At 20:00 on February 27th, the 52nd episode of BlockMania AMA live broadcast will continue. This episode is a hardcore technology series. BlockMania is committed to bringing the deepest cognition and thinking of the blockchain industry to the industry and the public. Other communities are welcome to follow We collaborate, and together we build connectors and amplifiers of thought.

The following is a review of the content of this AMA

The following is a review of the content of this AMA

According to the context in some parts of the sharing, we can consider the following expressions to be equivalent:

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Why Developers (Community) Matters

1. Future applications will be built on the new generation of Internet;

2. Applications need to be built by developers.

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Blockchain Developer Community

Community is a very flexible and abstract concept, which can be defined as "a group of people gather together for certain interactions". Even for the community in the niche field of blockchain + developers, there are actually many ways to classify. Here I only make several classifications that I think are relatively common for different groups of people. As for the specific interaction forms (telegram, WeChat, etc.), I will not discuss them.

Blockchain community segmentation methods: projects, domains and languages.

other

Among these communities, Bitcoin and Ethereum are still the two largest communities.

You can also classify using the domain method:

In these communities, smart contract developers are the most, accounting for 40% [1].

A trend that can be seen from the above figure is that the total number of smart contract, application, and currency developers has decreased, while infrastructure and Defi developers have increased.

Although the overall number of smart contract developers has decreased due to the cold Dapp market, the number of full-time developers has increased. [1]

etc.

Developing core protocols C++, Rust, and Go are more popular, and developing application protocols and products Solidity and Javascript are more popular.

Features of the blockchain developer community

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blockchain developer

Classification of blockchain developers

Blockchain developers are divided into two categories:

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Blockchain developer portrait

Age Range: Coincides with Internet Developers

Most of them are between 25 and 35 years old, which coincide with mainstream Internet developers.

Experience: mostly newbies

In terms of smart contract development, most developers are still newbies. This point can be seen from ChainIDE’s paper [5] that 81% of ChainIDE users use the codes in tutorials and examples, not developing their own needs.

Ways to participate in development: various

Each row in the figure represents a commit submitted by a certain developer, and each point represents a commit. If there is continuous (more than 10 days per month) contribution, it is presumed that this is a full-time developer; if it is intermittent (2 -9 days) contribution, it means that this is a part-time developer; if there is only one contribution overall, it means that this is a one-time contributor.

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The State of Blockchain Developers

Scale: still small

Compared with other open source ecosystems, the blockchain developer ecosystem is still niche. You can see a set of data comparisons in the report [1] released by Electric Capital:

The number of developers counted in the report is relatively small, and only the code writers of open source projects are counted. If you add other roles in the development team, such as testing and operation and maintenance, as well as closed source projects (such as exchanges and some Dapps) , the number will be more, but I personally feel that the number does not exceed 100,000.

There is still a lot of room for growth in the number of blockchain developers, and the road ahead is still long.

% of developers

The proportion of different roles of blockchain practitioners [8]:

We can see that engineers occupy the largest proportion. In some teams I know, the proportion of engineers is higher, close to 50%-70%. I don't know which projects are "holding back".

Market supply and demand: there is demand

Company: in need

According to statistics released by Linkedin on January 9, 2020, Blockchain is now the first technology to be needed, followed by cloud computing data analysis and artificial intelligence. [4]

Developer: "Consider" entry

For non-blockchain developers, the data in the CSDN 2019 report [3] shows that: 27% of developers have applications or are preparing to apply, 66% of developers are still in the initial stage of understanding, and 7% of developers do not understand at all, but relatively Compared with 2017, the degree of understanding and attention to this technology has increased significantly. In the next year, 79% of developers will consider entering the blockchain industry.

Personally, I feel that the data of 79% is a bit optimistic. The word "consideration" is a very vague word. After consideration, only 1% of people may enter. But what is pleasing is that this data reflects that blockchain has become a platform/technology that cannot be ignored.

In addition, according to Stack Overflow's 2019 survey results [2], most developers are optimistic about the blockchain and believe that the blockchain is useful, and most of these people are young developers.

