Results of My Survey of Hedera Information

Most developers don't want to allocate too much time to background information -- they pick up what they need along the way. There's not a ton of information about Hedera out there, but there's always enough cruft to distract you.

So I spent a couple of days searching around for high-quality sources of truth for information about Hedera, focusing on the things that a developer would to need to read or use to get started. This survey was just to try and identify sources of truth -- I only went deep enough to judge the quality and purpose of the content. I looked for content that would be useful for ramping up and for ongoing development. Background information is okay, but as I didn't want to get lost in rabbit holes, I only considered content that is core to the technology. Something you'd read once or twice at most to figure out where the technology fits in your technological world.

I came up with the following resources. I'll be reading/familiarizing myself with them in the order I provide here. Once I go through each, I'll be writing about what I've found. Content that I think is important for developers to review will end up prominent on the sidebar. 

Note that I have excluded code repositories for the time being. I expect to have to sort through a ton of them soon. But during this go-round I'm doing what a tech writer does with a new topic: familiarizing myself with the landscape of information.

1. Main Website 

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

Note: This is being written in January 2023. Websites cycle through organization and style often. Plus with the creation of the swirld.com company, some of the content will likely end up migrating.

  • Network section – I'll read everything.
  • Devs section – I'll read everything.
  • Use Cases – I'll read everything.
  • Resources – This is a list of videos. I'm going to scan the list and view some of them. 
  • Ecosystem – I'm going to scan this section to get an idea of the companies that have tossed their hats in the Hashgraph ring, so I can get a feel for the kinds of big bet projects that are in progress.

2. Reddit Hedera Community

https://www.reddit.com/r/Hedera/

The Reddit community seems to focus on general info and opinion. There are two good resource indices: Social Media and Developer Resources. Both seem to be up to date. There's a Getting Started topic which looks to be more about getting started with the subreddit. I will dig into it more deeply later.

I'll spend more time over the next couple of weeks to get a feel for how often to check into this subreddit. Later in this blog series I'll provide my recommendations on how ofter to peek into the several resources on Reddit, Discord, YouTube, and Medium.

3. YouTube Hedera Channel

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIhE4NYpaX9E9SssFnwrjww

There are a ton of videos here of all types. I'm going watch as many as I can stand to try and build a top N list for developers.

4. Discord Hedera Server

https://discord.com/channels/373889138199494658/892945371901354076 
 
This is deeply developer focused. As with the Reddit community, I'm going to read around the server channels to get a sense of where the high-value content is.

5. Medium 'Hedera' Topic

The Hedera foundation only publishes blog content on its main website, but other folks post here periodically. I'm just going to look at what's there and how often new content comes up.

So there you have it -- that's my review work for the next couple of weeks. I'll keep you posted.






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