Are there other ways to view the functions of a smart contract other than a blockchain explorer?
The platform source code, pretty much you can look it up on Github.
It was my hope that someone with some knowledge would be helpful enough to point me in the right direction so that I don't spend time re-inventing the wheel.
I surmised that it was programmatically possible, and have quite an extensive background with Python (just not in the Web3 space).
If you don't want to reinvent the wheel, you can simply just build or run locally the frontend/interface. Take a look at the Github page of any platform. Usually, most of them are listing their smart contract code, SDK, frontend, etc.
As an example:
Uniswap interface:
https://github.com/Uniswap/interfacePancake frontend:
https://github.com/pancakeswap/pancake-frontend[/quote]
Brilliant! That's a great start. Thank you for addressing what I was asking about!!! I don't really want to make a front end...after giving it some more thought, I'd like to make some automation to withdrawal or re-invest. I used to do quite a bit with Poloniex and had several bots running there and at a few other places, but I'd like to put some to work on the pools and farms.