NEAR Community Update: January 11, 2019

2019 promises to be a very interesting year. As an industry, we’re in a phase which will separate the projects which actually ship from those who instead languish in endless research and fundraising mode and those who win over the developer community from those who instead built pretty ideas with no utility.

All of this plays to our strengths. ?

Community and Events

We’ll be busy in 2019 and should accrue a *lot* of frequent flyer miles. Prior to TestNet release, we’re keeping things fairly close to home but then all bets are off. You’ll see us speaking at conferences, running hackathons and hosting workshops around the world.

Is there a conference or event in your city that we should make sure to attend or speak at? Let us know by forwarding a note to [email protected].

Recent Highlights

1. [SF] Dec 19: Blockchain 101 Onramp: What are Decentralized Applications (DApps) and How Do They Work? (Video, Slides)
2. [SF] Jan 9: Blockchain 101 Onramp: Using Blockchain in “Regular” Web and Mobile Apps (Slides)

Upcoming Events

1. [SF] Jan 15: NEAR Protocol with Illia Polosukhin @ SF Ethereum Developers
2. [SF] Jan 16: Blockchain 101 Onramp: Design Best Practices for DApps
3. [SF] Jan 23: Sprint Workshop: Design Charrette for Blockchain Mobile and Web Applications
4. [SF] Jan 25: The Frontier of Sharding Research [Graph Day] (with Alex Skidanov)
5. [Online] Jan 29–30: Decentralized Summit (with Erik Trautman)
6. [SF] Feb 6: Blockchain 101 Onramp: DApp Development Basics
7. [SF] Feb 13: Sprint Workshop: Building on a Blockchain TestNet
8. [SF] Feb 27: Blockchain 101 Onramp: Best Practices for Developing DApps

Writing and Content

Cofounders Alex and Illia have started a new video series which puts technical leaders from two projects into the same room with a whiteboard to deep dive into their protocols. The first two videos, which feature Zaki Manian of Cosmos Network and Anatoly Yakovenko of Solana, are on our YouTube channel.

Dr Max Zavershynskyi surfaced some of the knowledge and best practices that have come from our work with Rust in Understanding Rust Lifetimes.

Engineering Highlights

We are now running regular internal hackathons to dogfood the protocol and focus on developer experience. The first of these christened our new devnet while the other focused on potential tutorial applications. We’ve become surprisingly good at repurposing Rock/Paper/Scissors logic…

As for functionality, the last few weeks have seen a surge in new additions:

1. The first version of NEARlib.js, which provides the interface in JavaScript to the network.
2. Switched accounts to be keyed by readable names.
3. Updated libraries, DevNet and AssemblyScript compiler to use JSON serialization of arguments and data structures. Removing the need for using an ABI and not requiring extra libraries.
4. As part of hackathons, built 6 example applications on NEAR platform. We will open source them with tutorials next week. More templates in Studio.
5. Added gas and mana (payment for cross-shard relaying) accounting for smart contract execution.
6. In the process of assembling components for TestNet.

How You Can Get Involved

If you want to stay up to date with what we’re building at NEAR, follow us on Twitter for updates, join the conversation on Discord.

https://upscri.be/633436/