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title: sub0 & barcamp feedback

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# sub0 & barcamp feedback

This is my personal reflections on the week spent in Lisbon attending and taking part both in sub0 developer conference and Polkadot Parachain Summit.

## sub0

### admin stuff

I personally liked the choice of venue for the conference. LX Factory is a very nice area with loft design and a lot of restaurants around. The venue itself was spacious, but temperatures were not the most comfortable, later afternoon people had to put coats on.

The second thing to note is a bad acoustic in the main stage area. It was very difficult to concentrate on what speaker is saying due to echo.

Other spaces (Starter, Builder) were always well equiped and sound was far better.

Generally speaking, the timings were good, even though there was a constant delay in 20m, this was kind of expected. What really messed things up is Gavin's spontanous appearance on stage which had to delay all events buy 1.5h. The crowd was tired closer to 4pm which I felt affected the engagement.

### sub0 content

The sessions were always to the best quality and well prepared. Kudos to Hector for his "Trappist" session, the space was packed. 

Astar revealed Swanky suite 1.0 release with a lot of features such as frontend template, E2E tests and others. The tool is fully interactive and intuitive. The claim it to be chain-agnostic, so something for us to consider when working on `cargo-contract`

Another interesting talk by Astar was about XVM, I was pleased to see chain-extensions to be utilised to this potential.

I can't say much about other talks as I was dropping in and dropping off between talks.

### ink! shilling at sub0

I can't say how things looks from the audience side, but the talk went well IMO. We covered all the important aspects of our motivation behind ink! and pallet-contracts. We discussued our position within ecosystem and how we want to grow.

We had good questions about XCM, audits and benefits over Solidity.


After the talk, 2 compnaies approached to discuss potential collaboration on audits of ink! core:
- https://www.oaksecurity.io
- https://code4rena.com

They merely wanted a help with onboarding, I took their contacts and refered them to polkadot forum to continue the discussion there.

## Parachain Summit

There will be published more elaborated notes from Nikos, but I thought it would be nice if I could provide my personal impression.

Sam and I prepared an evelated pitch for `pallet-contracts` to be adopted by all parachains in the ecosystem. In the reality, due to the bad timing (we were the last one to go in the 2 day slot), only Astar, Phala, Unique and Kilt made it there.

Nonetheless, our discussion was very fruitful and everyone agreed that ink! should be more product-facing. We need more fronted/fullstack tooling, better website, better "centralised" documentation with examples and guided tutorials.

On the technical side, there wasn't anything said that we didn't know:
- Making chain extensions easier to write
- Maybe scheduler pallet for smart contracts
- Ability to import EVM state into pallet-contracts

As a part of collaboration and adoption, Sam prepared elevated pitch for ink!ubator. I will leave it to Sam to provide insights.

I dropped few ideas that were welcomed and can considered to improve collaboration with parachains and incoming developers: monthly office hours. Similarly to our monthly call, we can schedule a monthly call with parachains that use `pallet-contract` and quickly cath-up on the progress in the ecosystem.

Similarly, we can do the same call with developers and provide first class support.

## General sentiments toward ink!

Having talked to few people during sub0 and parachain summit here is my highlights why people didn't use ink!:
- Never heard of it
- Pain to work with frontend in comparison with EVM-world
- No audits
- The benefit of using ink! over solidity isn't yet that clear
- Chain extensions are not that easy to use
    - Many devs liked the idea of "embedded contract" - the ability to call contract directly from runtime allowing modularised and upgradeable runtime without hard-core full runtime upgrade

On that note, I think it was a big loss for us that we couldn't run the workshop game during sub0. All the points listed above again are somthing we were pretty much aware off. We need to have more appearence during conferences.

I think this is also a call for us to start work closely with marketing and DevRel team to push the adoption of ink!, Sam's talked to Harry working on CAPI work to make it work with `useInk`.

## Final thoughts

I think with ink! 4.0 we should have a more mature product. OZ collaboration will definitely make some noise in the space. Sam's frontend library will lower entry level to ink! and allow multi-layer, composable products to be built on top of parachains.

Documentation and website design are also something that can easily be solved, we just need to dedicate some effort there.

