Creating an awesome experience that incentives developers, will lead to increased developer adoption, productivity, and creativity.

Cardano has a thriving dev ecosystem, developers are able to scale their businesses by monetizing the services that they provide.

Key metric to measure

At the end of this challenge, we will be asking ourselves: Did we manage to make it easier for developers to build on top of Cardano?

• Filling in gaps defined in the exploration stage.
• Number of developers actively building on top of Cardano
• Number of repos on Github using the tooling. (Month over month increase)
• Reduce wait time of unanswered communications with developers to 24 hours.
• A sense of community and conversations. Having people around to talk with.

Guiding questions

• What are the the tools that we need to prioritize first
• How do we attract developers from outside of our current community to participate in Catalyst?
• What do developers want, and how do they get it from the Cardano dev ecosystem?
• What would make it a developer motivated to grind through the docs and code no matter how hard it is to create an app?
• What are enterprise dev managers looking for in order to be able to build out enterprise projects - either internal or commercial?

Potential directions

• Developer productivity: IDE's, scripts to automate stuff.
• Knowledge base & Documentation
• Deployment, testing, and monitoring frameworks
• Samples, recipes and templates
• Hackathons
• DEFI and tokenization
• Dashboards
• API's, and oracles.
• Support structures
• Incentivization structures

How does this compare to the Open Source Development Ecosystem challenge?

The difference is in the title. While we are advocates of open source, we recognize that not all teams are at the point where they feel comfortable or capable of open sourcing their solutions. Some APIs may be closed source forever, but still provide an overall net positive for the Cardano ecosystem. If you are all-in on open source from day one, definitely go with the Open Source Development Ecosystem challenge (if that's an option). We are rooting for you. We believe, however, there's room for both at this point.

The Catalyst Town Hall from December 1st 2021 had a breakout room dedicated to this discussion. Once it becomes available it shall be attached as a comment.

https://cardano.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Open-Source-Development-Ecosystem/382213-48088