There are four “stages” that Farcaster developers go through:

  1. Exploring
  2. Casting
  3. Syncing
  4. Making Apps

Level 1: Exploring

Most devs start out here, curious about Farcaster, and wanting to get their hands dirty building something simple. Usually involves writing some manual queries, fetching casts and getting a better mental model for how things work.

There are a few pain points that they run into:

  1. Searching Google for “Farcaster API” or similar terms yields no immediately useful results.
  2. If they try using hub-nodejs with the examples, they can’t get the URL for a mainnet hub.
  3. If they want to spin up a mainnet hub, there are no clear instructions in the repo on how to.
  4. Sometimes run into problems with the example not working
  5. No libraries for golang or python.

A few proposed solutions:

  1. Fix the website to be actually helpful to developers (in progress)
  2. Make a mainnet URL public — do we need rate limits for client IP? other protections?
  3. Write tutorials and paragraph articles to show how to build apps.
  4. Make sure all the examples work really well, and fix them when we release a new version
  5. See if farcaster-py team is interested in working on python library