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Various documents and resources for the stow protocol

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Linnia hackathon (Aug 2018) feedback

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Linnia hackathon feedback

The Good

Overall impression - it was well organized, and there was a lot of prepwork from the presentation slides, food, having Consensys members onsite or on Slack, etc.

Suggestions

On the code, I feel like we struggled quite a bit - we would get obscure error messages and really have no way of troubleshooting.

I think what would help is doing DX (Developer experience) testing. Do a walkthrough of how a developer should work with the Linnia packages. Ideally, test with 5 developers, one at a time. Since Linnia is intended for developers to ramp up quickly on Ethereum, it seems that DX should be a priority.

So the deliverable of this DX testing could be a guide for developers on how to use Linnia.

To start

Identify prerequisite knowledge expected of the developer.

  1. Level of Web development skills?

    • Vanilla Javascript, HTML, CSS
    • jQuery or other libraries
    • Framework

  2. What mental model should the developer have of working with Linnia? Of the blockchain? of IPFS, etc.?

  3. What desired state of knowledge should a developer reach after going through the guide that would be suitable for the hackathon? and perhaps for beyond the hackathon?

Actual test

Test whether a developer can take this guide and get to that desired state. Like a user test, you should have an "interviewer" present, and optionally you could record the session, although unlike traditional user interviews, it can be tricky here as the cognitive load is higher and being recorded might increase anxiety levels.

So it's like a user test, but different too.

Conclude

After doing a number of these DX interviews (at least five), you'll know what to do - what kind of error messages to output, what kind of functionality to provide, how to improve the documentation, whether to provide visuals and/or animation, etc.

My thoughts

Outside of DX testing, here are some of my thoughts.

Although it was great to have Linnia folks around, I felt no one was able to provide sufficient guidance on troubleshooting the hard issues, like connectivity or posting a transaction. Perhaps the product was too new, or not quite ready? It's one thing to know how something works, and another to be able to explain and troubleshoot; it really requires sufficient time working with the product and end user.

Having three or four (maybe more) github repos to research seems confusing. Which Linnia package should the developer use?

My preference: Start with Linnia-JS, and provide a brief overview of setting up with both vanilla JS and React. Generally, I think developers would prefer setting up an application themselves and using a library, instead of modifying a ready-made application like Linnia-Box to suit their purpose.

The documentation on script tags was incomplete, but that would have been a good approach to getting something up quickly.