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Stage 1: Project Discovery

Previous: Stage 0: Getting Started | Next: Stage 2: Project Exploration

In this stage you will work to gain a high level overview of what sort of projects there are to work on. The goal is to avoid diving too deep on any single subject.

Along the way, the hope is for you to start building and improving the following skills.

  • Feeling comfortable in the R&D Discord
  • Flex your writing skills. Note taking and writing down what you know in an organized manner.
  • Asking well informed questions.

Deliverable: Identifying Potential Projects

Your goal is to identify potential projects for improving the core Ethereum protocol. You should spend enough time with each project idea to gain a high level understanding of it. If you already know what you want to work on, you may choose to skip this stage, however, there is value in gaining a broad view of the Ethereum protocol.

First you will be hunting for possible projects. You should take a lot of notes. When you find a potential project, start writing things down and aggregating information. You can organize this information however you choose, but you should try to make it publicly consumable. Each project idea will be different, but in general, you should probably try to gather at minimum:

  • A "name" for the project
    • e.g. "Removing Gas Observability aka Ungas", "State Expiry", "Meta Transactions"
  • Prior work: Links to existing forum posts or other documents that people have produced.
  • A high level description of the project/topic/subject.
    • A paragraph or three.
    • If someone else has already done this, try to do so again using your own words. This is a good way to gauge whether you understand the topic.
  • An explanation of why this project is worth doing.
    • What does it solve. Why should it done. Who benefits.
  • Anything else that seems relevant.

If you haven't already, fork this repository. You are free to organize your work however you wish, as long as you do so in a public way. I'll recommend that you create a document under ./notes/<your-name>.md where you can commit your notes.

Finding Potential Projects

If you know very little about the Ethereum protocol, expect for this stage to be mostly you going back over old forum posts, blog posts, etc. Leaning on the work of those that came before is to be expected.

Even if you are reasonably well versed in the Ethereum protocol, don't feel like you need to re-invent the wheel.

  • New ideas are great.
  • Executing on an existing idea that isn't actively being worked on is great.
  • Joining someone else who is already working on an idea is great.

Here are a few places to start:

Whats in a good project

The breadth of what could be considered a good project is going to be incredibly broad and will differ based on you individual knowledge level. A good project will have many of the following attributes.

1. A Well Defined Goal

The project should have a well defined goal. The following are some short examples that loosely satisfy this requirement. In a real project proposal these would be fleshed out into more detailed descriptions.

  • "Determine the split between hot and cold state for epoch sizes of 1/10/100/.../1M blocks"
  • "Author an EIP and corresponding POC implementation for adding a historical block headers accumulator to the block header"
  • "Analyze the current usage of the SELFDESTRUCT opcode in the context of plans to remove or modify the opcode to be an unconditional send"

Here are a few examples of what does not constitute a well defined goal.

  • "Learn more about X"
    • This is an unquantifyable goal and it doesn't produce anything tangible.
  • "Come up with a solution for X"
    • This only identifies a problem, but it doesn't propose any actual route towards solving it. Maybe the problem is intractable. Maybe the solution is going to require years of work. Too many unknowns.

2. Explore New Territory

The project should explore new territory or have a good reason to explore previously visited territory. Duplicating previous work should be avoided. The one exception to this would be projects that take a "rough sketch" of a solution and flesh it out into something more complete.

The main exception to this will be participants who are starting with very little domain knowledge. It is ok for your work to overlap prior existing work if this is how you learn.

3. Expand Your Knowledge

One of the main goals of the program is to give you an opportunity to learn more about the protocol. Your project should result in you learning and expanding your understanding.

4. Externally Beneficial

The project should have some benefit to the broader ecosystem. This doesn't mean that it has to have an extremely broad impact, only that it will be beneficial to more than just you.

  • A new tool that is demonstrably useful.
  • Data that contributes to a better understanding of the protocol.
  • An implementation of something that only exists as a specification.
  • A well organized technical write-up of a complex problem.