Technical articles

[zhyatt]

In order to facilitate the writing of technical articles for publication to Medium, as well as reference within the docs, the articles directory in the docs repository will be used. This allows use of issues and pull requests to make collaboration and maintenance of the content easier with the community.

General workflow

• Issues will be created for the desired technical articles and linked below for reference alongside the ideas list.
• Initial drafts will be submitted as Pull Requests into the docs repository, targeting the new articles directory
• After article review and approval in this repository, the article will be merged and automatically published at docs.nano.org/articles/[article name]
• The import function in Medium will be used to pull the content from this article URL into Medium - minor review and formatting adjustments will be needed there, see Formatting below for how best to avoid extra work on the Medium side
• After publishing to Medium, changes to the content should be submitted to the docs first and updates if needed to the published Medium article will be done manually

Content

Many of these articles will be complimentary to reference materials added to the Living Whitepaper setup and be presented in a more narrative fashion for easier consumption at varying levels of technical experience. Depending on the topic, the technical level of the target audience should be identified to help shape the content appropriately.

Formatting

Due to some limitations in the Medium importing function, the formatting of articles should be limited to standard headers and text wherever possible. Medium will pull in .png and .jpg images only, .svg is not supported. If diagrams are needed, see https://github.com/nanocurrency/nano-docs#diagrams for standards on creating and publishing within the docs repository (in proper .png format).

Articles

This will be used to maintain a running list of ideas for new articles and ones in progress. If anyone has interest in helping draft an article on the topic, let us know and we will convert the item into an issue. Initial effort should be taken to pull in links to existing resources on the topic and referenced in the issue. Ideas for expanding this list are also very welcome.

Protocol Messages

• confirm_req
• msg_publish
• message header and message header extensions
• bootstrap commands: bulk_pull, bulk_pull_account

Other networking and communications

• realtime vs bootstrap sockets
• telemetry info (and what is that blob we send at the end of a telemetry ack?)
• peer crawler
• peer container and peer management

Bootstrapping

• lazy vs legacy bootstrap

Ledger and block details

• frontiers
• epoch blocks and canary blocks
• detailed anatomy of a block (state, open, receive, send, change)
• new ledger walker
• diskhash

Other

• broad overview of what the protocol is, discussing connecting with peers, communicating via message standards (newcomers) #558
• minimal viable node (@mistakia has done something on this)