of ethereum education very tightly related to uh the developer portal project that we've just demoed so we're hoping that whatever we do come up with will be a um you know a very good addition to to what's already there but yeah i mean again we're more than happy to like have community feedback feed into that as well so let us know on the all the channels that we've mentioned but uh that sounds great so uh for all the hackers that are listening in uh make sure to uh really bug sam and ryan with every request you have about any tutorial you can get so we can have that up on ethereum.

org for everybody else to also benefit from