Road to Polkadot Docs

[kianenigma]

aka how we get from this repo to polkadot-developers/polkadot-docs#142.

This is all tentative and more of a brainstorm medium at this point.

First, the current structure:

• Setup Metamask
• Deploy First Contract
  • Quick-DApp
  • Surge
• Ethers
• Local Node
• PVM Deep Dive
• Rust Example

In the simplest form, we can divide all of our content into two buckets:

1. Primary: what we expect the user to see and do in the first interaction.
2. Secondary: Everything else

The primary tutorial should be highly optimized, and focus on giving the reader as much dopamine boost as possible. It should have a number of chapters, each of which would take you to a next, tangible step.

I think the "Setup" + "Deploy First Contract" is a good foundation for this. As noted in #27, I would suggest giving more attention to Surge, or removing it. This primary tutorial can possibly take you towards a few more steps, as long as those steps are attractive and simple to explain.

Contrary, I think the latter 3 current topics we have are all in the "secondary" category, and should be placed such that they are seen only after.

The simpler one, running your own local node: While interesting for some, I don't think an average contract developer would want to run a local AH/Kitchensink node and interact with that, while a public test-net is available.

The Rust and PVM inner working chapters are similarly very advance. They are very valuable to have, yet are not the first points of attraction. They are great as "education for other educators".

Next steps and open questions:

1. What other scenarios/steps can we add to the primary tutorial.

• One example I am aware of here is that @lovelaced and team are working on a better template to get started

2. In a few weeks, once the Papermoon team is done with their current release and are ready to contribute to this effort, how are we going to split the effort.

I am not super versed in contract development, so I don't have ideas about the former off the top of my mind. But I would like to look into two A-class smart contract platform docs (Base, Solana), and see what they have in their primary tutorials.

On the latter, I think Parity should primarily focus on providing the low level fundamentals and integrations, and Papermoon to work on polishing the optimized primary tutorial, among revamping the existing contract related content in their website. Of course, in the meantime the current efforts around this repo should continue, and later I hope Parity and Papermoon to join forces 🤝

PS. the current docs are hosted here, feedback form here

[lovelaced]

Regarding "running your own local node", it seems that contracts devs use anvil to fork a living chain instead of running a node (it's effectively the same but super easy to do).
example:

anvil --host 127.0.0.1 --port 8545 --fork-url https://westend-asset-hub-eth-rpc.polkadot.io --fork-block-number 9734185 --fork-chain-id 2 --no-rate-limit --mnemonic <whatever> --balance 10000000000000000000

if this works properly, might be a better option to include in the docs.