Steem Devs: What do we need to add to the "Steem Developer Portal" in order to make it more useful for community developers?

in #steemdev6 years ago

A few days ago I was exploring on the Steem Developer Portal to try and find out how to implement a few light-weight applications. I found a lot of useful info there, but it seemed like a lot of things were missing.

For example:

  • What exactly do the functions do?
  • What format/type are the input parameters?
  • (Lots more)

It got me thinking..

I see a lot of people asking questions in the steemit.chat #dev channel. Shouldn't we be able to just direct them to the Steem Developer Portal? It would be great if any developer who is interested in creating applications for the Steem blockchain had a place to turn to get all their basic questions answered.

I'd like to start a discussion with the community developers:

What do we need to add to the Steem Developer Portal in order to make it more useful for community developers?

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My personal list:

  • What exactly do the functions do?
  • Example usage of every function with use case.
  • What format/type are the input parameters?
  • Is it cached by jussi?
  • Rough time complexity for the rpc node to process it?
  • What do we get back?
  • What errors to expect and how to handle them?
  • When to retry and when to fail?
  • How do prices works? STEEM ⇔ SBD ⇔ USD what is what in the market objects?
  • How to get accurate voting power?
  • How to calculate how much an upvote is worth?
  • What are transactions, what are blocks, what are operations, what are virtual ops?
  • What extra data is in every block and how to use it?
  • How to ensure you do not double send a transaction?
  • How to ensure you really send a transaction?
  • Probably a lot more, but these are a good start in my opinion.

I think it would be easier to list, what the api documentation contains:)

Documentation is sure lacking !

Imo we need to have something like my collection of snippets : steemsnippets but expanded to basically everything so there are lots of examples that people can use.

For instance it's not really intuitive that "comment" can be used to post AND comment.

Next is obviously a complete documentation :

  • Function use
  • Input parameters
  • Output
    It's insane that you still have to rely on trial and error for most of the things out here.

Then I think we need a long documentation that explains how steem actually work, so people can freely experiment with it and try to create new libraries for their favorite language which will expand greatly steem's portability.

I'd love to see @almost-digital 's testnet on it as well : https://testnet.steem.vc/ When you start to code things and need to break stuff it's so important to have a nice testnet.

I talked in more details about some of the problems and what I'd like to see solved for the dev community here

Thanks..
A working test net.. That would have saved me from a lot of public mistakes,now forever encoded in the blockchain:)

Hey Tim, good question :). IMO what we need is to document Steemd API in detail. For every single method and operation we are missing:

  • A description of what the op/method is doing.
  • The list of available parameters and sub parameters with expected format. Now most of the documentations don’t talk about the expect format for the parameters and the available sub-parameters, this is something devs need to figure out.
  • An example of the method / operation with default arguments, ideally with a pastebin link to be able to test the code with one click.

I know most of these operations and methods i could help if you want to start this process.
Some ressource that may help:
List of operations and methods https://v2.steemconnect.com/docs/steemjs
Some operations description taken from steem codebase https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign

Awesome, thanks for the input! I’ll make this one of my top priorities. I’ll let you know if I have any questions - appreciate the help!

Thank you for the initiative timcliff. I isited that site but it just didn't give me the answer immediately .

The question I wanfed answered was - how do I get my list of posts in descending order (from latest to oldest). The closest I got near was the API getDiscussionsByBlog() however I think there was something I wasn't able to get (filter by tags? I can't remember now) which made me resort to a other API.

So, for me, yes I agree it wpuld be very helpful if there was documentation on what parameters did an API accept particularly the query parameter.

And another are examples - code snippets I can use in my codes. I think it was 2 months ago I last checked and I haven't returned to the site after.

A complete series of video tutorials explaining how to use the functions in order to make a simple steem application.

This! Even if it would be something incredibly simple, would be a big help.

very good idea, I hope you achieve it, I support you.

I would love to see more documentation on steem-python. I am still struggling on how to import the last transactions in my wallet e.g. and have not been able to figure out how it works. Its probably easy - if you know which command to use. Also, more examples would be great because I tend to learn the most by examples somebody explains to me. Thank you in any case for your work!

steem-python has an .. OK.. documentation here:
http://steem.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
I guess, youdid read it already.
And most of it is hidden in the source itself.
Follow the functions there, play with them.
Not sure, if there exists a discord help group for it;)

Thank you for your answer. I have worked myself though this as good as I can, but I am still lacking some stuff. To read the code itself is too difficult for me I must admit ,-)

There is a lack of concrete examples in the documentation. Fortunately, developers like @fabien for example have provided excellent support on github by answering a lot of questions like here for example --> https://github.com/steemit/steem-js/issues/151.

Bringing all this information together in one place would be a great thing :-) .

I would like to see some programming examples in the dev portal using javascript, python and other supporting languages.

If would be nice to see sample apps for iOS and Android to expedite the mobile development.

Provide a how to step-by-step procedures.

I feel like just atleast seeing more code examples will help clarify a lot of things

I’d love to see some more sample projects. The one built at the top of the dev portal is great, but it would be cool to see a sample node project, etc. Also, I definitely agree about more info on all of the functions!

Adding more code examples and samples is definitely the way to go i think. the more ways people are able to see code used in different ways the quicker and easier it is to learn and find uses for in my opinion

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