Blog Urbit Community Update - June 2022

0 - Assembly 2022: Tickets on sale

We’re excited to announce that early bird tickets for Assembly 2022 are now on sale! Assembly 2022 will be a bigger-scale production than last year, accommodating up to 500 guests. Where last year showcased the ability to build on Urbit, this year will showcase the ecosystem that’s emerged and begun to build.

The first 128 tickets are ‘early bird’ tickets selling for $128 — this announcement is limited to the newsletter and on–network broadcasts as we’d like these to go to the most dedicated members of our community, so you had better pick one up quickly!

Learn more about the event and purchase tickets athttps://assembly.urbit.org

1 - Summer of Hoon

Hoon School Live, the instructor-led class taught by professor ~lagrev-nocfep, just concluded at the end of May with a total of 61 graduates (congratulations!). The learning opportunities don’t stop there though: next up is App School Live and a two-month hackathon culminating at Assembly in September.

App School Live will upgrade Hoon developers' skills to produce full-fledged Urbit apps. Urbit apps (or Gall agents) take advantage of Urbit's identity, communications, and database features. You’ll learn to build and distribute applications using Urbit, including CLI and front-end agents. Javascript (React) and HTML/CSS experience is not required, but will facilitate front-end development. If you didn’t manage to make it to Hoon School Live, you should complete the Hoon School written docs (https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/hoon-school/intro) before participating. Instruction begins on Tuesday July 12 at 8:30 p.m. US CT and will continue weekly for seven weeks.

Sign up here:https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfxAEdcdaLG_yK3RCOCLLScslcyjhBmAN2qUqHLajwSMgT-lw/viewform

Lastly, the Urbit Foundation will be running a hackathon starting shortly after App School Live on July 25th and ending at Assembly. The top projects will be given the opportunity to give demos on stage, with the winner selected by the audience. More details about this will be posted in the Hooniverse (https://urbit.org/groups/~hiddev-dannut/new-hooniverse) and Foundation (https:// groups, including specific prizes, rules and signup instructions.

2 - Mars Review of Books

The first issue of the Mars Review of Books is out! It came together beautifully thanks to the hard work of ~librex-dozryc and several members of the Urbit community. You can read it online athttps://www.marsreview.org/ (which is published from Urbit), but we recommend picking up a physical copy (available through the previous link). The production quality is quite high, as you can see for yourself here:https://twitter.com/anjiecast/status/1539262467225829379

3 - Fireside Chats

Starting on July 8th, ~wolref-podlex of the Urbit Foundation will be holding monthly “Fireside Chats” to share what’s going on at the Urbit Foundation and network more broadly, and take questions from the community. If you have a suggestion for a topic or already have a question in mind you can ask it here (https://airtable.com/shrAH7d8CAPtp62IA)

Get the details for the next one on our event page here:https://urbit.org/events/2022-07-08-urbit-fireside-chat-1

4 - New on the Network

A big update shipped a couple of weeks ago that included a binary update (to 1.9.0) and a corresponding OTA. Highlights for the update include the capability for the binary to upgrade itself with a simple command (./urbit next <pier>), making future updates much simpler, the release of the Khan vane, support for Clay tombstoning and commit messages, the revival of aqua, and a fix for an issue preventing comet-to-comet communications. For more details, see the release notes on the mailing list:https://github.com/urbit/urbit/releases/tag/urbit-os-v2.123 andhttps://github.com/urbit/urbit/releases/tag/urbit-v1.9.

The team at Holium shipped a big update to Ballot (https://urbit.org/applications/~lomder-librun/ballot). Ballot allows ships to create polls to vote on with one another. Now it supports delegation, custom triggers based on vote outcomes, and features a brand new mobile interface.

New on the blog is Convivial Networks (https://urbit.org/blog/convivial-networks), a piece that explores the relationship between human interactions and the tools that enable them: “Like the relationships that we build within them, our platforms should yield satisfaction precisely because they’re non-trivial; they demand effort, which is another way of saying they require engagement with the world.”