Some good data snapshots posted by @frabrunelle and it is clear the project needs more developers/contributors.
@dirvine himself said we need to expand the dev team.
How do we do this?
How do we attract high quality reliable passionate developers and keep them interested in the project for long enough that they catch the SAFE bug so to speak?
Some ideas off the top of my head?
-A hackathon, treasure hunt or something similar
-Direct marketing in areas developers hang out e.g. banner ads and email marketing to stackoverflow, codeproject, dreamincode, subreddits etc.
-University/college fliers
And just generally asking for developers. I have watched and listened to many talks and discussions on SAFE but it’s never really clear that SAFE is looking for developers. Like in sales, you need to ask for the sale to get the sale. If you dont ask you dont receive.
Sorry if this sounds jumbled. I am at work and busting for a wizz. Lol
Crazy idea here. Why not gamify the coding process. Like… assign a random number to every file on github that needs to be coded or whatever, there are different projects on there right? So every “job” gets a number. Then make a draw of it. Stick the numbers in a virtual hat (random number generator thing) or an actual hat at dev headquarters in Troon, and then whatever number gets drawn is the lucky dev that week. Winner gets a prize of bitcoin or maid. That way you code in order to play and the more projects you work on the more “tickets” you enter into the hat and therefore the more chances you have of winning the weekly prize. Game could include or exclude official devs and be for everyone or just for the bounty developers. It could also be an extra bit of fun for the weekly updates. Announce the winner of the weekly development draw! Bet there would be tons of speculation on the Pre-Dev thread.
Also you could have the community crowdfund to make the pot bigger. Like say the default was $20 worth of maid or bitcoin. Not too enticing but say the community was all excited about a bunch of new features. They could throw money at the pot until it raiseed to $50, $100 or just kept rising all week. This would keep Maidsafe from going broke and allow the community to form a “bounty” of their own.
I wonder if there’s a shortage of Rust programmers: one of the main reasons I haven’t looked much at contributing myself is because I’ve never done any work in Rust and I don’t feel like I know the language well enough. But from my understanding it seems like Rust is basically semantically equivalent in many ways to the cutting-edge C++ that is my language of choice, so it probably wouldn’t be that hard for me to get used to.
Well, and I also wasn’t aware that the project was in need of more developers…
Any new framework needs to make getting started super easy, so it’s just a few command and lines of code to do a hello world.
We need a hello world for the SAFE network, to show developers how easy authentication, storage etc… are.
Get tutorials out there. Explain step by step how to create a simple web app in JavaScript. Step by step videos on YouTube would be great.
We can also raise issues on open source projects encouraging use of the SAFE network within existing applications. For instance backup config files for any application would be a easy enhancement and would earn the developer a little Safe coin.
I don’t think that’s a rambling, that’s exactly on point.
Make it trivial for all devs - be they app or web devs or any other, and they will make their new toys SAFE, just because they can brag about that being another feature; or because the storage is cheaper; or whatever incidental reason.
There’s professional devs that might appear off topic at webmasterworld, that I expect, when the time is right, will be very interested in what SAFE can do easily. No-one wants to read a manual, especially creative types, so a hello world for devs that isn’t hard work and screams how easy it is… perhaps that talks on different levels to different audiences will be useful… I’m thinking one to those who want to store data; one to those who want to use APIs etc etc… do the work for them up front, so they see no challenge to just adopting SAFE as an easy option. If SAFE can provide for databases and the switch to move from insecure environment to SAFE one, is one button push, then who will resist that?..
I don’t know if the OP was suggesting more core devs, and I’m not sure if that’s needed. I’d rather trusted devs move carefully to resolve a rock solid base that other dare I say lighter-devs lean upon.
One thing I thought of was one of those “awesome” lists for the SAFE network on Github. Is there any list at the moment? Something like that could get lots of stars and give more exposure to developers as well as providing a up-to-date place for all SAFE projects, documentation on (and off) Github.
Quite simple - good documentation, example applications (hello world mentioned above is a good start), robust, easy to use API’s across a broad range of languages, stable test network. This is already starting to take shape - I really want to build something for the safe network, since time is very limited for me being able to build in a language which I’m already proficient in would make all the difference.
Lol of course it needs more developers. We’re rebuilding the internet after all. But you raise an important point and that is educating the public on how to code in the first place. So far a lot of the emphasis has been on attracting people that already know how to code. Perhaps we should start creating lessons on how to code in Rust, and more specifically how to code for the SAFE network. How does one actually create an app? How does one use github? How does one use all this fancy code. Perhaps one of the initiatives we should be focusing on is not just “marketing” in the economic sense but also education. And through that education we can then promote the project. After all if the lessons are geared towards teaching the student how to use and make stuff for the SAFE network it seems logical they’ll gain interest in the SAFE network. What if we just had a section of the forum where non coders could ask “How do I build this?” Like “how do I build such and such command line application?” Or “How do I build a gui interface” or “How do I design an array that’ll do such and such.” or whatever. And coders would be there to answer the questions and help write tutorials as they came up. There’s a forum for blender artists called blenderartists.org that does pretty much just that. Artists of all skill levels come together and help one another. They answer each other’s questions and post their work to be critiqued. What if we did the same thing for the SAFE network? Just had a board where people could ask questions, post answers, review work, and help one another. So far there’s been a lot of focus on the APIs but not everything is about the APIs. Not all coding is limited to just SAFE either. Sometimes you just want to encourage people to learn and code. Because the more literate they become the more they’ll be inclined to help the project at large and the more awesome apps they’ll create.
Also I’d like to note it’s not just RUST we need to focus on but all languages used to code on the safe network. Just generally promote programming literacy in a lot of ways.
