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· One min read
Niklas

Are you a developer in the polkadot ecosystem? Have you learned something on your polkadot developer journey? Why not share it with others?

Polkadot Study is looking for people like you to write developer tutorials for anything polkadot related. The funds allocated for each tutorial is 1314€ or ~$1400. The estimated work load would be around 15h for planing, writing and revisions.

If that sounds interesting to you, and have anything you want to write about, that you feel would be a great tutorial for others or if you have any questions or ideas - get in touch via the contact options below.

Status (May 1st)

· 3 min read
Niklas

I am happy with how Polkadot.study develops. Last month was focussed on Design, Collaborations and including and writing the first tutorial. The frontend is 80% done and is only missing some components and a design for tablets. I have not found all the prospected authors I wanted but am confident I will find some in the future but probably missing the deadline here.

See below for a more detailed report.

Tutorials

  • finished the tutorial for authors
  • 3 funded authors are working on their tutorials
  • 1 Author is working on a tutorial that they want no funding for
  • Collaboration with Substrate in Bits to publish their content on polkadot.study
  • Another Call for Authors made via the home

It seems that it will be hard to meet the deadline with the aimed 10 finished tutorials until mid June. I have done several calls on twitter and PBA Alumni Channels as well as Kusama Direction and chatted with 2 people but never heard from them since then. Going forward, I would try to find new authors on different channels (e.g. doing a call in the PBA Alumni Newsletter this week). I also added a banner on the polkadot.study website and hope that the finished design will help onboard new authors.

On top of that I will this month contact several parachain teams to ask if they want to contribute tutorials to the platform.

Substrate in Bits

I collaborated with Abdulbee (@abdulbee:matrix.org) to include Substrate in Bits in Polkadot.study here. He is the author of a successful treasury proposal and, you can track the progress here

New Docusaurus Plugin

  • Created a reusable docusaurus plugin because polkadot.study needed more functionality than the available plugins offered: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@niklasp/docusaurus-plugin-content-tutorials
    • It is still a wip but can be build upon.
    • Uses modern typescript build pipeline
    • raised several issues with docusaurus github that came up along the way
    • restructured the repository to make it easier for authors to add their tutorials
    • Allow filtering of tutorials
    • allow custom meta tags for tutorial Duration and difficulty Level that will display in the frontend
  • The Docusaurus Docs

Design

Worked with the designers on the new page design. Currently only for Desktop + Mobile but Tablet Design will finish soon. Have a look at the figma project

  • Tutorial Cards
  • Landing Page
  • Components
  • Icons from Polkadot Icons
  • Study Paths filter Component

Miscellaneous

· 3 min read
Niklas

This is the report for the Kusama Token Holders / Treasury for the first month of building pollkadot.study. Below you will find tasks, accomplished in the first month as well as plans for the following month.

The goal of completion is a total of 4 months, with 3 months remaining. I am confident, that I reach can reach the goal.

Setup

  • Registered Domains (polkadot.study, polka.study)
  • Github setup
    • Setup an issue template for new tutorial authors
  • Vercel setup polkadot.study / staging.polkadot.study
    • automatically build new commits and pull requests (from authors)
  • Setup the Docusaurus environment for polkadot.study
  • Research
    • Discussed Docusaurus functionality on Docusaurus Discord and Github

Design

What you currently see is only a quick preview of what the designers created in a first iteration. The design is going to be finished in the next 2 months. Tasks completed:

  • Setup a design document for the designers and a slack channel.
  • Several meetings: first iteration is visible on polkadot.study already

Components

A key part of the interactive tutorials on polkadot.study are the interactive react components. I have created the initial logic for those, so authors can already use them and play around.

Authors

  • Found 6 Authors (from the PBA context) to write new tutorials on polkadot.study. View their plans here: https://github.com/PolkadotStudy/polkadot.study/issues
  • Discussed with authors and setup the above mentioned author intro
  • Agreed on 50/50 funding beforehand and on completion
  • Wrote a tutorial for authors on How to write a new Tutorial on polkadot.study
    • Content requirements
    • Funding
    • Markdown mdx cheatsheet Wrote cheat cheat for authors
    • Contribution Guidelines
    • Develop an empty starter Tutorial to start from for authors

Collaborations

  • Discussing possible Collaborations with Substrate in Bits, current discussion here: https://kusama.polkassembly.io/post/2530
  • Discussing possible Collaborations with robonomics.network
  • Connected with Parity Developer Relations in a meeting

Next

  • Accompany the writing of the tutorials / help authors to get started
  • Find more authors
  • Refine and implement the design along designers
    • Landing Page
    • Tag Pages
  • Tag / Category Pages (e.g. polkadot.js API, XCM, substrate) with links to external learning materials
    • Contact eligible people to help setting up the content for tag pages (ink, xcm, substrate, ...)
  • Further development of Task and Question Components
  • Look for more possible collaborations (with parachains)
  • More meetings with parity dev rel
  • Writing a good „Tokengated Website with pollkadot.js“ Tutorial
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