Blog Urbit Community Update - August 2022

Jeremy Tunnell at

The Urbit ecosystem is growing quickly. This means that Urbit’s main newsletter is going to be focusing more on the visible results of development and the communities using these tools. This newsletter will be focused on what’s going on under the hood or behind the scenes, depending on your metaphor preference.

Here you can expect updates on new content on developers.urbit.org, bleeding-edge applications, developer call recaps, release updates, and work opportunities.

Without further ado:

Developer Site

Developers.urbit.orglaunched at the beginning of July. We've been working hard on creating and refreshing content to make it easier to use and easier to find what you need to know. In particular, we draw your attention to two features:

Lightning apps are short tutorials designed to show you how to quickly implement apps on top of Urbit. They demonstrate how having the right primitives makes it easier to build sensible, secure apps.

The newHoon Workbook showcases exemplary Hoon code to give you an idea of how to better structure and express what you're working on. Right now it's populated from the HSL competition, but we'll keep adding to it.

Blog Posts

TheAssembly Hackathon is ongoing until September 24 at Assembly 2022. There's always time to jump in and compete.

- TheHoon School Live Competition wrapped up in June and was reported out in July. Check out the excellent code submissions at the link.

-App School Live is ongoing. Since completion is based on homework submission, there's still time to get involved and finish—check out details in theHooniverse group.

Spotted in the Wild

Several new apps have been released recently by an active and beaverish developer community. These include:

Channel – a P2P, anonymous imageboard.
~sitden-sonnet/channel

Sphinx – submissions and search for listings of groups, applications, and more through your pals
~nocsyx-lassul/sphinx

Houston – a moon management app
~nodmyn-dosrux/houston

Trill – Urbit Native Microblog
~diller-mirtyl-wacdec/trill

Developer Calls

Last Call:Holium’s Community OS

Neal and Trent had a great conversation and discusssed:

  • Why Holium chose to build on Urbit

  • DAO OS bounties, Holium's App Dev Summer

  • External cognition tooling & exit from corporate culture

  • A future for integrated DAO experiences on Urbit

Next Call: The %khan Control Plane Vane with ~littel-wolfur – 8/18 at 9 PT

Updates

Tlon implemented a new release protocol announcing non-hotfix updates a week in advance. You can sync bleeding-edge updates from the prerelease moon `~doznec-dozzod-marzod`.

The core developer team released the following Urbit system updates in June and July:

Over-the-air (OTA) updates

-urbit-os-v2.125– Ames can close flows, improving subscription reliability

-urbit-os-v2.124– Quality-of-life improvements to Dojo error messages.

-groups-v1.1.0 – Various aesthetic and usability improvements.

-landscape-v1.1.6 – Included better support for searching for apps via resource IDs.

-urbit-os-v2.123 – System Zuse decrement required developers to update their apps to `%418`. Some new useful tools like `+vat` and `-naive-csv` were added. Spider child threads were revived. `;<` micgal now works without shadowing the `$` buc default subject. A new `$+` buclus rune allows adding type names for improved type pretty-printing.

Runtime updates

-urbit-v1.10 – Error handling for bail improved. Event log size increased.

-urbit-v1.9 – The new `%khan` control plane vane was introduced. Runtime docking was introduced, which includes the appropriate binary inside the pier of each ship.

While `%khan` hasn't been documented yet (we expect some minor API changes), there is an excellent example of its use available in ~midsum-salrux’sTendiebot andFaux.

Upcoming Pull Requests

- https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/5887 typed paths

- https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/5884 `?#` wuthax rune

- https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/5874 Ford `/` fas rune support

- https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/5873 doccords, which will allow better in-code documentation

- New Dill

- https://github.com/urbit/urbit/pull/5360 developer desk generator


Opportunities

Bounties

Jobs

- Chorus One – Systems Engineer:https://careers.chorus.one/o/systems-engineer-urbit

- Urbit Live – Documentation & Content Work: send a dm to ~bitmep-faswyn

- Tlon – Principal Product Designer:https://tlon.io/careers/principal-product-designer/

- Tlon – Customer Experience Manager:https://tlon.io/careers/cx-manager/

Jeremy brokers the sale of galaxies and stars. To purchase or sell a galaxy or star contact him at [email protected]

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