I've Settled on Which Hedera Resources I'll Focus On

I've spent the past couple of weeks digging in a little more deeply to the resources I identified with my initial survey of whatever Hedera content that I could find. 

If you recall, I'm looking at this from the standpoint of content a developer can use. If I were to specify in terms of a Job To Be Done (JTBD) framework, I'd have something like:

As an experienced developer who is new to Hedera, I need to identify the content resources that will get me started with Hedera most quickly.

Because there is a lot of content churn out there (for example, in the past two weeks, Hedera updated its web site, and it also reorganized its Discord server), it was tempting to get distracted and misdirected. But I managed to persevere, and have come up with the following set. I'm going to dig very deeply into just these resources for the next few weeks and make a plan for a barebones getting started document. 

1. Main Website 

The website is the central source of truth about Hedera. I'm going to restrict my review of the following sections:

Network section 

I'm going to study just the following whitepapers. I've scanned them once already, and now I'm going to try for a better understanding of the general architecture and canonical use cases for each:

I think the first two are definitely useful for any prospective Hedera developer to read at least once. I'm still noodling about the usefulness of the other two docs to a developer.

Note: If you plan on working with anything to do with Tokenization, you'll need to understand NFTs (non-fungible tokens). Because I have never worked with NFTs, I found this doc by the ethereum.org to have the most succint intro.

Devs Section: Documentation

Hedera already has some excellent getting started content. I'm going to start in their Getting Started section and go from there, but you can be sure I'll spend a great deal of time throughout these docs. 

Dev Section: SDKs

There're a pile of language-specific SDK implementations available from the Hedera GitHub project. I'll be using the JavaScript SDK, as many of the samples I've found are written in it.

That's It for the Main Website

I've scanned everything else on the site. As a developer, I think I can defer reading any of it for the time being.

2. Discord

As I mentioned already, the Discord server has been reorganized. I plan to monitor just these channels every day to get more familiar with terms and common problems:

 In addition, these two channels will be useful:

  • announcements - to keep tabs on testnet drops and so on, and

  • javascript - most of the public samples I've seen are javascript, so I'm starting with that.

I'll ignore everything everything else on the Discord server, especially those helpful folks who want all my HBAR.

3. YouTube

There are a number of playlists on the Hedera YouTube Channel. I will dig into only the videos in these playlists:

4. Reddit

I actually won't be using Reddit at all, but because you can find a nice list of developer resources there, I'm including it here. I'll be referring to that list in the coming weeks to vet it against what I find out in this phase of my work.

What's Not To Like?

For the next couple of months I do not plan to attend to any content that's not listed here. I figure that as a developer, I have a task to do which involves the Hedera technology. I really don't have time for DeFi, trading, industry or company news, ESG, podcasts, or anything else that doesn't help me create some kind of feature or function with Hedera.

From a Tech Writer Standpoint

If you are a tech writer, you'll recognize what I've done so far:

  1. I've been tapped for a project about which I know little.
  2. I did a quick wide search for possible useful content. 
  3. I then narrowed that content down to a collection of higher-value content sources of truth. 
  4. Now I'm going to dig in.
Typical stuff. Stay tuned.

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