DEV Community: OpenBuild

One-month Summary of the Open Source of OpenBuild Official Website

Ourai L. — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 10:02:27 +0000

Hello everyone! 🙌

The OpenBuild official website frontend project has been open for over a month now. I'd like to take this opportunity to briefly summarize the progress made so far and clarify the direction for the future.

Overview of Progress

Before the project code was officially released, we announced the upcoming open-source initiative in the community groups closely related to OpenBuild. Within a short time, more than a dozen people reached out to express their interest in contributing, and we quickly formed a dedicated interest group to facilitate communication.

Encouraged by the community's enthusiasm, we officially opened the project code just two days later! We also published an official announcement, which attracted even more contributors. Now, our interest group has nearly 50 members!

Among them, 12 people (excluding myself) have made actual contributions, accounting for about 25% of the group. They are:

GitHub Username	Number of Effective PRs	Number of Effective Issues
`Yolo-00`	7	0
`wiirhan`	6	4
`huzhengen`	5	0
`NeilYeTAT`	4	2
`missop`	3	1
`xiaoyaoke-v`	3	0
`Coooder-Crypto`	3	0
`Debbl`	3	0
`smallfu6`	2	0
`codersjj`	1	1
`UstinianMobius`	1	0
`MartinYeung5`	1	0

To express our gratitude to those who participated in the project's early stages and to encourage their continued contributions, OpenBuild gifted each of them a special year-end package:

Positioning and Architecture

Some contributors have expressed that the tasks are too simple and they are eager to take on more challenging work. Others would like to delve deeper into the project but are currently lacking systematic documentation.

This section aims to provide some guidance:

Organizational Operations

Although the OpenBuild official website frontend project was initially developed by the OpenBuild core team, with the release of the source code, the project has transitioned from being core-team-led to community-driven development.

This means that the OpenBuild core team will gradually step back to play the role of project coordinator and community order maintainer, while the community will organically manage the rest of the affairs:

Developers can provide feedback on any ideas or issues they encounter while using the OpenBuild website in a dedicated section of the forum (coming soon);
The core project building group (in collaboration with the OpenBuild core team) will assess the feasibility and break down feasible parts into atomic executable tasks for contributors to claim.

In this way, we can truly achieve "builders for builders" and "community for community"!

The stakeholders involved in the project's development process are illustrated in the following diagram:

Application Architecture

Unlike most open-source projects, the OpenBuild official website frontend project is part of a business application, which naturally creates two distinct paths for code contribution:

Product and Business: Focusing on user experience (UI & UX) enhancements, business functionality implementation, and application loading and rendering performance;
Technology and Engineering: Emphasizing developer experience (DX) improvements, software quality, and automation and intelligence in development.

In terms of positioning, the governance of the official website frontend project is based on the "Anti-chaos" system. This means that the project serves as an implementation case for the "Anti-chaos" system, and the code contribution forms will be:

Product and Business: Writing code entirely within the official website frontend project, which may often be descriptive fragments rather than traditional code;
Technology and Engineering: Writing adapter code within the official website frontend project, while the core code resides in the "Anti-chaos" system-related projects.

The overall architecture of the project will look like this:

The official website frontend project primarily relies on Petals and Handie from the "Anti-chaos" system, both of which are part of the OpenBuild ecosystem:

However, the current state of the project does not yet allow for the smooth integration of the "Anti-chaos" system. The architecture described above is the target state. Therefore, the focus moving forward will be to refactor the project based on the "Anti-chaos" philosophy.

Growth and Advancement

If you read the above content carefully, you might catch a glimpse of the structure of the "OpenBuild" organization:

It is clear that "ordinary contributors" can be promoted to "core contributors", that is, to join the core group of the respective project. Outstanding performers may even apply to become "OpenBuild Contributors" and enjoy a range of exclusive benefits.

Here is further clarification regarding the official website frontend project:

Contributor System

The official website is divided into user-side and management-side based on the different user groups. Ordinary contributors can only claim tasks on the user side, which mainly include:

User experience (UI & UX) optimization and bug-fixing tasks, suitable for newcomers just starting to participate;
Relatively simple business functionality and engineering optimization tasks, suitable for those who have become familiar with the project.

Core contributors in the core group, on the other hand, have a broader range of choices, including:

More important and complex user-side business functionalities;
Various levels of management-side business functionalities;
Refactoring the application based on the "Anti-chaos" system;
Participating in the iteration of the "Anti-chaos" system itself, which is highly innovative and challenging.

In addition, depending on the situation, some core group members may also take on decision-making and management responsibilities.

The basic requirement to become a core contributor is "Proof of Work" (PoW) — demonstrating oneself through the frequency and quality of contributions.

