Hello, Hashnode!

Happy new year and welcome to Developer DAO's new home for member-created content! 🥂

The goal of this kick-off post is to quickly (re)introduce you to Developer DAO (or D_D for short), include some context for what we're doing here on Hashnode, and provide a preview of what you can expect on this publication.

Developer DAO?

That's us. The mission is to accelerate the education and impact of a new wave of web3 builders. In a nutshell, we're a community of web3 newcomers and experts growing our skill sets and building public goods. As the current head of the Writers Guild, one of my top priorities is to make this publication as valuable of a free resource as possible. It shouldn't take much effort on my part, though; D_D members have so far been excellent at learning in public and generously sharing the lessons along the way.

Hashnode?

One of our DAO values is transparency, which includes documenting and sharing our journey. Here's the quick backstory of how we ended up on Hashnode.

The DAO, and primarily the Writers Guild, took some time to evaluate our publishing needs and potential solutions. A Request for Proposals (RFP) was created and I pitched the open source platform, Ghost, as a solution. My instinct is that a self-hosted option will let us maximize our potential in the long run; we're a community of developers with the skills to dream up and implement fun and meaningful web3 features. I also believe an open source web3 blogging platform would be a wonderful public good to offer the world.

Another member, Sam, dutifully performed his day job by proposing the use of Hashnode (😉). Turns out the Teams Publication feature (in beta testing) checked off many important boxes for us: support for a publishing pipeline that requires editor approval, rich customization, and robust data export support.

After giving Writers Guild members a chance to poke around at Ghost and Hashnode Team Publication instances, we discussed our findings. Ultimately, we landed on Hashnode as the right platform for us today. At this early phase in D_D's existence, we'll benefit from skipping the devops and getting off to the races, without locking ourselves into anything. The rest of the reasoning behind this decision is captured in the forum.

Edit: I should address a common question: "Why not Mirror?" Mirror is an excellent product, and Developer DAO has a Mirror presence, but it's not well-suited for a publication with very many authors. At the time of writing, adding each author to a Mirror publication requires a on-chain transaction on Ethereum Mainnet; optimistically, the DAO may onboard dozens, if not hundreds of authors over time.

What are we publishing?

Our mission, values, and goals are the lens we use to evaluate what we work on in the DAO. In this case, the goals are most instructive:

Onboard, Educate, and Support Web3 Developers

Foster and Build Web3 Tools and Public Goods

Onboarding web3 developers requires gentle introductions to blockchain concepts, tutorials for interacting with wallets or building first decentralized apps ("dapps"), interviews with developers in the field, and so on.

Supporting intermediate developers may come in the form of more advanced tutorials, highlighting industry opportunities, interview practice or negotiation advice.

As for web3 tools and public goods, we have plenty in early phases of development that we'll be happy to showcase and illuminate pathways for contributing. Tutorials published here will also highlight many of the open source tools we rely on.

I hope to include a variety of less technical subjects too, like chronicling personal journeys into web3, retrospectives of DAO activity, event announcements, milestones, and forecasting the future of the DAO and the broader industry.

What's next?

We're onboarding our first editors and opening the doors for DAO members to write! I'd like to see editors adopt a style guide and enforce a baseline of quality prior to publishing any content, e.g., correct punctuation, spelling, and grammar. Priorities beyond that will be up to them.

Our members already publish tons of great content each week. It won't be long before there's a steady publishing rhythm here. As this catalog of material gets built, we'll link to content from social media, the newsletter, the DAO wiki, and other DAO projects. One of the content initiatives I'm most excited for is the curation of learning roadmaps: crowdsourced pathways to becoming a web3 developer, one step at a time.