A Year in Docs

Guille · January 1, 2025 2024 was a great year for NEAR Docs! Let’s take a look at what we achieved together

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New Year, New Opportunities

There is something that we like to do every new year, and that is to take a look at how our docs changed through the past year. You see, NEAR is a live ecosystem, where new features are added constantly, products and projects emerge, and our docs need to reflect that. This means that we are always adding, removing, and updating content. By looking at the changes we made, we get to remember what we achieved - it is always nice to see all we built in a year - and it also helps us discover what we lost along the way! Join us while we take a look at the changes we made in 2024, and what we are planning for 2025.

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Consolidating Documentation

One of the main issues we tackled this year was consolidating our documentation. Users often complained that we had a lot of content spread across different sections, pages, and repositories, and we wanted to bring it all together in one place. At the beginning of 2024, we had different menus for Concepts, Smart Contracts, Web Applications, and Data Infrastructure. We decided to merge all these pages into a single Docs section, with a shared navigation bar, so you can always easily jump from one topic to another. Navigation before (left) and now (right), notice how many links were removed from both top and left navigation bars! To keep the sidebar clean, we added a What is... page for each major topic, which helps you to understand the basics and decide if that section is what you are looking for. For example, we now have the following pages:

• What is NEAR Protocol?
• What is Chain Abstraction?
• What is a Smart Contract?

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Code Explainer

During this year, we took a couple of weeks to build an in-house tool to simplify explaining code! The new Code Explainer allows us to easily explain long snippets of code, by highlighting the essential parts and adding text blocks to explain what is happening. Our new Smart Contract Anatomy section looks amazing and is much easier to understand now!

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2024: A Year of Growth

This year we have been busy adding new sections, pages, and tutorials to our documentation. Let’s briefly go through some of them.

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Primitives

One of the first things we added was a section about Primitives, which explains the basic building blocks of NEAR Protocol. In the new Primitives section, we show how to create and use NFTs, FTs, DAOs, Linkdrops, Oracles, and Decentralized Exchanges. Every page is full of snippets that explain how to leverage each primitive from any tool that you are using, be it the bash terminal, a web application, or from within a smart contract.

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Chain Abstraction

We also added a section about Chain Abstraction, which explains how NEAR accounts can be used to control accounts on other chains. Did you know you can control Ethereum and Bitcoin accounts from NEAR? We expect to make this section grow in 2025, as we plan to add more tutorials and examples on interacting with chains like Base, Solana, and Polygon.

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New Beginner’s Guide

In 2024 we also released a brand new Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering Near. This guide is perfect for beginners, as it explains everything from creating an account to deploying a smart contract, creating a web application for it, and even how to monitor the contract’s activity! It is our most complete guide yet! But stay tuned, as we are planning to add more tutorials and examples to it in 2025.

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NEAR API

We also released a new version of our API documentation, which now includes all API flavors - JavaScript, Rust, and Python. In this new version, we added a lot of examples on how to use the API in the most common scenarios, as well as linked all the code to a single GitHub repository, to make it easier for us to test it, and for you to copy and paste the code.

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Near Examples

An important part of our documentation is the examples it references. We have been working hard to make sure that all examples are up-to-date and working. For example, we have updated all our canonical examples (Hello Near, Counter, Donations, NFT, FT) to use the latest version of core libraries (near-api, near-sdk and wallet-selector)

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Looking Forward

We are excited to start 2025 with a lot of new ideas and projects in mind. We are planning to add new examples about how to build complex DeFi applications on NEAR, as well as adding community projects such as Pikespeak, FastNear, and NearBlocks More importantly, we expect 2025 to be the year of AI, focusing on building docs showing how easy is to use NEAR AI to build and deploy machine learning models on NEAR. By focusing on AI, we also expect to bring new ways to engage with our documentation, such as a chatbot that can help you find the right page! Of course, everything is being developed using open-source tools and libraries, so you can easily replicate what we are doing. We are excited to start this new year, and hope you are too! 🚀