Kodadot is an open source NFT marketplace built on the cutting edge of web3. There is a wide range of potential contributions to be made here - artists can display and/or sell their art, while developers and designers can contribute directly to the ever growing codebase.
Making your first contribution to the ecosystem can be quite daunting because there's so much available to do. Whatever your niche may be, the obvious first step is to join the lively community on telegram. The channel names are descriptive of the content inside, and where unsure you can ask in the General channel.
Artists have a dedicated telegram group (artists channel) to talk about art related topics like creating and displaying their best work.
As a developer, I naturally prefer to contribute code, so maybe I'll be a bit biased towards this kind of contributions.
The next step for developers is the organization's github.
Woooah that's a lot of repos. One step at a time. We got this.
The nft gallery seems lively, let's see what this one is all about as we learn how developers go about their day to day.
I have to admit, even just this one repo looks very intimidating. Luckily, there's some great documentation for developers. This is the place you will want to go as a dev to understand what kodadot is and the cutting edge stuff we're using over there.
Nft gallery is a Vue frontend that uses several internal and external libraries to provide an interface that looks like the main app. If you have more patience than me and haven't yet done it, clone the repo into your local machine following instructions from the readme. Dev server ready? Set up your polkadot wallet as you prepare to tackle issues in the repo, you get rewarded for doing that (chat about this later). Can you see the nfts on localhost? Now we can start cooking.
Issues
Let's see what's available to work on. Wait, 910 issues? Plenty to contribute, nice! Issues have labels. Naturally, there's issues with the good first issue label that aim to faimiliarize developers with the codebase. See what the various labels mean.
Wave at kodabot and you get assigned an issue
Issue assigned, no turning back now 💪.
Once your changes look good and make sense, push your local branch to the fork you made in your github account (you have no access rights to push to main, but vscode has the option to make a fork and push to it directly from your editor 🤯).
Finally!
Code review and merge
Awaiting a review can sometimes take a while, it's not a huge team. Feel free to pick another issue meanwhile.
As the PR author, you are the first reviewer of your own code.
Various automated steps are done on every commit in the PR.
Does your PR build correctly? Lint issues? False alarm (unrelated change)?
Several members of the internal dev team are available to review your work. They suggest useful fixes where applicable and they really help a developer level up. The most thorough reviewer is the QA.
Once he approves the changes, merging is done. Depending on the difficulty, size or label of the issue, a bounty is awarded in DOT to the wallet you had created earlier.
Grants and Bounties
You get paid to solve issues on Kodadot. Some issues have $, $$, $$$ labels indicating their respective potential payouts. This is great for attracting freelance contributors. There is another special grants repository for the biggest bounties, large features which would require a bit more time to pull off than regular issues. Looks well worth it in the end to complete one of these $-) .
Contributor habits liked at Koda
Contributing, of course. Kodadot is built by the community, for the community. The more active you are in various areas of the project, the better the platform. The more your rewards as well :) .
Great and fast communication. It saves reviewers time when requested changes are made faster.
Friendly people. Because who doesn't love a welcoming community?
Contributor habits not liked at Koda
Nothing works for everyone no matter how big or interesting the project is, and koda is no different. Here's a few things that lower your value as a contributor.
Too many unattended PRs.
The review team is very small and would like to dedicate time to issues that actually get closed.
Additionally, you need to show determination to complete the issue you selected. Get those features in the next release as fast as possible.Spamming in the community.
Don't fill every group with tons of messages after a short while. If you feel unattended to, you can tag someone or ask again later in the day. Someone will be sure to reach out to you. The most active groups are devs, artists and general - most things koda revolve around those and you'll get help faster.
Thoughts?
Kodadot is a chill community, with brilliant developers and a great sense of humour. If you like web3, art or working with cutting edge tech, this is definitely the place to be.
Visit Kodadot Frontier to catch up on the latest trends and improvements on Kodadot.
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