In much the same way that "Das Auge isst mit" ("the eye eats with") emphasizes the importance of visual appeal in food, programmers also care deeply about the aesthetics of the SDKs they work with.
Polkadot-sdk, despite being one of the most active codebases in the entire web3 space, has somewhat mediocre aesthetics. As one mere example, I [updated our README](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/pull/4502) for the first time since moving to the mono-repo, and it is still lacking a lot of basics.
The type of work needed to fix this is unfortunately deemed boring, yet I argue that it is as **important** and should be valued. It requires little engineering knowledge, yet it requires:
- A deep sense of care for tidiness. Having mild OCD is a bonus.
- Knowing what are the best practices and programmers want to see
- enough understanding of the polkadot+sdk to distinguish correct and incorrect descriptions and setups
Hereβs a list of ideas that I have in this direction.
- Fix anything that is visible in our crate.io / docs.rs pages
- README.md
- Cargo.toml: Crate description, license, website
- espcial care to the umbrella crates
- bad examples:
- https://crates.io/crates/polkadot-sdk-frame
- https://crates.io/crates/frame-support
- Remove all signs of substrate.io from the codebase
- Add link checkers to all documentation, or the entire repo in general
- Provide a better domain for [`polkadot-sdk-docs`](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/tree/master/docs/sdk)
- atm: https://paritytech.github.io/polkadot-sdk/master/polkadot_sdk_docs/index.html
- Explore publishing this crate to `crates.io`, needs fixing [this](https://github.com/sam0x17/docify/issues/22) by tipping Sam.
- Provide a unified and standardized `getting_started.sh` and `install.sh` in README of `polkadot-sdk` and the main 3 templates that it comes with.
- Scripts/Dockerfiles to run the following with 1 click:
- single chain with `--dev`
- alice/bob network
- zombienet with para+relay
- revive something like https://getsubstrate.io/
- not making the same mistakes of the past, all of this should be CI tested ^^
- [Clean all templates](https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-sdk/issues/3155#issuecomment-2126934939); the templates should be even more tidy than the main sdk-repo.
- Merge [awesome-substrate](https://github.com/substrate-developer-hub/awesome-substrate) and [awesome-dot](https://awesome-dot.com/) into `awesome-polkadot-sdk`.
The two paths forward:
- A team/lead within parity takes ownership of this.
- We put this up as an issue in Polkadot SDK, try and tip people to do it