Pen of the Week

MisterTicot

Homepage: https://codepen.io/cosmic-plus / Follow on Twitter • Follow on GalacticTalk
Organization: Cosmic.plus

Summary

Pen of the Week is a code snippets series that teaches, each week, how to implement a Stellar-related feature in JavaScript.

Description

Pens of the Week use Codepen to host interactive code snippets crafted to maximize their pedagogic impact.

The end-goal is to provide a wide collection of examples that support developers in coding their applications; And to trigger community discussions around the showcased features.

While it was initially intended as a way to exemplify Cosmic.plus libraries, it is gradually growing in scope to teach about various independent libraries & standard features as well.

Why?

Documentation, along with open-source libraries, is fundamental for a developer ecosystem to thrive.

If a library makes developers win about 50 hours of work, and 200 persons are using it, then it is 10,000 hours of development time that can be invested into something else. And that's about $500,000 saved.

That's how powerful open-source development can be for crypto communities. And for this to work, good documentation & howtos are required.

Published so Far

Making the Best of It

You can take full advantage of those pens pedagogic value by going through those steps:

Read the description & play with the interactive content.
Read the keypoints, take time to fully grasp the provided information.
Play with the code, and see if you can create something on your own.
Look at the documentation if some question is buzzing your mind.
Look at the challenges, and see if you can solve one.
Fire a discussion on GalacticTalk if you have anything to ask or to say.

It is important that you challenge your creativity & your ability to make sense of the code on your own. Besides being important programmer skills, those are good ways to improve your understanding & memorization.

Challenges

Each Pen of The Week contains two challenges. You can solve the easy one using the information provided by the pen, but you'll need to dig in the linked documentation to solve the hard one.

Challenges are first of all a way to learn by doing. The first to share the solution of a challenge can also claim a reward in GILS.

How to Claim the Reward

Fork a pen.
Find an elegant solution for one of the challenges.
Open a trustline to GILS:gils*cosmic.plus.
Post your solution in the GalacticTalk thread linked from the pen, as well as your public key.

The easy challenge is worth 1000 GILS, and the hard one 3000 GILS.

About GILS

GILS are exclusively minted for Pen of the Week challenges (issued by gils*cosmic.plus). For now, GILS have no intrinsic value and should be kept safely in your wallet.

At a later time, Cosmic.plus will release a service that makes use of them - giving them a market value that you'll be able to claim for yourself.

Note that GILS are not expected to hype or to become a speculation vehicle of any sort, but to be a pleasant reward for having written a neat piece of code.

Goals

[x] Release cdn.cosmic.plus to link versioned web libraries.
[x] Create a custom Codepen profile for Cosmic.plus.
[x] Come up with a nice format.
[x] Figure out a release process.
[...] Release 100 Pens of the Week over 2 years.
    [...] Exemplify Cosmic.plus libraries.
    [ ] Exemplify SEPs: 01, 05, 06, 07, 10.
    [ ] Exemplify Stellar libraries: stellar-wallet, kelp, ...
    [ ] Exemplify ecosystem libraries: stellar-guard, stellar-vanity-address, pubkey avatars, ...
    [ ] Exemplify security features: Content-Security-Policy, TweetNaCl secret boxes, ...

About the prize

How the funds will be spent?

Part of the funds will be set aside to finance my work on the series for the next two years. The remaining funds will help to finance the ongoing development on Cosmic.plus libraries.

What if it doesn't get a prize?

I enjoy making those pens. As developers, we're often overwhelmed by many tasks, so taking time to fully search how much a given problem can be simplified is quite refreshing.

I'll continue this series no matter what. I probably won't enlist it again to SCF, as I'm more interested into presenting software; but SCF opened the possibility to do something new and I wanted to play the game, at least for once.

Feedback

The series is new and still need some traction. Please come by & show us your skills!

The format I use for those pens is entirely new, so I'm interested in your comments about it.

I'm also interested in which libraries you would like to see showcased in this series. Let me know if you have any suggestion.

Thank you for reading 🙂

MisterTicot

Organization: Cosmic.plus | @GitHub | @NPM

Follow: Reddit | Twitter | Medium | Codepen

Talk: Telegram | Keybase

MisterTicot

I'm surprised nobody made a comment about the gils*cosmic.plus address so far... ^.^

(yes I finally found an excuse to bump my thread as well... By the way check the cosmic-lib, Contract Template pen - it is neat.)

MisterTicot

Funding Disclosure

The 2019-10-29, Pen of the Week received 55.000 XLM from SCF #2 honorable mention. This was $3,600 at transfer time, expected $2,500 after taxes.

A pen takes about 4 hours to craft. Including the work on the interface and the concept, I estimate that the project costed about 100 hours of work. The Codepen
subscription is $96/year.

Financially-wise, I estimate the project to be on par.

Future

Pen of the Week is still allowed to participate in SCF in order to receive further funding. However, one can only present a single project at once and I prefer to fund more demanding and impactful projects, such as CosmicLink and the string of innovation that will follow it.

The consequence is that continuing to publish Pen of the Weeks would lead to a leak of funds and time which would negatively impact Cosmic.plus. Hence, I decided to close this project in its current form.

I'm still looking for ways to occasionally publish pedagogic content or share around dev challenges, as I think this is something missing in the community. At that time, I'm trying to build some dynamic around @cosmic_plus Keybase channel.

About

This disclosure is meant to inform the community about how Cosmic.plus is using the funds received from the SDF.

MisterTicot

On a more personal note, I'd say that this project was a lot of fun to design & to publish.This was not an easy decision to make, but ultimately I think this was the logical one as it failed to trigger the dynamic it was intended to.
On the other hand, I think I can spend my time on products that will better benefit the ecosystem, such as the recently released Trezor wallet library.