The State of Web3 Developer Joy 2024 Report

It's here! While you were admiring your amazing eclectic taste in music with your Spotify Wrapped, I was crunching data on how well 55 Web3 projects are delivering Developer Joy.

Defining "Developer Joy" - The report is broken down into 4 sections:

Education - What type of education is being provided to developers? What kind of traction is that content seeing?

Tooling - Are Web3 projects offerings samples built with modern developer tools? What tooling, frameworks and, languages are popular?

Community - Where and how are teams engaging the developer community?

Enablement - How are teams enabling developers to build on their projects through activities like hackathons and grants?

While I know there is a very popular 180-page "Developer Activity Report" out there, the thesis of this report is to see how the areas above influence developer activity.

Disclaimer: Currently this only looks at Ethereum aligned projects. This is my own bias but there is an effort to include other ecosystems in the future.

I received no funding from any of the projects included. This was a "labor of love" and a desire to see this community grow. If you found any of the data useful, please consider collecting this post.

Just for fun, I looked at how each project describes its project and the technology:

Methodology: Going to each project's site and whatever was the first term that appeared in the copy.

DappaDan's Take: I was actually surprised to see "onchain" much lower. All though I called this the "Web3" report, its probably my personal preference to describe our industry and moves away from any negative stigma of Web3.

This category covers how each projects are delivering education via their documentation, YouTube and courses.

I looked at 13 Web2/AI companies docs of medium to small-sized teams to compare. These docs sites have an average of 13 guides on their documentation.

Methodology: Guides are defined as pages in the documentation labeled as "Guides", "Getting Started", "Tutorials" or any page that was enables developers to perform some action to build an application such as "How to send a private transaction".

DappaDan's Take: There is a large gap between beginner guides and what it takes to actually build an app using Web3 tools. Web2 projects are normally driven by customer demand to add more diverse guides. More Web3 projects should lean on hackathon projects to drive new ideas for guides (and not just copying and pasting the repo link).

Description: Can Developers propose or make changes to the documentation?

Methodology: Verified that there was a GH repo where PRs could be made. Excluded if docs only had "thumbs up, thumbs down" type rankings.

DappaDan's Take: I'm not mad it's an even split. From experience, there are only a few teams that handle open source docs really well. In most situations, they are not being managed or there really isn't much community participation/incentives to contribute.

Description: Do developers have the ability to "Chat with the Docs" using LLMs/RAG or do they only offer a standard search.

Methodology: Visiting docs sites and seeing what is available.

DappaDan's Take: Use AI or get left behind. If your docs system doesn't support it, it's probably time to make a change.

Description: Does the project offer a standalone course that is outside of the documentation guides or tutorials?

Methdology: Searching through the project's websites for mentions of a course either internally or externally hosted.

DappaDan's Take: Courses are a great way to onboard new developers to Web3 and your project in one go. I have seen a lot of teams use external services like Encode and DeveloperDAO to do this. I'm not a betting Dan but if I were, I bet we will see more of this in 2025.

Description: The number of subscribers to the project's YouTube Channel

Methodology: Verifying sub count on YouTube

DappaDan's Take - If you have learned software development in the last 12 years, you probably used YT to learn something. Nice to some teams leveraging YT really well but having 14 with less 1,000 subs needs to improve.

Description: How often are projects posting videos to Youtube?

Methodology: Seeing the last developer/technical video that was posted by the project. This excludes videos less than 2 mins long that were marketing related.

DappaDan's Take - Lots of teams post around events (pre or post) and then drop off. Creating a regular content schedule with original content vs recording of workshops would probably boost a lot of channel's growth.

Description: How many views did the project's most popular developer video get?

Methodology: Sort by popular, exclude any videos that were just 1-2 min marketing videos vs for developer education purposes.

DappaDan's Take - The sweet spot seems to be in that less than 10k range. I feel that is aligned well with the amount of active developer audience for Web3 is on Youtube. Would be interesting to see how this changes in the new year.

Description: What Web3 tools, libraries, or services are used in the code samples in the project's documentation?

Methodology: Reviewed code samples and looked at imports and headers to determine the tools.

DappaDan's Take - Was honestly surprised how popular Hardhat and Ethers still are. Although they are some of the OGs, I feel most developer I interact with have moved on to other tools/libraries. Another interesting thing, while the majority of projects offered multiple tools - if they had ethers examples, they were more likely only to use ethers.

Description: What Javascript Frameworks or Libraries are used in the code sameples?

Methodology: Reviewed codes samples, looked at imports and headers to determine the tools .

DappaDan's Take - My two biggest disappointments is that react-native is so low and create-react-app is so high. Many people advocate that the PMF of crypto is mobile but yet there are very little react-native examples. create-react-app has been deprecated for a almost 2 years now so it doesn't show well that these examples are being updated or using modern tools.

Description: What languages are also supported or have code samples for in the project's documentation?

Methodology: Reviewed code samples and looked at code and headers to determine the languages. Excluded Solidity and any Web3-specific DSLs.

DappaDan's Take - The world is not just JavaScript. If we want to onboard more devs, creating code samples in their language of choice is a great way of doing so.

Description: Community is defined in many different ways but on most project's sites it's Discord and Telegram are listed as where the community is.

Methodology: Look at public data/invites for Telegram and Discord groups.

DappaDan's Take - Please purge your Discord's of the bots. The only thing it is helping is your ego but it's hurting developers who are actually looking for support more. I have seen many teams now launch private Discords/Telegram groups to get closer to real developers. This ultimately hurts the community because you need to be in the "Cool Kids Club" to get some support.

Description: How much in Hackathon Bounties were offered by these 55 projects in 2024.

Methodology: Pulled data from ETH Global and other hackathon platforms with the marketed amount in hackathon bounties for each project.

DappaDan's Take - Hackathon's get a lot of hate. Looking at these numbers means on average projects paid $65,000/yr in hackathon bounties. The average salary of a software tester in the US is $92,000/yr. If you think hackathons are all about battle testing your project, that's $30k in outsourced savings! (Let me live in this positive world)

Description: How many projects do developers continue to work on?

Methodology: Looking at the original project's source code that was submitted through the ETH Global showcase portal.

DappaDan's Take - I wanted to get a general snapshot to determine if the meme "nobody works on their projects" was true so I picked ETH Global Finalists as a cohort. I have received lots a feedback on this point in terms of 1) Maybe they renamed the project. 2) But what about other bounties/hacks? 3) I know for a fact the projects built on my thing are always building!

That's fine. Honestly, these numbers were better than expected and I think we should just find more ways to improve it.

Description: Does the project offer some sort of funding to teams in terms of grants, builder programs or startup investments?

Methodology: Looking at the project's site for any mention of a grant type program.

DappaDan's Take - Its great to see so many grants being offered. One area of opportunity would be to be more transparent about these programs. Many projects did not offer any clear explanation on the amount of funding, milestones and length of funding.

I will be the first to admit this report isn't perfect. But hopefully, it gets the conversation going on how we can increase Developer Joy as an industry and gives you a few data points to talk about within your teams.

If you made it this far and found ANY of this data useful, it would mean a lot to me if you collected this post:

This is a list of the Protocols Included in this report. They were selected first through an open call I made on my Twitter profile and secondly, from activity in the industry or by request while at Devcon.