While Part 1 was entirely focused on singular Clarity smart contracts, Part 2 is asking for Clarity
tooling submissions.
Exploring any new blockchain platform can be challenging, which is why tooling is integral for onboarding builders and streamlining development.
Good news: There are all sorts of different tools! It's a broad term that loosely translates to: "Make developers and users lives easier". Some examples that might help:
Linters are tools that analyze source code to flag programming errors, bugs, stylistic errors, and suspicious constructs. They can also color-code different categories of text to help differentiate functionality, or even autocomplete common statements and commands.
Visual/interactive editors greatly simplify the development process, and reduce complexity for beginner programmers. "No-code" platforms, allowing you to simply drag-and-drop various elements into the code, have exploded recently and expand the audience of people with the potential to build applications.
Tooling can also be as simple as a
comprehensive documentation page or substantial tutorial. An all-encompassing guide, with screenshots, code snippets or a video demo, can be just as helpful to the community as a piece of software or plugin.
The field is wide open! An IDE extension for language support? Code-coverage validator? A basic boilerplate project generator? If it solves a problem or alleviates a pain-point, it's probably a tool!
Use your imagination and if you have any doubt something you're thinking of is a good fit, ping
us in Discord.
For a fantastic example, check out
this tool developed recently by one of our rockstar community members. The "Stackulator" is a simple web app that allows users to calculate the potential amount of bitcoin someone could earn by locking up $STX tokens on the Stacks 2.0 Mainnet. It has a beautifully simple UI, "Simple" & "Advanced" modes for all levels of technical ability, and is focused on educating the ecosystem on the mechanism of "Stacking".