Growth in the last year

According to the report [1] released by Electric Capital (above), from June 2018 to June 2019, the number of blockchain developers decreased by more than 800 people, accounting for 10.4%.

But don’t be pessimistic. After careful analysis of the data (above), 80% of the developer loss comes from one-time developers and part-time developers. The number of full-time developers has basically remained the same, or slightly increased.

What Factors Affect Growth

I have summarized several influencing factors:

Perfect infrastructure

It takes decades for new technologies to explode, and the gradual improvement of infrastructure is a slow process, and the development of blockchain technology is still in its early stages.

quotes

The growth of developers is affected by the market, and has the following trend:

If the market value increases, the number of developers increases faster

If the market value decreases, developers will also have a small increase, and the growth rate will slow down a lot

Entrance of giants

The entry of giants also has a certain impact on developers. For example, the addition of Libra and Ant Financial has a certain (great?) role in promoting the increase of developers.

The chart in the ChainIDE paper reflects the proportion of developers using ChainIDE to deploy different blockchain contracts. It can be seen that the use of Libra accounts for the largest proportion, which also shows from the side that the giants in the existing mainstream Internet world Promoting the development of the blockchain industry has a certain effect. In addition, after the cooperation between ChainIDE and Ant Financial's blockchain, users have also achieved significant growth.

policy

policy

Since China clearly stated its support for the development of blockchain technology on October 24, 2019, many blockchain companies have suddenly emerged throughout China.

How to build a good community

「The great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together. And great things are not something accidental, but must certainly be willed. 」—  Vincent van Gogh

"Great things are not done on impulse, but through a series of small things; and great things don't happen by accident, they must be achieved by ideas." - Van Gogh

Here we mainly focus on the perspective of the project as a community to measure the quality of the community. We mainly discuss how to build a good developer community from three perspectives: soft indicators, hard indicators, and taboos.

soft indicators

hard target

Taboo

A good developer community can be summed up in vernacular: a bunch of developers are chatting there, and everyone feels both hardcore and interesting.

The first thing to say is that building a developer community is a long-term goal. You can attract many developers to enter through short-term incentives (of course, if you have money, you can use it for a long time), but if there is no good mechanism, it is easy to be robbed and the popularity will disappear.

I did not take into account many factors such as the technical differences of each project, the strength of the team, the star aura, and the timing of the project (sometimes timing and luck are really important), etc. Too many variables make us at a loss. We try to return to the essence of the community to look at this issue, which is the soft indicator to be discussed below.

soft indicators

A community is much like an economy. An economy requires people to trust each other, then exchange goods and obtain capital.

In the economy of the community, trust is also needed between members. Commodity exchange can help each other and ultimately gain social capital. As member interactions increase, people feel a sense of belonging.

Even if there are high and low positions, different wealth, and different reputations. But each member is an independent individual in the community, and everyone has an equal discourse relationship. What everyone builds and accumulates is social capital. You may be rich, but your social capital is not necessarily high. In layman's terms, you may not be popular. People with high social capital also naturally have greater influence in the community.

There is such a benign interaction, I think it is a good community.

hard target

I only listed one metric: the number of developers. In fact, I listed a bunch of hard indicators at the beginning, but later found that all of them can be deleted, because I found that it is enough to measure the data of real developers in this ecosystem. Real developers will bring you good projects, more commits, and attract more developers to join.

For the project side, another indicator that is of great concern can also be referred to: market value. Try your best to become Top 100. Top 100 projects will get more attention from developers. According to the data [1], the sum of developers of top 100 projects accounts for 50% of all developers.

Taboo

Reference article:

Reference article:

[1] Developer Report, January - June 2019, by Electric Capital；

[2] Stack Overflow Developer Survey Results 2019；

[3] CSDN 2018-2019 Chinese Developer Survey Report

[4] The Most In-Demand Hard and Soft Skills of 2020；

[5] ChainIDE: A Cloud-based Integrated Development Environment for Cross-blockchain Smart Contracts

[6] ChainIDE 2.0: Facilitating Smart Contract Development for Consortium Blockchain

[7] virtual community;

[8] The State of the Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Job Market in 2019。