About

Race of Sloths — gamified open-source contributions.

Race of Sloths story is rooted in the back of the minds of the people behind it since the first days of playing with open-source software back in 2000s.

Let's cut it to the race (pun intended) and say that we started actively working on it on April 19th, 2024 as part of NEAR DevHub initiative to bring more developers to the NEAR ecosystem. Vlad Frolov proposed the initial design of a gamified open-source contributions project which did not have a proper name at that time but had a very clear goal, how the success could look like, why it should work, and why it could fail.

Get Set, Go!

Long story short, on April 25th, we already had a great team of 7 superhumans working on Race of Sloths naming, visual design, implementation, and a ton of other tiny details! Fast-forward to July 8th, we are live in production!

As it is already mentioned in the beginning, you can see that it takes time (20+ years we may say), but once we get there, we win the race! How about calling it the Race of Sloths? Do you hear a funny irony towards the open-source world? Well, that was the idea behind the naming.

@race-of-sloths is a friendly GitHub bot that you, as a contributor, can mention in pull requests on GitHub and start collecting Sloths Points immediately and keep your streaks continuous.

What is Next?

We'd like to keep it all friendly and fair, so we are starting small with only several dozen projects for which we had support from the maintainers. We'd like to expand the list with the open-source packages that helped us to develop NEAR, and then expand it further with the most influential open-source packages overall.

With the growing number of contributors and projects, we will introduce thematic quests for various ecosystems (NEAR, Rust, JS, Python, and more), so you can join the camps. The open-source is not about competition, at the end of the day it is about collaboration, so let's race together!

Yours, Race of Sloths Team

Artur-Yurii Korchynskyi
Andrew Saichuk
Sasha Pais
Volodymyr Chabak
Gleb Palienko
Alex Botezatu
Vlad Frolov