Blog Urbit Community Update - October 2021
Jeremy Tunnell at
Assembly 2021 is here. wagmi.
Hundreds of us are going to gather tonight in Austin to kick off Urbit’s first public unconference. We planned Assembly to mark a major milestone: Urbit is ready to be built upon. We’ve been working toward this for a long time. It really feels like a new era.
There’s almost too much happening these days to fit into a single email, but let’s go:
0 - Assembly online
We’re going to stream many of the talks starting at 8am PT / 10am CT / 11am ET on Saturday, October 16th. You can follow along here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywj36TUtbS4.
After the talks, ~wolref-podlex (Josh Lehman) is going to join an AMA around 11am PT / 1pm CT / 2pm ET. Join the conversation here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MA8sqFi8Bd8.
The conversation, as always, continues on Urbit. If you can't make it to Assembly, many of us will convene in the Assembly 2021 channel in ~bitbet-bolbel/urbit-community.
1 - Assembly projects + panels
Our goal with Assembly is to help community members get to know each other and start working on new Urbit projects. There are a few talks and panels to serve as inspiration, but mostly there’s lots of time to start working together.
One part of this is the Hoon Workshop, led by ~lagrev-nocfep, which will walk people through the system and get them familiar with its language and structure. The other part is community-led projects that anyone is free to join. We’ve been tweeting about a few of them:
https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1448370502142251012
https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1447668039516819457
https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1446566276231581703
https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1446525245645414403
2 - WIP launches
If you’re on the network you have probably noticed that some big updates went out over the last few weeks:
Software distribution
This is one of the biggest updates of all time. We shipped the ability to package and distribute Urbit applications. Landscape was how we got from 0 to 1, now we’re ready to go from 1 to N. People are already experimenting with new things and it’s so much fun to see. More on that below.
Star Market
The community has developed the ability to swap an ERC-721 NFT star for an ERC-20 WSTR token. To help people participate in this as safely as possible, we builthttps://star.market, an interface for these new contracts. It’ll be exciting to see what people do with this new market.
Urbit Visor
Urbit Visor is a browser extension for authenticating with and connecting to your Urbit directly from the browser. This unlocks a whole new world of standalone apps that can connect to Urbit without ever touching Urbit itself. Urbit Visor was developed by dcspark with support from the Urbit Foundation. It’s a very promising project that unlocks a whole new flow for developing Urbit-connected apps. To learn more about Visor, check outhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzJ97wYgPDM andhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g98ns7Enge4
App experiments
We’ve been experimenting with the new ability to package up an app and ship it over the network, and community members were quick to jump on it as well. A few things we saw that are worth mentioning: the first video calls *over Urbit* using urChatFM, Poker, pals, and, perhaps the simplest (and cutest), Locket: a single tile that just displays an image on your Landscape home screen. If you're curious to try out some of these fresh experiments, get on the network and ask around to find and check them out.
3 - Network update + support
Software distribution is a *major* update to Urbit OS. The fact that we were able to ship this update over the network is pretty incredible and is a testament to the system we’ve built.
After this update went out we did find a few people who ran into bugs and ended up stuck on an old version. In some cases this can leave you orphaned from Urbit, so we can’t send messages to you. If you’re stuck in the last era, you might want to check out this faq:https://urbit.org/using/os/dist-faq. If you’re still having trouble don’t hesitate to reach out to[email protected] and we’ll do our best to help.
4 - Guides
Software distribution, the market, and incoming Hosting and iOS updates call for clearer, easier to understand guides to what we’re doing. We’re rolling out a few of these today and expect to refine them in the coming months:
A new, one-stop place to understand how to both get started and dive deeply into developing on top of Urbit.developers.urbit.org walks through how to learn more about the system, where to connect with the community, and how to earn ownership in the network through grants and apprenticeships.
If you own a large chunk of address space or are considering buying one, now there’s a single place for support.operators.urbit.org explains everything there is to know about running nodes, supporting the network, and participating in the Urbit economy.
A new, more robust network explorer for Urbit from dedicated community member ~dinleb-rambep. Now we have a much needed tool for inspecting the state of Urbit IDs that’s easy to use, fast, and responsive. Check it out.
5 - Careers + grants
As you can tell, Urbit is growing. There’s so much for us to do, build, and explore. We’re excited to see Urbit on the road to being the neutral shared infrastructure we designed it to be. If you want to live in a digital world that is shaped by the people who depend on it, come work with us.
Tlon
Tlon is hiring for a number of different roles. Read about them athttps://tlon.io/careers/ and dm ~roslet-tanner to learn more.
Urbit Foundation
The Urbit Foundation is always excited to give out address space grants to motivated people who either take on projects or come up with their own. You can learn more in ~wolref-podlex/foundation.
Community
There are new community projects self-organizing and getting started all the time. Join ~bitbet-bolbel/urbit-community to jump into the conversation.
See you out there,
The Urbit team