Subalfred

• Team Name: hack-ink
• Payment Address: 0xccd79b2b77e71292924e85de130bfb1c03d94522 (Ethereum)
• Level: 2

Project Overview 📄

Overview

subalfred's goal is to become an all-in-one Substrate development toolbox.

It provides a bunch of tools to make the developers feel more comfortable while playing with Substrate.

Project Details

Check the Subalfred Book.

Ecosystem Fit

• Where and how does your project fit into the ecosystem?
  • A CLI tool is written in Rust that Substrate developers can use anywhere.
• Who is your target audience (parachain/dapp/wallet/UI developers, designers, your own user base, some dapp's userbase, yourself)?
  • I encourage all the Substrate developers to try this tool. I believe there must be at least one feature that benefits them.
• What need(s) does your project meet?
  • Improve the experience for Substrate developers.
  • Speed up the debug/development process.
• Are there any other projects similar to yours in the Substrate / Polkadot / Kusama ecosystem?
  • Some features are unique and some features are similar to the other projects.
  • If so, how is your project different?
    • subalfred key vs Subscan format transform tool
      • Can be use offline.
      • Use official ss58-registry as dependency directly.
      • Detect the key type automatically.
      • Accept ParaId(u32) as input.
      • Accept PalletId([u8; 8]) as input.
    • subalfred state export vs fork-off-substrate
      • Use Rust instead of JS. No variable size limitation, easily export large chain state.
      • Use WS/Rust/Async. Faster, max speed up to 20k pairs per second.
    • subalfred rpc vs curl
      • More concise syntax.
  • If not, are there similar projects in related ecosystems?
    • No.

Team 👥

Team members

• Xavier Lau

Contact

• Contact Name: Xavier Lau
• Contact Email: xavier@inv.cafe
• Website: https://linktr.ee/aurevoirxavier

Legal Structure

Personal. (no legal structure entry)

Team's experience

Xavier Lau

• Six years of experience in Rust.
• Three years of experience in Substrate.
• Darwinia Network core developer, since 2019.
• Actively at Substrate StackExchange.

Team Code Repos

• https://github.com/hack-ink
• https://github.com/hack-ink/array-bytes
• https://github.com/hack-ink/cloudflare-bypasser
• https://github.com/hack-ink/codewars
• https://github.com/hack-ink/unescaper

Please also provide the GitHub accounts of all team members. If they contain no activity, references to projects hosted elsewhere or live are also fine.

• https://github.com/AurevoirXavier

Team LinkedIn Profiles (if available)

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/xavier-lau-b0655310a

Development Status 📖

GitHub, Subalfred Book

There are three parts:

• CLI components.
• Core libraries.
• Substrate minimal libraries, some Substrate libraries's re-implementations reduce the unnecessary dependencies as much as possible.

Overview

• Total Estimated Duration: 8 weeks
• Full-Time Equivalent (FTE): 1 FTE
• Total Costs: 30,000 USD in Ethereum USDC

Milestone 1 — Polish the existing features and add more new features

• Estimated duration: 5 weeks
• FTE: 1
• Costs: 24,000 USD

Number	Deliverable	Specification
0a.	License	GPLv3
0b.	Documentation	I'll document every pub function and a basic tutorial that explains how a user interact with Subalfred.
0c.	Testing guide	Core functions will be fully covered by unit tests to ensure functionality and robustness. Simply run cargo test under the project root.
1.	Core: check features	I'll finish the this features, which is use for checking Substrate runtime runtime-benchmarks/std/try-runtime features enable status.
2.	Core: use paritytech/ss58-registry	I'll make PR to paritytech/ss58-registry to support my custom logic, and setup the dependabot to update ss58-registry automatically.
3.	Core, CLI: override runtime code	I'll make it able to override the runtime code while fork-off the chain state.
3.	Core, CLI: rpc	I'll finish the this features, user could use this command to send the RPC call to the Substrate node.
4.	CLI: JSON output	I'll make key command provides JSON output.
5.	CLI: stable Rust toolchain	I'll rewrite the subcommand parts in procedure macro to remove the unstable Rust features usage.
6.	CLI: --at accept block number	I'll make the --at arg accept block number input, instead of a block hash only. Any command with --at arg will be updated.
7.	Releases	Linux, macOS, Windows prebuilt binaries, and crates.io release.

Milestone 2 — Add more new features

• Estimated Duration: 2 week
• FTE: 1
• Costs: 4000 USD

Number	Deliverable	Specification
0a.	License	GPLv3
0b.	Documentation	I'll document every pub function and a basic tutorial that explains how a user interact with Subalfred.
0c.	Testing guide	Core functions will be fully covered by unit tests to ensure functionality and robustness. Simply run cargo test under the project root.
1.	License	GPLv3.
2.	Core, CLI: track-updates	List the companions that you need to do from substrate/cumulus/frontier/parity-bridges-substrate.
3.	Core, CLI: update-subdeps	Update the substrate/cumulus/frontier/parity-bridges-substrate dependencies in one command.
4.	Releases	Release Linux, macOS, Windows prebuilt binaries on GitHub, and crates.io.

Milestone 3 — Provide checks' GitHub Actions

• Estimated Duration: 1 week
• FTE: 1
• Costs: 2000 USD

Number	Deliverable	Specification
0a.	License	GPLv3
0b.	Documentation	I'll provide the inline documentation.
0c.	Testing guide	I'll provide a GitHub Actions setup example and describe how to check the result.
1.	GitHub Actions: check runtime features	I'll provide a GitHub Actions, which could check the runtime features status while developing.
2.	GitHub Actions: check runtime storage	I'll provide a GitHub Actions, which could check the runtime storage changes while developing.
3.	GitHub Actions: check runtime version	I'll provide a GitHub Actions, which could check the runtime version changes while developing.
4.	Release	Release on GitHub.

Future Plans

• Keep connected with the community/parity to provide more useful tools.

Additional Information ➕

How did you hear about the Grants Program? Web3 Foundation Website / Medium / Twitter / Element / Announcement by another team / personal recommendation / etc. From my team, Darwinia Network.

As I said, subalfred's goal is to become an all-in-one Substrate development toolbox. I browsed Substrate's issues and was active on Substrate StackExchange, and discuss with other developers to know what do they need while developing on Substrate. Currently, I have already implemented some of them and plan to do more. So, I hope all these features can be a part of this grant.

According to your suggestions. I'll document every public functions, and write unit tests for them. There are around 30+ features. Please note this is a part of milestone 1.

I'd love to convert these milestone to issues on the repository. It will be much easier to track the status.

Amending

• Remove 0.d from milestone 1 and 2. Because I realize that it is much easier for you to test this with a simple cargo test command. So, I decide to use cargo instead of docker. Discussion