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Open-Sourcing Documentation and Rewarding Community Contributors

Open-Sourcing Documentation and Rewarding Community Contributors

Author: Elan Halpern

Reviewed by Brady Werkheiser


Published on August 16, 20213 min read

We're thrilled to officially launch open source developer documentation for the community! Our goal is to enable developers around the world to have the best resources to freely learn blockchain development and bring this technology to the world.

Documentation enables faster, better development 

From the very beginning we've invested a lot of effort towards creating high quality, beginner-friendly, informative documentation. We've been thrilled and humbled by the response from the community.

‍We wrote all of our tutorials from scratch, listened to users and built guides for complex concepts like eth_getLogs and EIP-1559, and made sure the docs contained the most up to date information amidst the ever-changing web3 ecosystem.

Now, we’ve decided to allow contributions from the people we built it for in the first place, you. 

Why contribute?

Web3 was built to make traditionally inaccessible industries, knowledge, and power, widely available to everyone - no matter what. However, this bold mission comes at a cost of complexity. It can be extremely challenging to break into the web3 space as a developer due to the intricate nature of blockchain technology.

This is where documentation comes in. We need resources, guides, and tutorials from the beginner to the expert level, that teaches people how to build things. No one is more qualified to do this than the builders themselves. 

Almost everyone who has built in web3 has, at one point or another, felt frustrated with the lack of resources or explanations when developing, ranging from deploying your first smart contract to creating complex defi tools. However, those same developers oftentimes persevere and figure out how to build it anyways. If this is you, come write a tutorial about it! Odds are, hundreds of other developers felt the same way and gave up - you have an extremely unique opportunity to massively impact their experience, and get rewarded for doing so.

Yes, we are giving out rewards for people who contribute! These include but are not limited to:

  • Free Alchemy credits to help fuel your dApps

  • Exclusive Beta access to new Alchemy features

  • VIP support for your Alchemy account

  • Free Alchemy Swag

  • Twitter shout out from the Alchemy account

*Note: The type of award given will be determined on a case-by-case basis 

Our first contributor...

We were thinking about open sourcing our docs for quite a bit, but had not actually moved forward until a recent conversation with a newer Alchemy user, Clay Shentrup, co-founder of IPIQ.

Clay was continuously becoming frustrated with the confusion of how to integrate Ethers.js, an increasingly popular alternative to web3.js, into his NFT project, but there were no instructions or guides for doing this.

Clay's frustration and confusion on how to integrate Ethers.js
Clay's frustration and confusion on how to integrate Ethers.js

Like most other concepts in web3, Clay found himself having to gather bits of information from across the web and stitch them together to figure out how to do this.

Clay having to research and piece together bits of random solutions
Clay having to research and piece together bits of random solutions

So we reached out to Clay to try and help figure out what was going on, but after a few DM exchanges, Clay ended up figuring it out on his own! After tons of hours of debugging and piecing things together, he was ecstatic! 

This whole experience had us thinking - there are probably many other developers who wanted to do the same exact thing, but gave up somewhere along the way. Clay, a beginner web3 developer, would be the perfect person to teach other beginner web3 developers! So we asked him:

Clay became our first open source docs contributor
Clay became our first open source docs contributor

And he was in! Next thing you know, the initiative for open source docs was kicked off, and Clay became our first contributor. You can find his tutorial on How to Mint an NFT with Ethers.js by visiting our documentation or GitHub repo

How you can contribute

If you’re excited about teaching others cool web3 hacks that you’ve learned or writing a tutorial on a specific topic - contribute to the docs! You can find thorough instructions for how to do so on our documentation and in the Alchemy docs Github

Reach out to us on Twitter or Discord if you have any feedback, questions, or ideas!

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