I was reviewing proposals listed under the SPS system today and noted that inertia's latest proposal to continue documenting the Steem API and best practices for working with this API isn't voted in (yet at least), so I wanted to briefly the reasons why I think this should be a "no brainer" proposal that you, the reader, should vote for, if you want to see the Steem ecosystem grow.
Documentation of the API is critical to support software development centered around the Steem blockchain. If such documentation doesn't exist, each individual development group has to reverse engineer the functionality, effectively duplicating effort. And as new developers won't be as familiar with Steem, it will take them much longer to do.
In addition, there is a higher probability that new developers without access to this documentation will use less efficient API calls, which can lead to slower web sites that detract from the user's experience on their sites. And without proper examples, they may not employ the best security practices on their sites, increasing the chances for things like leakage of private key data.
The price being asked for the work is very reasonable, IMO. As of this moment, 1 SBD is approximate 0.66 USD. So he's asking just under $86/day to work for 30% * 8 hours = 2.4 hours per day (calculations based on his proposed workload per day). That comes to $35.80 per hour. As someone who hires software contractors, I can promise you that is a fantastic price for this type of work. It's actually hard to find programmers who are willing to write documentation, because it's one of the least enjoyable parts of programing for most programmers (e.g if you're like most people, think about what it was like when you had to write a book report for English class).
This is a continuation of a prior documentation proposal, and I felt he did a good job in that prior proposal and even gave nice progress reports along the way.
The other alternative, of course, is to wait for either Steemit to do it (probably going to be waiting a long time, because they already have their own plans and internally they "know" the APIs already) or hope for someone altruistic to do it for free. But as I mentioned already, this is the least fun work for programmers, so its not a favored target for a free contribution.
All rewards from this post have inertia as a beneficiary (assuming I did this right, it's my first time playing with this setting)...