Dear community,

With the aim of supporting ecosystem developers, I'm presenting this treasury proposal for "Substrate in Bits", a series of in-depth technical content focused on addressing the pain points of developers building with Substrate. The goal is to provide valuable and comprehensive resources that can help developers understand their code better as well as serve as a trusted reference for developers seeking to gain an in-depth understanding of how their codes work.

Each article in the series will be written with the goal of providing detailed information and practical examples with the ultimate goal of serving as a trusted reference for the common problems logged on Substrate media platforms like the StackExchange, Polkadot Discord server, Substrate Matrix channel, etc.
By breaking down complex Substrate concepts into “bits” that are easy to understand and implement, we aim to make it easy for developers to gain a deeper understanding of their code and be able to make proper changes when things go wrong.

Substrate in Bits

Problem:

• The depth and specificity of community-created content needs to be improved.
• The developer community needs more reference resources that target specific pain points of developers.
• The ecosystem needs more community-curated technical content that can easily evolve over time by eventually leveraging the expertise and contributions of a diverse community of engineers.

Jump to the Problem section of the proposal

Available solutions

There are some existing solutions for substrate-related resources (Including the Substrate documentation and Blockchain training Alliance course) and some are in the works (eg, Polkadot.study). But a key different between "Substrate in Bits" and these solutions is that the technical content in “Substrate in Bits” are not designed to be specific courses. Instead, they’re designed to address specific issues often faced by developers.

A key component of addressing these issues and creating technical content, is consulting with experts and getting their opinion (this is a core component of our research process).

Jump to available solutions section of the proposal

Proposed solution

This proposal aims to tackle the existing problems by:

• Creating technical content using a problem-based approach. The goal of these “Substrate in Bits” is to address common issues faced by substrate developers and go in-depth on why these problems arise and how to solve/avoid them.
• Making technical content as collaborative as possible, allowing engineers from the community to make contributions and make Substrate in Bits an up-to-date and trusted reference for substrate developers. In order to achieve this, all our technical content will be housed on GitHub. This will make it easy for interested contributors to contribute to improving these pieces of content in the future.

By compiling these information in one easily accessible location, developers can more quickly and effectively troubleshoot their code and gain a deeper understanding of Substrate's technical components.

This will not only save developers time and effort but making the content open-source on Github contribute to the growth and success of the Substrate ecosystem by encouraging greater participation and collaboration.

Jump to the Proposed solution section of the Proposal document

Scope of work and Deliverables

The key deliverable for this proposal is 40 pieces of "Substrate in Bits" content. Priorities will ultimately be given to issues that are logged more often on substrate channels and the stackexchange and have less available solutions. These pieces of content will be housed on Github

Other efforts that are not part of the key deliverable include:

• Monthly analytics of our content and the living survey to gauge impact
• Efforts at bringing "Substrate in Bits" into the limelight of developers
• Running a "Substrate in Bits" channels where developers can brainstorm on "Substrate in Bits" content

Jump to the Key deliverables section of the proposal

Key success criteria

• Developer reach:
  • Target: 100
• Percentage of developers that participated at least once in our living survey
  • Target: 30% - 50%
• Developers’ perception of our content
  • Target: >70% of readers should find our content to be helpful and satisfactory

Jump to the success criteria section of the proposal document

You can find the full information in the proposal document

Looking forward to your feedback. Thank you!