Monthly Roundup for July 2022

We are finally approaching the cusp of fall/spring folks! We hope everyone is having a lovely summer, or winter depending on where you are located. Thanks for tuning in, please check out what the team has been up to over the last month.

Holochain Developer Education Initiative

The team had a great time connecting with the community at the first session of the Holochain Developer Education Initiative. Thank you to everyone who applied, and we are looking forward to hosting another session soon.

Testing and QA for Publish hApps Pre-release

The last week was a beehive of activity as the Holo dev team prepared the release of the Publish hApps milestone for QA testing. This milestone is about Holochain apps being able to be ‘published’ to the Holo network by Alpha Program Publishers. The apps they publish will be hosted on HoloPorts (also in the Alpha Program) and may be accessible to end users depending on how each publisher coordinates their own testing. If you are curious about the — hot from the press dev updates — those can be found on Holo Twitter.

Quantised Gossip, Optional Countersigners, and More

Paul came back from the Holochain & Rust Developer Immersive to find a big pile of interesting things to write about. One, of course, was the Immersive itself, which I’ll share about next week. But for this week, here are the usual weekly release changelogs for the last six releases (there are some important changes in there) and notes from around the ecosystem.

Read the whole Dev Pulse here!

Mini-spotlight: Kizuna, a private messenger app

Kizuna is a messaging application for one-on-one or group conversations.Kizuna empowers people to message each other completely privately, without the involvement of a central server. The app is open-source and is being developed by a non-profit group called the Holochain Institute of Japan.

Read more about Kizuna and what they’re building on Holochain.

Rust In Blockchain Newsletter

RiB Newsletter #37

Holo & Holochain Community Meme & Brand Guide

We’ve created a brand and meme guide to help our community create awesome memes, without any copyright infringement! Please check it out here.

Join the Holo Team

We’re Hiring! Holo is excited to continue our mission by expanding our team. Check out the open positions below:

• Software Project Manager — Holo EMEA
• Junior Software Tester
• Project Manager — Holochain Component

Interested in building a hApp? Join the Holochain Developer Forum and start your journey!

If you have general questions about Holo, Holochain, or HoloPorts — or want to join our community — the best place to start is on our Twitter, Holochain, or Holo Reddits.

For specific questions or any technical issues regarding Holo or HoloPorts, you can read more, or contact us directly at help.holo.host.

— Sarah @ Holo

Monthly Roundup for Holo & Holochain was originally published in HOLO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Monthly Roundup for June 2022

Happy July folks! Thanks for tuning in as always. Check out what the team has been up to this month in our Monthly Roundup, featured below.

Holo Launches the Holochain Developer Education Initiative

Holo Limited is very pleased to announce the launch of the Holochain Developer Education Initiative. In the coming two years we are committing upwards of $2M to build and foster an ecosystem of developers. This work builds on past efforts–especially those of the Holochain open dev community–and will create efficient, effective, and scalable curriculum to educate experienced developers on how to code and build hApps and products on Holochain.

Read more here: https://press.holo.host/214789-announcing-the-holochain-developer-education-initiative

Chess to be added to Longitudinal hApps test soon

Elemental Chat continues to work well with sharding enabled after two weeks of testing with approximately 1,000 people trying it out. We’re also evaluating Chess, the next hApp we’d like to publish concurrently to the Holo network that is running Elemental Chat. We’ll share more about Chess when and if we believe the app is ready to publish.

Regular Holo Dev Updates on Twitter

If you are curious about the — hot from the press dev updates — those can be found on Holo Twitter.

Holochain Dev Pulse 121

This month’s Holochain release brings a large and anticipated change, what will become the foundation for the 0.1.0 release of the HDK and the Stable Validation milestone. Paulhinted at it a few months ago, and now the time is finally upon us.

Read the whole Dev Pulse here!

Unenclosable Carriers and the Future of Communication

The final chapter in the enlightening series from Josh Zemel and Art Brock explores how Holochain can help solve problems, both large and small.

Start part one here.

Ecosystem Sessions — Generative Objects

Generative objects is an open-source meta low-code platform that empowers anyone with great ideas but not much tech know-how to create the tools and applications they need.

Watch the latest Ecosystem Session now: https://buff.ly/3lRqggu

Rust In Blockchain Newsletter

RiB Newsletter #36

Holochain Rust & Developer Training AMA

AMA #51 focused on the Holochain Developer Education Initiative, and more specifically the first training happening in July. Keep up to date on Twitter for an announcement about the AMA, and in the meantime please submit any questions you have here.

Join the Holo Team

We’re Hiring! Holo is excited to continue our mission by expanding our team. Check out the open positions below:

• Software Project Manager — Holo EMEA
• Junior Software Tester
• Project Manager — Holochain Component

Interested in building a hApp? Join the Holochain Developer Forum and start your journey!

