4-Month DotCodeSchool Stewardship & Improvements
Beneficiary:🔧 The Situation
Batman, the original creator of DotCodeSchool - the platform every PBA and PBA-X student goes through, is stepping back from active maintenance. While he may still contribute occasionally, he’s no longer in a position to maintain or drive the project forward.
DotCodeSchool has already proven its value:
- 500+ registered users (many more unregistered)
- Actively used during PBA/PBA-X
- Stable, functional platform ready for more growth
Without active stewardship, it risks stagnating, becoming harder for new devs to benefit from and harder for contributors to engage with.
🎯 My Proposal
I’m committing 4 months to actively maintain, improve, and prepare DotCodeSchool for long-term community sustainability.
My focus will be:
- Embed New Rust State Machine Video Tutorial (Month 1-2)
- I’ve already recorded “The Rust State Machine” by Shawn Tabrizi - an 80+ video hands-on tutorial (watch here).
- 5+ weekends of recording were my personal investment. A give back to the Polkadot ecosystem for supporting my PBA journey.
- Funding covers the integration work: embedding videos into DotCodeSchool, linking them with exercises and resources for a smooth learning experience.
- Codebase Refactor(Month 2-4)
- Restructure and clean the codebase to lower the barrier for contributors.
- Improve documentation, standardize testing/linting, and ensure contributor onboarding is straightforward.
- Ongoing Maintenance (All 4 Months)
- Keep dependencies up to date, fix bugs, ensure platform stability, and respond to community needs.
🌍 Discoverability & Access
DotCodeSchool is open to anyone.
However, feedback from the community shows that too few people know it exists.
The proposed work will lay the technical foundation for future discoverability efforts. Once the platform is refactored and video content is integrated, it will be in a stronger position to run targeted outreach campaigns. Potentially in collaboration with community members experienced in marketing
📊 Accountability & Transparency
I will publish a monthly progress report with:
- Task
- Duration
- Time
- Date
Since I’m new to the Treasury process, I’m open to suggestions from the community on where these reports should be hosted.
If there’s no preferred place, I’ll post them publicly on LinkedIn and X for transparency, and also share the links in the relevant Polkadot forum thread so they’re archived in one place.
💡 Why Fund This?
This is not a one-off feature drop. It’s 4 months of active stewardship, ensuring that:
- DotCodeSchool stays stable and up to date
- The codebase is ready for new contributors
- The platform gains valuable new learning content in the form of a high-quality, embedded video tutorial
Without this work, the risk is that DotCodeSchool will stagnate, making it harder for new devs to benefit from it or contribute.
💰 Requested Compensation
- Time Commitment: 20 hours/week
- Rate: $70/hour
- Duration: 4 months
- Total: $22,400
DotCodeSchool belongs to the community and this proposal is about keeping it alive, improving it, and setting it up for a sustainable future.
Comments (7)
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I would actually prefer to commit for a full year. But from the feedback I’ve seen the community clearly favors smaller sprints with well-defined deliverables. Since my name is not yet well-established in the ecosystem, I understand that members may hesitate to entrust me with a large, long-term commitment right away. That’s why I proposed a 4-month scope: it’s concrete, transparent, and gives the community the chance to evaluate my work based on visible results and metrics. If this proposal is successful and the community is satisfied with the outcomes, I’ll be in a much stronger position to extend the work with another proposal.
In the long run, my goal is not to hold onto DotCodeSchool forever but to hand over maintenance to someone else, while making sure it doesn’t fall into disrepair. It would be a pity to let it depreciate, especially since it’s both a valuable learning tool and the community has already invested around $153k into it.
I assume you mean distribution to students.
I’ll continue spreading the word through my socials (YouTube, etc.) and by creating more learning content. That said, I know this alone won’t be enough, we’ll need a proper strategy from someone experienced in marketing. I’ve already been in touch with Hope Clary (here), who’s open to supporting a campaign on that front. Still, I believe the immediate priority is to fix and refactor the codebase. Every student is also a potential future contributor, and we shouldn’t miss the chance to welcome them into a clean, well-structured project.
I'm a strong supporter of educational initiatives, but I’m wondering why fund something that has already been done, when what we really need are materials covering other aspects of Polkadot technology?