How can we design the NEO Developer Portal?

[gracegui43]

Currently we lack a unified portal to showcase infrastructure and development tools, which may be inconvenient for developers. If we can have a developer portal page on the NEO official website, what should be included and how to design?

[shargon]

@lock9 have a lot of experience in this

[lock9]

Hello, My experience is mostly in product development and in this area, we always start thinking about our "customer". Who is him/her, what are they looking for, etc. Using answers from these questions we can create something that people actually want. Here is something I did when thinking about the documentation, but could be "applied" to another area (sorry for the terrible colors, I'm not a designer):

I would suggest trying to understand who is the customer we want to reach, what do they want and build a portal based on these answers. In the image, I only considered "developers", if you are looking to build a complete NEO portal, I would add some extra "customers" to that list like investors and government employees (and also rewrite all the columns).

Extra note: Thinking about customers is not very easy, it would be good to interview a few of "them" to understand "what are they looking for".

[lock9]

I'm not sure if I can understand the scope of this portal. Should we care to explain parts of the code that they are not going to interact with? In other words: Is it aimed for "developers only" or is it going to include technical aspects that are relevant but not directly used by the developers?

[gracegui43]

I think at this stage, developers are our main customers with highest priority. So we can have the page for developers only. And the other portal can be designed in different pages.

[lock9]

Hello Grace, Are we considering what kind of developers? C# only? With or without previous blockchain experience? Should we care about exchange developers?

Maybe we can divide the "developers" into smaller groups? 🤔

[gracegui43]

It's a good question. Personally I think different language support is our advantage and language can be used as a reason for grouping. However, it may be hard to maintain different language tools. So maybe we can list C# page first since it may be more complete, and use C# as a template. Then we list the other language such as python and javascript, and expand its content.

[lock9]

I did this structure in the past:

NEO DOCS
    About NEO
        NEO
            NEO Foundation
            NGD - NEO Global Development 
            NGC - NEO Global Capital
        NEO Technology
            Consensus Mechanism
                Consensus Whitepaper
                Consensus Diagram
            Whitepaper
            Network Components
                Consensus Nodes
                Relay Nodes
                Light Wallets
            NEO 3.0
        NEO Virtual Machine
        NEO Enhancement Proposal (NEP)
        NEO Community
            NEO Research
            New Econo Lab (NEL)
            City of Zion (CoZ)
            (Add other)
    Blockchain Development
        Using the SDK
            C#
            Python
            GO
        Using RPC (HTTP)
        Asset Transfer
            NEO
            GAS
            NEP-5
        Fees
            Network fees
            System fees
        Hosting a private chain
        Configuration Files
        Wallet file
            Wallet representation
        NEO Plugins
        Advanced Topics
            Network Protocol
            Transaction Serialization
                Contract Transaction
                Invocation Transaction
                Smart Contract deployment
            Oracles
            Using the wallet through RPC
        Document for Exchange Developers
            Version 2.9.2
            Version 2.9.1
            Version 2.9.0
            Version 2.8.0
            Version 2.7.6
        Blockchain Explorers
        Network Monitoring
            CoZ Monitor
            Happy Nodes
            Notification Server
    Smart Contract Development
        Setting up your development environment
            Local network
                neo-local
            Using the debugger
                C#
                Python
        Smart Contract Basics
            Supported types
                Boolean, byte, integer, string, array, map
            Authentication
                Check Witness
                Verify Signature
                Multisignature Contracts
            Storage
            Contract Triggers
            Hash functions
            Random numbers
            Serialization
            Fees
                System Fees
                Network Fees
            Object Serialization
            Deploying your smart contract
            Invoking a smart contract
            Retrieving notifications
        Samples and Tutorials
            Hello World
                C#
                Python
            Lock Contract
            Domain (Domain Name System)
            Contract Authentication Tutorial
            Deploying a Lock Contract
        Custom token (NEP-5)
        API Reference
        Unit Testing
        NEO .NET Dev Pack
    Downloads
        Executables
            NEO-cli
            NEO-gui
            Neon
        Configuration files
        Blockchain files

In another study(incomplete and unordered), I gathered these results:

"Code level topics"
--
    RPC
    Indexer
        Off-chain
     'sendrawtransaction',
    Multi-signing
    Transaction Status
    2 token model
    Network Protocol
    Data model (including protocol messages)
        Binary serialization
                Json Encoding
    Security
    Consensus
    Gas generation
    Gas claim
    UTXO
    Gaming
        SDKs
        Patterns
    Fees
        Network fee
        System fee
    Transaction building
        Attaching gas
    NEP-5 transactions
        Multiple NEP-5 in one transaction
    DEX
    Quantum protection [NEP-85](https://github.com/neo-project/proposals/issues/85)
    Smart Contract
        API
        Patterns
        Docs
        Unit Testing
        Debugging
        Examples
    Neo-local
        Components
    Security aspects
        Private key generation
        Encrypted private key (nep-2)
    Wallet
        Light Wallet
            Indexer dependency
            Code patterns
            Neon 
        Wallet (Node)
            Neo-cli
            Code patterns
            Plugins
        RPC
            RPC security
        NEP-6
    (Decentralized )Exchange Developers 
        Security
        Patterns
        NEP-5 tokens
        Game tokens
        Other tokens
    Decentralization
        Elections
        Node geo-location
    Consensus
        Single block required (I don't remember the correct term)
        15 second confirmation time
    NEO 3.0

Unfortunately, I used the wrong persona in this study, but I think I can rework it to consider C# developers "only". We have to be very careful how we design it, because if we present it too much "Windows with Visual Studio"(common C# tools) it can make developers from other programming languages and platforms to lose interest. Also, Neon wallet is (in my opinion) a masterpiece and it is entirely made with javascript, I'm certain that developers can learn a lot from it (even if they are not interested in making a wallet).

[igormcoelho]

I like a lot your table diagram Ricardo. One thing we lack for developers is a Neo Unified Development API. This could be a table embedding all existing features, from basic to advanced, for example: TOPIC. LANGUAGE. EXAMPLE. IMPORTS Put data on storage. C# Storage.Put("Hello", "World"); using Neo.SmartContract.Framework; Python xxxxxxxx Something like that,organized by sections of broader topics, in a very clean way. Perhaps, it could include a "link to complete example", in neo/examples (or elsewhere), and have includes on hidden bullets (language could be selected too). But I still like two main views (perhaps with different background colors): (1) for users / investors / entusiasts. (2) Neo developers

Core dev is outside the scope,more related to yellowpaper and github issues / pr.

[lock9]

@igormcoelho Thanks. Correct me if I'm wrong: I think that what you are saying is that we need to split into different abstraction levels. Is that right? We need to define what abstraction levels we want. I suggest we use UML for that (different diagrams for different abstraction levels).

For "code level help" (API/SDK), I think we can use "tabs" for each programming language. This means that the explanation is programming language agnostic, but the examples are shown in C#, Python, Go, Typescript and Java.

To avoid us "waiting" or "depending on other people" we could start with C# only. Instead of using "least common multiple" we use the most complete one. I "changed my mind" because in my 'main area' (app development) we never choose tools that offer the least common multiple because this has a very high impact in the resulting software (fewer features, less performance), so yeah, maybe we should focus in C# ('.NET core') and add other things later on. We don't have any examples of light wallets done in C# but we have neo-modules that can be used for that purpose.

TL;DR: Use UML Use tabs in code level examples Focus in C#

[gracegui43]

I did this structure in the past:

Hi Rick, the structure is nice! But it is more like documentation structure, right? If for developer portal design, can you suggest a simpler version?

[saltyskip]

I think for a developer there are only three necessary sections to get started

1. Setting up a node
2. Writing/deploying basic contract
3. Interacting with wallets/contracts based on DAPI

For beginner this will get you 90% of the way there when working with NEO. Once you get past these three topics you can get into more advanced topics like those written out in full by @lock9

[lock9]

Hello people, Is the discussion going to continue here? Can we close this and continue in discord? @Grace-Gui it is up to you, if you want to keep it open, we can keep it open.

[gracegui43]

We can close it. We will update the developer page in Oct. Thanks for all the suggestions.