If you have general questions about Holo, Holochain, or HoloPorts — or want to join our community — the best place to start is on our Twitter, Holochain, or Holo Reddits.

For specific questions or any technical issues regarding Holo or HoloPorts, you can read more, or contact us directly at help.holo.host.

— Sarah @ Holo

Monthly Roundup for Holo & Holochain was originally published in HOLO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Monthly Roundup for April 2022

Happy #HoloMonday everyone! Thanks for taking the time to click in to the latest Monthly Roundup. We are already a quarter through the year, and both the Holo and Holochain teams are busy working hard. Check out exactly what we’ve been doing in the roundup below.

3 Milestones in 3 Months: Holo Update

On the Holo build out we’re really pleased with the fact that we passed 3 milestones in (less than) three months over the holidays. Here is a short description of those milestones as they appear on our roadmap, and why they matter. Below is a brief summary of each of the Milestones:

• Elemental Chat in Public Alpha
• HoloFuel Transactions Pre-release UX/UI
• HoloPort Registration Usability

Check out the *New* Holochain Roadmap

As Holo announced in their recent update, Holochain now has a public roadmap. I’m thoroughly excited about this, and I sincerely hope it helps you, dear hApp developers, get an idea of where we’re heading — and plan your development trajectory accordingly.

There are a lot of milestones planned, including ephemeral storage (non-permanent DHT data) and pub/sub (subscribe to DHT change events), but I want to call out one in particular that’s simultaneously the least and most interesting: Stable Validation.

Approaching Longitudinal hApp Testing

We’re getting close to the release of our next Holo milestone, Longitudinal hApp Testing. Elemental Chat will be tested on the Holo infrastructure with no pre-determined limit for how long we keep it available. This is a longevity test primarily for use by our biz dev team and other partners building hApps and to gather data about use over time. Following the initial release, additional hApps will be added to the infrastructure. This release sets us up for future publishing milestones where we’ll work with early adopter app developers who want to publish their hApps in a live test environment. We’ve recently updated Elemental Chat to a recent version of Holochain and we’re doing regression testing for minor changes.

Regular Holo Dev Updates on Twitter

If you are curious about the — hot from the press dev updates — those can be found on Holo Twitter.

Dev Pulse 117

This is a very short Dev Pulse; but Paul covers the changes in the Holochain release earlier in April. Good news, links have gotten some more changes (#1298, #1308), bringing us closer to the Holochain Resource Locators milestone. Now you can use headers as your link base or target, without having to re-type them to entry hashes (which worked but felt kinda hacky to me). But not only that — you can now use external hashes as well!

Read the whole Dev Pulse here.

Agent Key Stability in Holochain

Watch a clip from the latest AMA where Erik Harris-Braun talks about what agent key stability looks like on Holochain.

Ecosystem Session with IOEN

Watch the Eco Sessions replay with Mike Gamble, Simon Wilson, and Phil Beadle on the @IOEN_tech. Watch here!

Rust In Blockchain Newsletter

RiB Newsletter #34

Watch AMA #50 Replay

Watch the replay of AMA #50 with Art, Erik and David from earlier this month. During this AMA, we kept the conversation more dev focused than usual! Come take a peek and see what the team had to say.

Join the Holo Team

We’re Hiring! Holo is excited to continue our mission by expanding our team. Check out the open positions below:

• Software Project Manager — Holo EMEA
• Junior Software Tester
• Project Manager — Holochain Component
• Front-End Web App Developer

Interested in building a hApp? Join the Holochain Developer Forum and start your journey!

If you have general questions about Holo, Holochain, or HoloPorts — or want to join our community — the best place to start is on our Twitter, Holochain, or Holo Reddits.

For specific questions or any technical issues regarding Holo or HoloPorts, you can read more, or contact us directly at help.holo.host.

Happy Holo Monday everyone, see you next month :)

— Sarah @ Holo

Monthly Roundup for Holo & Holochain was originally published in HOLO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Monthly Roundup for May 2022

Somehow we’ve made it to the halfway mark of the year already. Thanks for joining us on this journey, and if you’re new then we are glad to have you! Between launching the Holochain Developer Education Initiative and the upcoming launch of the newest hApp, Chess, there was a lot going on last month. Read all about it below:

Holo Launches the Holochain Developer Education Initiative

Holo Limited is very pleased to announce the launch of the Holochain Developer Education Initiative. In the coming two years we are committing upwards of $2M to build and foster an ecosystem of developers. This work builds on past efforts–especially those of the Holochain open dev community–and will create efficient, effective, and scalable curriculum to educate experienced developers on how to code and build hApps and products on Holochain.

