Blog Urbit Community Update - September 2021
Jeremy Tunnell at
0 - Assembly 2021 @ October 15, 16, 17 Austin, TX
As of now, there are still a few tickets left—get them while you still can. If you’ve already registered for the event, check your email for a few links to questionnaires about t-shirt size, dietary restrictions, and project ideas for attendees to work on in Austin (optional).
Also, ~lagrev-nocfep, who will be leading a workshop at Assembly 2021, has made his course lectures on “martian computing” available online.
https://davis68.github.io/martian-computing/
1 - Haleek Maul Interview
It’s time to talk about NFTs. After all, we’ve silently been using them for years, and they’ve been working great as functional network identities. We haven’t really talked about it before, but an Urbit ID—whether it’s a planet, star, or galaxy—is an ERC-721 token and therefore an NFT. However, they’re unusually functional because they are keys to an entirely new digital world.
https://twitter.com/urbit/status/1437858935827017732
We recently sat down with Haleek Maul to talk about the future of Urbit and NFTs—Haleek will be a panelist at Assembly and is also a founder of Holdersland, an organization dedicated to spreading tech literacy in the Caribbean.
https://urbit.org/blog/haleek-maul-interview
2 - Galaxy DAO
There’s a new DAO on the block, and it has recently acquired an entire Urbit galaxy. While there are other Urbit DAOs who collectively own stars, this is likely the first time that a DAO has been created around a galaxy (~wen). For more information, check out the podcast episode with Justin Murphy called “Tokenizing Urbit Galaxies.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiYKw9x2_GA
~winlud-dirnet/point-dao
3 - Layer 2 Explainer & Developer Call
Tlon’s head infrastructure engineer, Philip Monk (~wicdev-wisryt) has released a video detailing the basics of Urbit’s layer 2 solution. In particular, Phil dives into the internal workings of naive.hoon, the code which handles Urbit’s off-chain rollups. Also, on September 16th, Phil and the layer 2 team will be running a developer call on this topic, where they’ll also do a live demo of the upcoming changes to Bridge. This is an ideal opportunity to get all your layer 2 questions answered, anything from the general to the hyper-technical—see you there!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQdqCwYIBoU
https://urbit.org/events/2021-09-16-developer-call-azimuth-scaled
4 - Grants
Learn hoon, then gall, now get partnered with a mentor for an apprenticeship. Rinse. After getting some hands-on experience, propose a grant or tackle a bounty. Repeat. You’re an Urbit developer now. Ez pz.
https://urbit.org/docs/hoon/hoon-school
https://github.com/timlucmiptev/gall-guide
Also, congratulations to Edward Amsden (~ritpub-sipsyl) in completing his WebRTC grant! We all know what ‘s next.
https://urbit.org/grants/webrtc-gall-agent-and-external-app
5 - Odds & Ends
~midsum-salrux has made a “chatbot bridge between urbit and discord. Whenever a member posts in your discord group, a bot will echo their message in your urbit group, and vice versa.”
https://github.com/midsum-salrux/faux
~mocrux-nomdep has written a great post about why Urbit is an excellent solution to many problems that blockchains can’t handle, “Blockchains are a poor choice for solving p2p messaging, identity, and generalized computation. Urbit takes a completely different approach in its design which addresses these issues from the ground up.”
https://medium.com/dcspark/why-urbit-410d32961031
~tocryt-socryp of Tirrel, has created an interactive visualization of the Urbit network.