The Neo Blockchain Toolkit was designed to remove even the smallest hindrances to developing on Neo. NGD Enterprise chief architect, Harry Pierson, recently joined the Neo News Today podcast to share more about improving Neo’s developer experience. He said:

Every time you can shave a little bit of pain out of the developer’s life, the better. There’s no problem too small when you do it a million times an hour. The difference between 11 seconds and four seconds, that’s seven seconds. Who cares? But again, if you’re going to do it a hundred times an hour – seven seconds adds up. That kind of focus on making sure the developer experience is as good as possible; that’s what I think we bring to the table. Specifically, to NGD Enterprise and generally across the Neo ecosystem.”

Pierson officially joined the NGD Enterprise team in early 2019, when it was known as NGD Seattle. Hitting the ground running, he’d begun working on debugging and development tools in the Neo Blockchain Toolkit for VS Code.

The first version of the Toolkit released in Jan. 2020 allowed developers to easily run private network instances, enabled the creation and debugging of C# smart contracts, and simplified blockchain deployment and invocations. Since then, Pierson and NGD Enterprise have implemented additional new tooling. One such example is Test-Driven Development, which reduces the time a developer spends debugging.

To the team of ex-Microsoft vets based out of Seattle, improving the tooling for the Neo blockchain was essential. Pierson noted:

“It’s cliche since I come from Microsoft, but it’s [about] developers, developers, developers! I am a very strong believer in the virtuous cycle of platforms. I’ve worked on platforms for a long time. I’ve worked on developer tools for platforms. You can’t have a good platform if you don’t have good developer tools.”

With N3 MainNet right around the corner, Pierson believes that the time put into tooling by NGD Enterprise and the community as a whole is beginning to pay off. He said, “[Neo offers] an experience that’s just significantly better than what it was even a year ago. And, significantly better, I think, than anything else in the industry.”

The latest version of the Neo Blockchain Toolkit can be found on the Visual Studio Code marketplace. NGD Enterprise has also published several quick start videos and tutorials to help get developers up and running.

The full interview with Pierson can be found below:

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