Want to create a visualization - building from grafana source or just create the visualization

I’m not making progress in my attempt to build a visualization for a very specific dashboard. I have tried two different development “paths”. 1. - I followed the steps https://grafana.com/docs/project/building_from_source/ and 2 - just build a visualization with https://grafana.com/blog/2016/04/08/timing-is-everything.-writing-the-clock-panel-plugin-for-grafana-3.0/
1- working with 6.3.5 I build as far as “Building the backend” with go run build.go build but after that yarn, then grafana-tools broke and appear to be badly versioned and I can’t fix.
2- this I did not get far with. It appears to be from April with version 6.1 of grafana and the build environment is way out of date already.
Can anyone point me to current docs on how to build a visualization plugin? I did try to do a “go get …” for grafana with an older version of grafana but that failed