This post covers the following:
- Motives for creating the portal
- Goals to be achieved with the portal
- Content categories published on the portal
- Collaboration and contribution scenarios for the community
Motives#
Historically, the community around Espressif’s ESP8266 and ESP32 chips played the key role in making Espressif well-known and respected worldwide. Independent enthusiasts popularized our products through the word of mouth, countless projects, and articles on embedded technology blogs.
Owing to these independent enthusiasts, lots of learning materials have been generated and published online. Such materials have been offering a helping hand to those making the first steps with our products and to seasoned developers alike. This, in turn, allowed us to dedicate more resources to developing new products and let the community spread the word.
One long-term drawback of such arrangement is that not up-to-date or otherwise inadequate information about Espressif’s hardware and software products, their features, or usage is bound to slip into the community articles. This happens due to lack of direct access to the engineers who create the products. Conversely, trying to spot such faulty details and fix them is a never-ending uphill battle.
In addition, as our hardware products, such as chips, modules, and development boards, grow in variety and acquire new features, so does the software ecosystem around them. Apart from the well-known in the community Espressif AIoT Development Framework (ESP-IDF), lots of other frameworks, components, and libraries are being developed.
With such richness and variety of products, it takes a great deal of effort to keep everyone updated even within Espressif itself, let alone the community. Unfortunately, in today’s world where software and even hardware design is permeated with the agile approach, circulation of outdated or inadequate information is a big and solid part of reality, and, for better or worse, it is impossible to version the collective knowledge in a git repository.
In an effort to disseminate the most up-to-date information about all Espressif products, we have been increasingly dedicated not only to improving documentation but also to publishing articles in the ESP journal on Medium, creating videos (YouTube, BiliBili), answering questions on the ESP32 forum. We even established our own annual conference – DevCon.
Nevertheless, all these sources of information may sometimes appear siloed, like an orchestra without a conductor. To further improve the quality of information, keep it up to date, and further enrich content, we decided to launch our own developer portal. The Espressif Developer Portal is conceived as a conductor that will unify all sources of information from within Espressif into a cohesive and harmonious orchestra.
Also, the portal should become the forum in its true sense – the public meeting place for open discussions between our engineers and community. This is where the community will share ideas, concerns, feedback, and offer solutions. The ripples from these activities will at least improve documentation and the user experience and at most will have potential influence on our upcoming products.
Goals#
The main goals for the Espressif Developer Portal are as follows:
- Reduce the distance between Espressif engineers and the community and let the community drive the developer portal
- Create an up-to-date knowledge base about Espressif products verified and endorsed by the engineers
- Facilitate discussions to further improve Espressif products and their user experience
- Map out and unify all Espressif content and resources scattered around multiple places
- Simplify the process of contributing content for both Espressif engineers and community members to share knowledge and exert influence on the community
- Identify and fill in the gaps in documentation and learning materials
- Proactively create content covering problematic areas to reduce the number of questions and GitHub issues
- Build awareness of lesser known Espressif products and solutions
Content categories#
As it is seen now, the main content categories on the portal will be:
- Awesome: Links to relevant content or resources related to a particular product.
- News: Announcements about upcoming products, their releases, reviews, demos, project sharing, etc.
- Tutorials: Hands-on content, such as step-by-step guides, how-to, etc. for using popular products and their features.
- Articles: Overviews of products, in-depth explanations of features and concepts, etc., overview of notable applications based on Espressif products.
- Workshops: Content to be used for training purposes, event workshops, online webinar, etc.
- Events: Announcements about upcoming internal and external related events.
These categories are preliminary and may change over time according to the community preferences.
Collaboration and contribution#
You, dear members of the community, are very welcome to collaborate on the portal and contribute in any way. Some of the possible scenarios are:
- Contribute original content
- Request articles and initiate discussions
- Leave comments about existing content
- Improve infrastructure and functionality
For details, see the Contribution Guide.
Conclusion#
In summary, the Espressif Developer Portal is here to create a verified knowledge base about Espressif products and solutions, unify all Espressif resources, and bring Espressif engineers and the community closer.
With that said, let’s team up, roll up the sleeves, and start working side by side to make the experience of using our products and solutions as efficient and frictionless as possible.
Ideally, we expect the community to take the front seats and navigate the development of the portal! No matter how the roles and responsibilities will be divided in the end, this is going to be an exciting journey!