Spread the word to attract developers to SAFEnetwork

Continuing the discussion from Tech Conference suggestions thread:

Ben (@lightyear) is going to be spreading the word at conferences to attract developers (see above where he’s looking for suggestions).

How else can we get the word out and attract more developers?

This topic is for ideas, and to share what you are doing to attract developers to SAFEnetwork.

As the funding round closes I will think about how I can shift my own advocacy more towards developers. I already do that via SAFEpress twitter account (>300 followers) but maybe I could go more directly, perhaps write some blog posts aimed at developers. I think web developers are the ideal target because it is very easy for anyone who’ll knows client side web stuff to create a web App on SAFEnetwork.

  • So, what are you going to do?
  • Do you need help with something you’d like to do?
  • Can you help anyone with an idea they posted here?
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2 posts were split to a new topic: TestSafeCoin will attract devs

Passive marketing like twitter, will only catch a fraction of potential devs. Even conferences will likely only catch those who are looking for something.

I wonder most people gravitate to what they know and rarely explore; once you find a comfort zone, the effort to find better not as strong as temptation to stick to what you know.

So, go where the devs are?.. That could be proactive alerting forums to what SAFE is for developer interest - who will be interested: for example javascript pros and database managers perhaps.

Google: largest webmaster forums throws dated but still useful lists:
. http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/best-webmaster-forums/
. List of Top 10 SEO Webmaster Forums 2014-15
. 35 Popular Forums and Discord for Designers and Developers - Hongkiat

If you consider the first link, those with pagerank like webmasterworld.com are evidently established and likely host to 1000s of devs in each of many topics.

I expect there’s real potential for devs to engage devs, especially where there are genuine technical questions… there’s no reason to post all queries here.

I’ve posted to webmasterworld.com javascript a few times and expect I’ll do odd other queries when the need arises. Perhaps then don’t be shy of talking SAFE is the reason for the work you’re doing that then has spawned a topic in those forums.

I guess the inverse too… if there’s opportunity to suggest SAFE as a solution to problems that others are posting, that would be the ideal. There are obvious issues with web security, so getting a few of that flavour to understand SAFE might be a real boon.

Most generic intent then must be to find people with a problem that SAFE solves and alert them to the difference.

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In think this is an excellent approach, if I may summarise:

  • Devs already here can hang out with other Dev communities
  • given a real problem you’re grappling with, explain it mentioning SAFEnetwork, and ask for help
  • help others, and where appropriate suggest solutions related to SAFEnetwork, or it’s forum as a source of information, help, ideas etc

No need to force it, but no reason not to share your enthusiasm for SAFEnetwork in other contexts.

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Another way is to approach developers of existing open source tools / apps and discuss with them what would be involved in porting them to the decentralised SAFEnetwork.

For example, I just stumbled on:

  • WeKan Kanban board like Trello
  • ??? add suggestions to this list!

I’ve made this into a wiki post so you can edit it and add to the list, but please also consider approaching at least one of the teams and reporting back on this topic.

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Related to my last post above, https://stackshare.io looks interesting:

  • maybe as a way to find apps we’d like to encourage onto SAFEnetwork, and then approach the teams, or
  • maybe a place to discuss other things with developers and highlight SAFEnetwork apps (SAFE Beaker? :slight_smile:). I suspect quite a lot of Devs use stackshare.io although I’ve only just found it myself.

Anyone here already familiar with stackshare.io? This bit looks interesting, anyone want to look into this…

Show your company’s entire software stack to thousands of engineers

Attract developers by explaining what you use and why
Easily reference your software stack by sharing it on job hiring sites
Invite your engineering team to contribute to your stack page

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My braindump on this

Platforms devs engage with

  • github
  • papers (ie technical)
  • blogs (ie less technical)
  • social media
  • documentation (hard api docs in gitbook, soft design concepts in wiki)
  • aggregators (hacker news, reddit)
  • community (ie this forum)

Motives for devs to be involved

  • curiosity
  • utility (safe offers something other projects do not)
  • ego (devs want to be involved so they can put their name on a thing)
  • simplicity (especially getting started, ie good docs - if it’s hard devs won’t be attracted)
  • political / activism
  • controversy / gossip
  • for a challenge, to work at the leading edge of knowledge
  • coolness
  • economic, they can earn money for the work they do

Leverage the path of other projects

There’s a lot to learn from the history of other popular projects. Investigating their history may indicate actions that cultivate interest.

  • ipfs
  • bitcoin
  • bittorrent

Actionable items

These are things anyone can do that will attract devs (but don’t just do it, you must also tell people you did it)

  • start a project
  • help improve or maintain an existing project
  • write your opinions about stuff
  • test and break things
  • ask others for their opinions

Purpose

Why do you want to attract more devs? This will dictate who and how and where and when you take action.

  • ‘core’ dev vs ‘app’ dev vs docs vs testing vs libraries etc… all very different dev audiences.
  • is it to create new work, or build on existing work
  • are they wanting to enhance the quality and volume of conversations
  • are you looking for devs to improve the security of the network
  • devs can also hype and buzz and create links with media and law and politics etc
  • as an economic activity, to employ people and build business

Wait…

I also think it’s too early to be able to attract most devs, since the network isn’t live. The economic motives will draw a large crowd. Preparation helps, but imo the main thing is to keep working and wait for the inevitable.

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2 posts were merged into an existing topic: TestSafeCoin will attract devs

Use Source{d} to build a list of Devs that fit a defined profile…contact directly or find where they hangout and engage there.

