CARDANO JS SDK: A Builder’s Journey

The SDK formalises interactions with Cardano, giving developers quality foundations that reduce implementation subjectivity and complexity.

• A coherent developer onboarding experience for Cardano builders.
• Open source projects, repos, and documentation that use cardano-js-sdk

• Number of npm downloads of cardano-js-sdk
• Sentiment of onboarding platforms
• Github stars of exemplar repositories
• Number of case studies
• Number of example projects 
• Number of new feature requests for backlog prioritisation and collaboration with Cardano the community

Background

Cardano presents a new paradigm for everyone yet there exists few opportunities and toolsets to easily on-ramp. Whether you dream of building an NFT project, wallet, game, DEX, or otherwise, dreaming big is part of who we are as members of this community. To start building and realising those dreams, we require a toolset. That’s why IOG started building cardano-js-sdk. The SDK formalises much of one’s interaction with Cardano, giving developers a quality foundation that reduces implementation subjectivity and complexity. Delivering such a toolset will start to make the developer experience a joy and help developers (of all experiences) build on Cardano. The community knows best what steps are required to build their visions, that’s why it's important any on-boarding platform should be led by the community. IOG’s Adrestia team submits this challenge to prioritise focus towards this shared vision.

Brief

Transparency around development on Cardano is paramount and enables not only a positive developer experience but also developer longevity. A set of projects that document and showcase their usage of cardano-js-sdk can help developers begin realising their visions with the current feature-set - and importantly submit feature requests to include going forward! 

It is critical to formalise an onboarding experience that compliments this toolset in collaboration with the community. Without you, the developer experience and onboarding quality will vary and succumb to meet the requirements as others see them. We want this challenge to help give rise to a community driven platform that is capable of creating a long-term, consistent pipeline of new developers into the Cardano ecosystem who become familiar with using battle-tested tools & best practices. Ultimately this challenge will serve to bolster dApp development, improve knowledge sharing, and inspire developer longevity.

N.B. we leave the definition of “dApp” ambiguous on purpose. 

Guiding Questions

• What challenges does a developer have building in the Cardano ecosystem?
• What documentation and examples would help overcome these challenges?
• What could sample documentation and example projects look like?
• How should a community drive the direction and project portfolio of an onboarding platform?
• Given a new set of projects, how should such a platform introduce new projects, documentation, examples, and use-cases?
• How have other platforms been successful in onboarding developers into their ecosystems & what could they do better?
• On-boarding experiences in other ecosystems (and other industries) vary in quality, consistency of delivering new updates, and outcomes. How can a platform maintain the quality of content, consistently deliver new information and experiences to the community, as well as help improve outcomes for developers who learn from the platform?

Inspirational Potential Directions 

• References of successful platforms and their operational models (from other ecosystems) 
• Case studies on how platforms do (or don’t) use sample projects to 
• (1.) bring users to the ecosystem 
• (2.) drive innovation 
• (3.) deliver educational material 
• (4.) help developers utilise best practices
• Presentations on how to deliver a fun and interactive educational experience while not missing out on the importances of the underlying tools to help realise a vision.
• Showcasing projects is one important item, but delivering information effectively beyond the superficial level is cardinal if we wish to cater to both new and veteran developers.
• Design a product portfolio that captures the tools necessary for a developer’s success
• Within cardano-js-sdk there are a number of packages that begin to meet developer needs. Outline and present what other packages, functionalities, and features are necessary for a Cardano ecosystem developer’s success and why they are necessary.

Resources : Warning: The SDK is still pre-production!

• Cardano-js-sdk (0.3.0)