There are four “stages” that Farcaster developers go through:
- Exploring
- Casting
- Syncing
- 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:
- Searching Google for “Farcaster API” or similar terms yields no immediately useful results.
- If they try using
hub-nodejs
with the examples, they can’t get the URL for a mainnet hub.
- If they want to spin up a mainnet hub, there are no clear instructions in the repo on how to.
- Sometimes run into problems with the example not working
- No libraries for golang or python.
A few proposed solutions:
Fix the website to be actually helpful to developers (in progress)
Make a mainnet URL public — do we need rate limits for client IP? other protections?
- Write tutorials and paragraph articles to show how to build apps.
Make sure all the examples work really well, and fix them when we release a new version
- See if farcaster-py team is interested in working on python library