Source{d} is a tech-driven recruitment company analyzing open source code contributions to match talent to global innovative companies. Source{d} ensure an extensive technical understanding of client needs and match that with developer fit. Source{d} understands developers through the code they have written. They analyze more than 16m open source projects with 900m code contributions across over 6M developers.

An example of their work from the blog: 100 Awesome Women In The Open-Source Community You Should Know

There’s 100 solid contacts to start attracting woman to this project.

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Perhaps posting updates on LinkedIn would also help? Lots of IT people cluster together of all ranks there and getting some visibility may help.

Personally, I am not big on social media and try to keep my StN ratio to a minimum out of respect for me friends. However, liking the odd maidsafe post on progress seems worthy though.

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This is key though - it isn’t ready yet.

There is enough meat on the bones for devs to start experimenting, but this will only be the most curious sorts. A lot of people won’t bother until it is clear the project will be a success.

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Thanks for all these suggestions folks, really good stuff here. @mav awesome response, thank you.

I think we can all agree we aren’t going to win over “most” Devs at this point, and that when SAFEnetwork is working and rocking the world, finding Devs will not be a problem.

The reason I started this topic is because I’m sure we have reached the point where any Dev who is interested can begin learning the API and learn how easy and useful it will be to build on SAFEnetwork.

Getting some more Devs to this point achieves several things:

  • it will help us reach even more Devs, because Devs who find new things that excite them like to talk about them
  • it will add Devs to the community, who can help each other and thereby grow the capability of SAFEnetwork
  • it will lead to more SAFEnetwork apps being built, and ready at launch, and give extra leverage when it is most valuable: when people first hear about SAFEnetwork, and first take a look, we want them to be impressed, excited, and above all find something here which they find useful. Every extra app helps that.
  • it will also help add to and decentralise the core maintainers, and decentralising that is another important part of the mission

I don’t want us to get sidetracked into discussion about this aspect - I’m explaining because three people have said something about most Devs not being ready for this yet. I think some Devs are ready, and that reaching them will be worth the effort. If you disagree that’s fine, you can do whatever you think will help.

So thanks again for contributing ideas. More welcome!

Also, please feel free to share any things you decide to do (or are perhaps already doing) and any results. Thanks for helping give this ball another push :slight_smile:

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I think setting up a hackathon or more bounties like Maidsafe did with the browser will attract quite a lot of developers. I’ve seen tens of projects that make the same claims that Maidsafe makes and I think that more than 90% of those claims by other projects are nonsense, why would a external dev don’t think the same about Maidsafe/SAFE?

If there’a a price (money) involved in creating applications for the network or setting up a project, developers will at least take a look at the network and it’s code. In the future this money might be safecoin, but even with safecoin there are developers that need to take that first step and afterwards tell their friends and other developers.

Until tomorrow (not sure when bnktothefuture money gets in :blush: ) I think Maidsafe has been on a strict budget but I guess more money will flow into things like bounties and hackathons when the money is in :slight_smile: Besides Maidsafe hosting this we can look into setting up bounties or a hackathon as a community of course, would be very cool if we can pull that off.

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Great point. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater!

My personal story of being attracted to the safe network (and bitcoin) is simple: how epic it is. There’s a lot of empty hyperbole in crypto, but bitcoin and the safe network both deliver an absolutely epic solution to an equally epic problem.

Not enough developers appreciate how epic the safe network is. If they did, they’d be attracted.

The things that engaged me after I was attracted:

  • good documentation and reading material. SO important! I was completely obsessed for weeks with both networks and it was fed by the ready supply of reading material.
  • somewhere to discuss with others (ie this forum)
  • a project of my own
  • a project to contribute to
  • some leading people to help inspire and aspire to

My path may be different to other devs, but hopefully some more can find their way to this great project.

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In time perhaps look to pepper the likes of ‘awesome’ lists, which I don’t know much of but perhaps are where devs seek the bleeding edge.
eg GitHub - rust-unofficial/awesome-rust: A curated list of Rust code and resources. note that for that though contributions: “goal is to have mostly projects that are stable and useful to users.” but expect that perhaps Crust could answer to “is the entry valuable to people trying to get things done in Rust?”… and beyond just rust obviously… expect there are similar lists and focus for decentralised projects.

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There’s also the satisfaction of realizing that many will look back on our early communications and say “Oh, Shucks!! They were right!” A small thing, perhaps, but I find the idea pleasing.

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From a non-technical point of view, I think it’s very important the way the community evolves, one of the main reasons I decided to not just join the community but also try to participate, is the humbleness I found in the discussions in this forum/community.

I think having smart people in a community is a key, but making sure that everyone is always well treated with humbleness encourages you to participate and not be worried about being wrong or asking basic or ‘stupid’ questions.

To sum up, after succeeding in attracting more people/devs to participate, join, read, follow the forum and the project, which we already know it is not a trivial task, we need to make sure we have them to stay. I think this community has been doing great in this regards so far, so we just need to keep it this way. Of course, this IMHO :slight_smile:

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Another idea that is also a small dev project (and could be used to create a tutorial):

[ ] Create a SAFE Invoice App and get listed at nobackend.org (could use my SAFE remoteStorage.js)

This would be similar to @zatvobor’s TodoMVC demo app (posted on the forum and to github). Perhaps more could be done with that too…

[ ] update SAFE TodoMVC, keep live on the test networks, share it where other TodoMVC apps are listed.

Posts with tasks in them can be made into wiki posts so you can edit them and using “[ ]” to indicate a todo item that anyone can grab (just add your handle to indicate you’re working on it thus: [@happybeing]. :slight_smile:

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