Read more here: https://press.holo.host/214789-announcing-the-holochain-developer-education-initiative

Chess to be added to Longitudinal hApps test soon

Elemental Chat continues to work well with sharding enabled after two weeks of testing with approximately 1,000 people trying it out. We’re also evaluating Chess, the next hApp we’d like to publish concurrently to the Holo network that is running Elemental Chat. We’ll share more about Chess when and if we believe the app is ready to publish.

Regular Holo Dev Updates on Twitter

If you are curious about the — hot from the press dev updates — those can be found on Holo Twitter.

Holochain Dev Pulse 119

Earlier this month, we released a new version of Holochain Launcher with a lot of new features. I took it for a test run and I have to say… I’m excited. It feels like something my dad could actually use! The new Launcher is much more welcoming to non-technical users. I’m going to unbox it below, but first, the Holochain release notes for this week.

Read the whole Dev Pulse here!

Agent Key Stability in Holochain

Watch a clip from the last AMA where Erik Harris-Braun talks about what agent key stability looks like on Holochain.

Ecosystem Sessions — Generative Objects

Generative objects is an open-source meta low-code platform that empowers anyone with great ideas but not much tech know-how to create the tools and applications they need.

Watch the latest Ecosystem Session now: https://buff.ly/3lRqggu

Rust In Blockchain Newsletter

RiB Newsletter #35

Upcoming Holochain Rust & Developer Training AMA

AMA #51 will focus on the Holochain Developer Education Initiative, and more specifically the first training happening in July. Keep up to date on Twitter for an announcement about the AMA, and in the meantime please submit any questions you have here.

Join the Holo Team

We’re Hiring! Holo is excited to continue our mission by expanding our team. Check out the open positions below:

• Software Project Manager — Holo EMEA
• Junior Software Tester
• Project Manager — Holochain Component

Interested in building a hApp? Join the Holochain Developer Forum and start your journey!

If you have general questions about Holo, Holochain, or HoloPorts — or want to join our community — the best place to start is on our Twitter, Holochain, or Holo Reddits.

For specific questions or any technical issues regarding Holo or HoloPorts, you can read more, or contact us directly at help.holo.host.

Cheers to making it all the way to June. And thanks for reading if you made it this far ;)

— Sarah @ Holo

Monthly Roundup for Holo & Holochain was originally published in HOLO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Monthly Roundup for March 2022

It’s been a very exciting last month here at Holo! Read the whole Monthly Roundup to gain insight on what we’ve been up to, and what’s going on in the community.

Check out the *New* Holochain Roadmap

As Holo announced in their recent update, Holochain now has a public roadmap. I’m thoroughly excited about this, and I sincerely hope it helps you, dear hApp developers, get an idea of where we’re heading — and plan your development trajectory accordingly.

There are a lot of milestones planned, including ephemeral storage (non-permanent DHT data) and pub/sub (subscribe to DHT change events), but I want to call out one in particular that’s simultaneously the least and most interesting: Stable Validation.

Meta-currency: a step towards the Rheonomy

Read our latest think piece by Eric Harris-Braun on the Holochain blog. The Meta-currency article is designed to ‘Broaden our understanding of economics would give us new insights into addressing many of the biggest problems in the world.’

Read the full article on the Holochain blog.

Regular Holo Dev Updates on Twitter

If you are curious about the — hot from the press dev updates — those can be found on Holo Twitter.

Live Ecosystem Session with David Atkinson

David Atkinson held a live Ecosystem Session with IOEN (Inernet of Energy Network to disccuss what’s up next for the team! Watch the 45 minute session on YouTube.

Rust In Blockchain Newsletter

RiB Newsletter #33

Upcoming AMA #50

Come and join us for our next AMA on April 4th!

Join the Holo Team

We’re Hiring! Holo is excited to continue our mission by expanding our team. Check out the open positions below:

• Software Project Manager — Holo EMEA
• Junior Software Tester
• Project Manager — Holochain Component
• Front-End Web App Developer

Interested in building a hApp? Join the Holochain Developer Forum and start your journey!

If you have general questions about Holo, Holochain, or HoloPorts — or want to join our community — the best place to start is on our Twitter, Holochain, or Holo Reddits.

For specific questions or any technical issues regarding Holo or HoloPorts, you can read more, or contact us directly at help.holo.host.

As always, we are thrilled to be able to share in this incredible journey with you all, and your support is truly cherished. Hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s roundup, and we will catch you with more updates and news next month!

— Sarah @ Holo

Monthly Roundup for Holo & Holochain was originally published in HOLO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Monthly Roundup for February 2022

We can’t believe it’s already approaching the third month of the year. It's been a great start so far, and in his monthly roundup, we will take you through everything that’s been happening in February.

