NEAR Community Update: March 22, 2019

If you’ve ever observed a duckling gliding across the surface of a pond, you know that what looks like effortless motion above the water is generated because their little feet spin furiously below the surface to keep them moving. For us, it’s definitely been a duck week — lots going on beneath the surface while we continue the march towards MainNet.

A big welcome to Peter DePaulo, who is joining us in Developer Relations. Peter comes with a rich background that spans everything from open source communities to engineering products that serve some of the biggest companies in the world. On his first day, he upgraded our documentation to a much more user-friendly organizational style and his presence will undoubtedly be felt in the community.

The Whiteboard Series continues to pick up steam and is best consumed on our YouTube channel, despite how educational it is in GIF form:

Community and Events

After an exhilarating — and exhausting — couple of months packed full of events, it’s good to have the team back in one place for a hot second to focus on creative ideation and building. It’s also helpful to have the Game Developer Conference in our home town this week as well because we’ve had the opportunity to meet some very interesting projects and show off our usability.

We will be pushing community development efforts in some exciting new directions over the upcoming weeks so stay tuned for that.

If you want to host a local NEAR meetup in your city or see if we can support yours, reach out to [email protected].

Recent Events

1. [Paris] March 8–10: Events around Eth Paris
2. [Tokyo] March 8: NEAR at Waseda University
3. [Tokyo] March 9: NEAR at HashHub
4. [Beijing] March 11: NEAR at Beijing AI
5. [Beijing] March 13: NEAR at Tsinghua University
6. [SF] March 20: Building on a Blockchain DevNet (Workshop)
7. [San Jose] March 21: Blockchain Developer Meetup

Upcoming Events

1. [Berlin] Mar 25: NEAR, Fluence and Cosmos DevNet and MainNet Demo Night
2. [SF] Mar 27: Unblocked SF with Erik Trautman of NEAR Protocol
3. [SF] Mar 28: Decentralized Computing with WASM @ Github
4. [Uruguay] Mar 29: Rust Latam conference
5. [San Mateo] Mar 30–31: Nueva Hacks Hackathon
6. [Sydney] April 8: EdCon
7. [Fremont] April 20: Launch Hacks hackathon

If you want to collaborate on events, reach out to [email protected]

Writing and Content

Dr Maksym Zavershynskyi wrote another in-depth post on Rust called Remote Development and Debugging of Rust with CLion. The Whiteboard Series continues strong with several new videos:

1. Ep9: Stan Kladko of SKALE Labs
2. Ep10: David Utrobin from MakerDAO
3. EP11: Guang Yang from Conflux

Engineering Highlights

On the application/development layer, we’re re-skinning the UIs for the wallet and block explorers. On the blockchain layer, we’ve deployed our multi-node AlphaNet (a Proof-of-Authority-style network that runs a full consensus) and are stabilizing for public release.

There were 42 PRs in nearcore from 10 different authors over the last couple of weeks. As always, the code is completely open source on Github.

Blockchain Layer

• Stabilizing TestNet “Alpha”: reactive catchup for blocks and bug fixes. Follow the documentation to launch your own network and attach our studio IDE to it.
• Updated runtime WASM api to support faster reads and writes
• Caching authority computation to speed up startup time
• Benchmarks for the client excluding network and consensus.
• Improved APIs and integration tests for DevNet while improving stability.

Application/Development Layer

• Streamlined command line tools for local development, testing, and deployment
• Continued work on improving receipts for cross-contract calls.
• Deployed new docs.

How You Can Get Involved

Join us! If you want to work with one of the most talented teams in the world right now to solve incredibly hard problems, check out our careers page for openings.

Learn more about NEAR in The Beginner’s Guide to NEAR Protocol. Stay up to date with what we’re building by following us on Twitter for updates, joining the conversation on Discord and subscribing to our newsletter to receive updates right to your inbox.

Reminder: you can help out significantly by adding your thoughts in our 2-minute Developer Survey.

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