Incentive Mechanism

Participating in the project will undoubtedly benefit your career development and help you realize your self-worth.

In addition, contributors to the official website frontend project, especially core group members, can enjoy:

Claiming bounty tasks — tasks that meet specific conditions will come with rewards;
The qualification to apply to become an "OpenBuild Contributors".

Within the "OpenBuild Contributors", there are multiple levels with varying degrees of benefits.

The OpenBuild Official Website Front-end Codebase Is Open Now!

Ourai L. — Wed, 01 Jan 2025 18:50:25 +0000

Since the end of August this year, when I deeply participated in contributing to OpenBuild, my first goal was to open source the front-end codebase of the OpenBuild official website - which is very much in line with OpenBuild's nature and development trajectory.

When I first took over this project, after reading through the code, I felt it was in a messy state. To achieve the goal, two key points had to be addressed:

Adjust the file organization and reference methods, and increase constraints to ensure maintainability during multi-person collaboration.
Write various collaboration-oriented documents and supplement other materials necessary for open source.

Using my trip to Thailand for Devcon as a time division point, I focused on the above two aspects before and after the time point.

Even though I haven't achieved perfection, even at 80%, I believe this does not hinder me from excitedly announcing here now:

The front-end codebase of the OpenBuild official website is open source now!

Introduction

On the OpenBuild official website, developers can:

Learn Web3 technology and professional knowledge for free;
Participate in hackathons, meetups, and other offline events;
Claim bounties;
Build personal domain influence;
...

Although it is called the OpenBuild Official Website, don't be intimidated by the word Official Website, because it is a web application, not a static website.

Moreover, it is not a traditional web application, as some functions interact with smart contracts, making it a decentralized application, a.k.a. dApp.

As the official website of a Web3 developer community, the technology stack used in the codebase is naturally the conventional set based on React, Tailwind CSS, and Next.js in the field.

Experienced people will know that if such projects do not have good governance methods, the code can easily fall into a state of chaos.

After my involvement, using the Anti-chaos theory and practice system formed by years of accumulated experience and thought, I have reduced the entropy significantly:

Mainly by adjusting the file organization and reference methods and adding constraints, the architecture hierarchy shown in the above figure is presented.

Why Open Source?

As mentioned at the beginning, open sourcing the OpenBuild official website's front-end codebase is in line with OpenBuild's nature and development trajectory, because OpenBuild is an open source community:

An open-source community bridging Web2 to Web3, connecting builders and businesses, and empowering them to succeed!

——OpenBuild Eco Introduction

As an open source community, it is natural to open source its own codebase, and on top of that, to carry out the open source spirit, helping participants to improve or benefit in (including but not limited to) the following aspects:

People with little front-end development experience can understand what modern front-end development is like.
People with some front-end engineering experience can understand how to manage and maintain complex front-end applications.
Provide domestic front-end developers with the opportunity to practice with foreign mainstream technology stacks.
Familiarize and adapt to remote asynchronous collaboration based on GitHub.
Experience how open source projects operate.
Create your own WhateverBuild.

Of course, open sourcing is also beneficial to OpenBuild itself, such as: allowing developers to participate in co-construction, which can truly meet the needs of developers and the community, so that developers can like to use it, love to use it more and more, and the OpenBuild official website can be said to be a product facing developers.

In fact, OpenBuild has long wanted to open source the codebase, but the early development team wanted to wait for a complete product to open source.

However, after the product came out, it was found that many unreasonable architectural designs and chaotic code were forced to emerge under many urgent needs (OpenBuild is developing rapidly), and even if it was open sourced, everyone would not be able to participate.

So, recently, a lot of time has been spent optimizing the architecture and code, while improving contribution documents and processes, which led to the delay.

In addition, I guess there is another reason - waiting for a good person to appear (please allow me to boast a little 😆).

How to Participate in Co-construction?

If you are interested in participating in co-construction, it is what OpenBuild welcomes!

In theory, there are no hard requirements for those who participate in co-construction, but in order to collaborate as efficiently as possible, it is best to have some related knowledge and skills that you have already learned and mastered in advance.

After reading "How to Participate in Project Co-construction", follow the general steps below to co-construction:

Read the project-related documents.
Go to the specific GitHub Projects to pick up tasks that suit you.
Fork the specified branch in the project repository.
Develop task code locally.
Initiate a PR and mark the task as completed.

In addition to contributing code by doing tasks, you can also co-construct by submitting issues for problems, defects, or suggestions for improvement.

In the future, OpenBuild will issue corresponding achievements and benefits based on some indicators of project co-constructors.

Conclusion

Whether for myself or for OpenBuild, open sourcing is an ideal, a passion, a mission!

Because of this, we exude the same smell, meet each other, and move forward together!