Unnoticed achievements of developers

Today, in our Friday #opinion column, we present a subjective post partly about the recent update to TON documentation, and partly about "technical" issues that usually remain "behind the scenes."

What exactly happened? TON has long had technical documentation on docs.ton.org, essential for TON developers. Currently, TON Studio is working on a major update to it, and a beta version has already been rolled out to beta-docs.ton.org: likely, once completed, it will be moved to the main address. The most noticeable difference is that you can now ask an AI chatbot questions about the documentation's content. But besides that, a lot of work has been done on the content itself.

Why is this important? We have already written that it's not easy for developers in TON, and this hinders the entire ecosystem. Here, efforts are being made to simplify their lives. "If you can't find the answer to your question among a bunch of pages, just ask the chatbot." Perhaps a developer who previously would have gotten stuck, abandoned TON, and gone to do something else, will now figure it out and implement their project. However, this won't happen tomorrow, and the TON price won't rise because of it tomorrow: the effect of such changes is delayed over time.

And here's an observation. If it weren't for the hype around AI, this significant work would have gone largely unnoticed. A positive event would have occurred in the ecosystem, but everyone would have just continued to complain about the falling price. In other cases, this is exactly what happens: something useful is done technically with TON, but most people in the ecosystem don't notice it.

Two things can be true at once. On the one hand, there's an injustice in the fact that developers' merits are only seen by other developers. There's plenty to complain about in TON, but at the same time, useful technical work is being done – and it's important to acknowledge this.

And on the other hand, this technical work is only part of what's necessary. Yes, it's important that the blockchain doesn't crash under load, and that coding on TON is convenient. But even the most technically perfect blockchain, capable of supporting billions of users, will be meaningless if there are no users.

Therefore, the conclusion is this: techies, thank you for the updated documentation and other useful work. But can TF now also attract people to TON so that all this work doesn't go to waste?

@thedailyton