I started about a year ago and got overwhelmed with all the different paths. The reply I got at that time was that the development environment was undergoing a re-do. Life got in the way and I dropped it then. I want to try again but there are so many rabbit holes. I started on one of the tutorials and didn’t get too far until I was off creating other accounts and investigating other capabilities. I was a developer for a government agency for a long time so I’m a little behind the times, but it shouldn’t be this hard. The proliferation of various terminologies that refer to similar concepts makes it hard. This is somewhat of a frustration rant, my apologies for that, but if someone can point me to a simple tutorial to create a simple app it would be much appreciated. Developers that have evolved with the environment probably think it’s easy, but jumping in cold is a different story.
It’s still evolving, it’s still not fully documented, and it’s still way harder than it needs to be. 
Hi, there! Have you taken a look at this tutorial?
The tools you can use depend on what you’re trying to achieve. You can tell me more about your Use Case and ask anything that comes to your mind, I’ll help you through the process.
Thanks. That seems to be the general direction of software development. More complicated that it needs to be. At least knowing that you have that view will help at least with the frustration level. 
Thanks. I’ll take a look at it. All I’m really trying to do is set a simple app to do something. Think “Hello World”. It was a way to create a functional process that didn’t really do anything, but the fact that you could write some code, compile/build/interpret/whatever and then deploy it to an environment that you could execute it and see the output. This would give a structure to build functionality at the same time learning the environment as needed. There usually wasn’t a lot of external requirements to do this but it was an evolution that would lead to adding the external dependencies. It seems that the ST development starts with a big step to build the learning curve.
I’m just now seeing this, so you may have already figured everything out. But if not…
What platform and language are you using? I’m working on an example for the Raspberry Pi running Python if you’re interested. It’s still a work in progress, but you can check out what I have so far if you’re interested. https://frydaydevelopment.com/smartthings-smart-home-dashboard-1/