NEAR Community Update: Nov 29, 2018

It’s official: as promised, we’re now open source.

As Illia announced in the accompanying post, this is the first milestone on the path to TestNet and it’s intended to help us build a more engaged early developer community. This early community is important because they will help us fulfill our commitment to creating the most developer-friendly toolset out there.

Speaking of community, the ball is officially rolling on our in-person community here in SF and it’s going to pick up speed quickly.

Speaking and Events

We’ve focused primarily on building out our local event series which addresses not just developers but a broad ecosystem of designers, product people and startuppers too.

Recent Highlights

1. We kicked off our cross-disciplinary San Francisco Meetup group with a look at the state of the ecosystem. Expecting the recording shortly.
2. We attended a sharding panel with the Stanford Blockchain Club on Nov 28th alongside OmniLedger.

Upcoming Events

1. [SF] Dec 5: Blockchain 101 Onramp: Start Here! Deconstructing the Blockchain Ecosystem
2. [SF] Dec 12: Improving Blockchain Developer Experience: When UX Meets Developer Tools

Writing and Content

1. Aliaksandr Hudzilin started a series on the promise of blockchain in the music industry

Engineering Highlights

I’ve already provided the lead on engineering highlights — we officially open-sourced our core client repos, including:

1. The NEAR Studio web IDE, which allows you to play with writing contracts using TypeScript in a web window. The interface is still preliminary.
2. NEARCore repo including the local DevNet code.

This is in the context of the following upcoming milestones:

1. DevNet: Finish building out the developer experience for our blockchain. We are progressing on this milestone pretty well, but there is still more work to be done.
2. “Minimum Viable Blockchain” (MVB): a fully functioning blockchain that can provide a platform for running experiments on governance, economics and user experience. This version will only have a Beacon Chain consensus.
3. Shard Chains: Add sharding of state and processing to MVB.

How You Can Get Involved

If you want to stay up to date with what we build at NEAR, use the following channels:

• Twitter — https://twitter.com/nearprotocol,
• Discord — https://discord.gg/kRY6AFp, we have open conversations on tech, governance and economics of blockchain on our discord.

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