Announcing the Deep Dive Docs Bounty

Over the past several months, much has happened in the world of Stellar developer docs, with the most notable milestone being the merging of the Stellar and Soroban documentation sites. Before smart contracts launched on Mainnet on February 20th, 2024, Soroban developer documentation lived on its own site, separate from Stellar developer documentation. Soroban’s integration with Stellar Mainnet, made it clear that the two sets of documentation needed to come together to enable universal search and create a more cohesive developer experience. And now, after much discussion and contributions from the community and within SDF, the docs merge is complete!

The merge was successful, but there is still much to be done to improve and create content for the docs. And getting contributions from the ecosystem (those actually using the docs) is important. Like other Stellar projects (such as the Soroban CLI and the Rust SDK), Stellar developer documentation is open-source, meaning it’s available for the public to use and modify. Being open-source enables collaboration, transparency, innovation, and community support, all of which help to increase the use and adoption of the Stellar network.

So, what’s the best way to contribute to the docs, you ask? Great question!

The Deep Dive Docs Bounty (it’s ri-doc-ulous!) will run from May 29th (today!) through August 7th, 2024. It is a bounty program that encourages and incentivizes the community to contribute to Stellar projects and improve Stellar developer documentation to create a best-in-class developer experience. Developer documentation is incredibly important in that it facilitates developer onboarding and boosts user adoption.

SDF and the community have worked hard to ensure Stellar has comprehensive and useful documentation, but we can never have enough examples and how-to guides to continue to help developers build on Stellar!

Participate in the bounty by navigating to the Stellar Developer Docs issues on GitHub and picking an issue marked with the `Docs Bounty` label. Each issue also includes how much XLM the person who completes it is eligible to receive based on the issue’s complexity. Then, the exact amount is determined based on the submission’s quality (is it well-written, well-crafted, and easy to follow?) and thoroughness (is it comprehensive and well-documented?).

Be sure to check out the full participation instructions on the Stellar Docs GitHub README.

But wait, there’s more! Even more exciting than getting awarded is intergalactic recognition! When you merge a PR in the Stellar docs repo, your name appears at the bottom of whatever page you revised, as in the example below.

If you have any questions about the bounty, feel free to reach out to Bri (.aythia on Discord and briwylde08 on GitHub). If there is a piece of helpful content you think is missing from the docs and not listed for the bounty, go ahead and create an issue for it in GitHub and tag Bri for review to see if it makes sense to include it in the program.

And, as always, if you’re stuck on an issue, the Stellar Developer Discord is a great resource full of knowledgeable folks who can help!