Building a STEEM app – starting my journey

Hello Steemit Friends!

This post will serve a double purpose. It’s a personal journey of me starting to develop for the STEEM blockchain and a guide for people who want to start developing too.

I’m not new to programming and web development but I’m new to the blockchain technology. I wanted to use the latest tools and the best practices to build my first app, dpixify.com

The first stop that I could think of to find some help was to go the official STEEM developer portal at https://developers.steem.io/. It’s a good reference for the STEEM API but it doesn’t give a full picture of what you need to get started with developing for the STEEM blockchain.

The next place I thought of was the discord chat for developers at https://discord.gg/SXEbVme . This server is useful to ask for help or to find some tutorials, but I still didn’t see anything that was in the form of steps you need to take to get started. After a lot of scrolling around in different rooms I found a nice tutorial in the “tutorial-submissions” room by Hive account@shreyasgune. You can read it here.

That tutorial was the first step to getting closer to what I should be doing. I was able to follow it very easily. I set up my own instance of the busy.org app on Heroku and got it to work.
You can see what that looks like at https://leap-busy.herokuapp.com/ . So, I’ll be using Heroku to host the preview of the dpixify app.

After looking at the set up for busy and other STEEM based open source apps, I concluded that I need to learn to work with https://nodejs.org and https://www.npmjs.com . I haven’t worked with these technologies before, so I didn’t know the best way to learn and develop with them. I didn’t see any direction to find help for these in the “official” channels of steemit.

Hive account@cryptoctopus to the rescue! This is when I came across a post by him that helped me get the direction that I was looking for. I found this post first. Then, I found the first 2 entrees to his coding diary, which I recommend you read also.
Based on the information from the above articles I signed up for the web developer udemy course to learn how to work with Node. The course has a free invite to the cloud9 IDE, which is the best option for Node js development.
I am going through the course now to get everything set up for the dpixify app.