I decided to persue this almost immediately after the Mutable Data data type was finished being implemented by the team so it was very early, with not as much or as good documentation for a dev and a high probability that the API’s would change. There was just a breaking change in the API’s announced last week but that is generally very rare so not something to worry too much about. It was a decent learning curve at the time but it should be far less now for these reasons.
• There is way more documentation
• More example code
• More language bindings (programming language options)
• API’s are more simple and stable
• Better understanding amongst devs and community of what is capable so better support.
• Tools such as the Web Playground that allows a dev to easily test out API’s in real time.
• Much easier mock network setups found here.
The team has had safe_app_nodejs available for quite some time and it was and still is a great option because JavaScript is a very popular language amongst web developers and I wanted JAMS to start off as a web app, as opposed to a desktop app, which technically you can still do in JS packaging it with Electron. Not to go too far down that hole but the browser is made with a program called Electron that makes it easy to have Cross Platform builds of an app and so you can actually package your web app as a desktop app with it, which is pretty cool.
Now there are more options such as https://crates.io/crates/safe_bindgen/ which has bindings for Java and C# so those are mobile languages that JAMS will hopefully be taking advantage of in the not too too distant future.
This may seem like a lot but when posting your app description on upwork, pick a language (JavaScript is common like I said) for them to know, it’d be good if they knew some front end stuff like CSS too, upwork makes it easy and will have other relevant options, then mention in your app description what the app is, what you want it to do, and that it’d be built on a distributed network called the SAFENetwork and that learning the API’s will be necessary and provide the https://hub.safedev.org/ site so they can look at it before they apply for the gig and message you. Then you just screen people, ask them some questions and see if you’d work well with them. I’ll think of some relevant questions that I could share (none are coming to me right now).
If you have any other questions along the way I’d be happy to help, feel free to DM me on here if it’s not something you feel like sharing in this thread or if it’s too lengthy. Hope this helps @majumba! 