# OP Stack Shared Contributing

> The OP Stack is the standardized, shared, and open-source development stack that powers Optimism, maintained by the Optimism Collective.
>
> \- stack.optimism.io

When external builders come to the Optimism Collective, we greet them with the premise that there is an **open-source**, **standardized**, and **shared** development stack. The first is clear-cut; for as long as Optimism has been around, the collective has delivered on the promise of being open-source. That is the *monorepo*. A reference implementation for OP Stack components, the monorepo well serves the measure of being **standardized**. Especially as it is the core deliverable of OP Labs. This leaves the third attribute of being **shared**. Only recently has a great influx of external contributors including Test in Prod, Base, and other incredible individuals, surfaced the question of how **shared** is the OP Stack.

Introspecting into the recent experiences with external developers building on the OP Stack, we can gauge how well we've delivered on this promise. This starts with a few key questions.

- How and what have folks been building on and contributing to the OP Stack?
- What are frequently recurring challenges faced by external developers?
- Is there a road to an order-of-magnitude improvement for the OP Stack?

First, let's go over the state of the past few months of OP Stack contributing experiences to build up some context.

### State of the World

On August 24th 2023, the Optimism Collective [welcomed](https://optimism.mirror.xyz/Luegue9qIbTO_NZlNVOsj25O1k4NBNKkNadp2d0MsTI) its first *core* contributor to the OP Stack, Base. Since then, multiple sync calls and a great effort to migrate the roadmap from linear and notion to github has been underway to onboard Base engineers. But along the way, they've repeatedly surfaced the question about how to best contribute to the OP Stack. And it's justified. Since Base is still tightly coupled to Coinbase, project managers need to present a strong value proposition for why the work they embark on will bring value and aligns with the organizational roadmap. This was a near complete 180 from the mostly-flat organizational hierarchy that allowed Optimism to execute so flexibly.

[](https://x.com/WilsonCusack/status/1695081403929571833?s=20)

Along the way, there have been talks of Base establishing a rust team to build a rust fault proof program and other larger client projects. It's unclear where the decision process and roadmap planning breaks down to prevent these ambitious projects from happening.

Not long after, Optimism [welcomed](https://x.com/optimismFND/status/1712198518377525578?s=20) its third core contributor to the OP Stack, Test In Prod. Over the course of roughly one - two months, Test In Prod implemented Span Batches in the op-node, opening a series of PRs into the monorepo.

For _**weeks**_ these prs remained stagnant after one or two review cycles, the process to getting them merged, unclear.

// intro what people have been building on the op stack

// why have people had problems

- testing components
- devnet configuration
- path to canonicalization
- discoverabiliy

// solving op stack developers problems