Holo Network Updated

Our third milestone in three months is complete! The “HoloPort Registration Usability” release is a huge one because of what it accomplishes on the backend.

Read more here.

3 Holo Milestones in 3 months

1800 people signed up for the DevCamp, which amazed us all. This was a huge increase from the previous DevCamp’s roughly 200 registrants. More and more people are hearing about Holochain, among them developers who may go on to create some really wonderful apps.

Web3, entangled

In response to many questions about Holochain’s fitness for Web3, and in the face of growing criticisms of Web3, my colleagues and I share why we think Holochain is capable of building Web3. Not Web3 as it exists today — centralised, expensive, and finance-oriented — but a truly people-powered web built with distributed ledger tech that isn’t blockchain-based.

Read the full article

Regular Holo Dev Updates on Twitter

If you are curious about the — hot from the press dev updates — those can be found on Holo Twitter.

Holo Token Listed on Huobi

Holo has now been listed on Huobi! Check out Huobi to buy and sell Holo Tokens.

Ecosystem Sessions & Holochain in Action

Ecosystem Sessions are long-form conversations with Holochain app builders on beliefs, the ins and outs of building distributed solutions, and a featured demo of the latest progress, while Holochain in action shows live demos using the Holochain infrastructure.

• Ecosystem Session — Kizuna Development Updates
• Holochain in Action — Grammatics of Location
• Holochain in Action — Holochain Sweettest & TDD

Rust In Blockchain Newsletter

RiB Newsletter #32

Join the Holo Team

We’re Hiring! Holo is excited to continue our mission by expanding our team. Check out the open positions below:

• NixOS System Administrator For Large Scale Distributed Network
• Company Operations Analyst
• Front-End Web App Developer

Interested in building a hApp? Join the Holochain Developer Forum and start your journey!

If you have general questions about Holo, Holochain, or HoloPorts — or want to join our community — the best place to start is on our Twitter, Holochain, or Holo Reddits.

For specific questions or any technical issues regarding Holo or HoloPorts, you can read more, or contact us directly at help.holo.host.

Always happy to share in these milestones and conversations with you. Hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s roundup, and we will catch you with more updates and news next month!

— Sarah @ Holo

Monthly Roundup for Holo & Holochain was originally published in HOLO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Monthly Roundup for January 2022

Happy Lunar New Year everyone! Welcome to our monthly roundup. January was an amazing start to 2022 for both Holo & Holochain and we loved getting to share it with you all.

Holochain & Web3

In response to many questions about Holochain’s fitness for Web3, and in the face of growing criticisms of Web3, my colleagues and I share why we think Holochain is capable of building Web3. Not Web3 as it exists today — centralised, expensive, and finance-oriented — but a truly people-powered web built with distributed ledger tech that isn’t blockchain-based.

Read the full article

FOSDEM 2022 is coming up!

Holochain is co-hosting the Web3 room again at FOSDEM 2022. I’d love to see up-and-coming Holochain-projects give talks there!

Learn More Here

Regular Holo Dev Updates on Twitter

If you are curious about the — hot from the press dev updates — those can be found on Holo Twitter.

Dev Camp 8 Huge Success

1800 people signed up for the DevCamp, which amazed us all. This was a huge increase from the previous DevCamp’s roughly 200 registrants. More and more people are hearing about Holochain, among them developers who may go on to create some really wonderful apps.

Ecosystem Sessions & Holochain in Action

Ecosystem Sessions are long-form conversations with Holochain app builders on beliefs, the ins and outs of building distributed solutions, and a featured demo of the latest progress, while Holochain in action shows live demos using the Holochain infrastructure.

• Ecosystem Session — Kizuna Development Updates
• Holochain in Action — Grammatics of Location
• Holochain in Action — Holochain Sweettest & TDD

Rust In Blockchain Newsletter

RiB Newsletter #31

Watch the replay of AMA 49

Last month we hosted AMA 49, where we talked about many things…..including when Beta and the next wave of HoloPorts! You don't want to miss this one, so watch the replay here.

Join the Holo Team

We’re Hiring! Holo is excited to continue our mission by expanding our team. Check out the open positions below:

• NixOS System Administrator For Large Scale Distributed Network
• Company Operations Analyst
• Front-End Web App Developer

Interested in building a hApp? Join the Holochain Developer Forum and start your journey!

If you have general questions about Holo, Holochain, or HoloPorts — or want to join our community — the best place to start is on our Twitter, Holochain, or Holo Reddits.

For specific questions or any technical issues regarding Holo or HoloPorts, you can read more, or contact us directly at help.holo.host.

As always, we are thrilled to be able to share in this incredible journey with you all, and your support is truly cherished. Hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s roundup, and we will catch you with more updates and news next month!

— Sarah @ Holo

Monthly Roundup for Holo & Holochain was originally published in HOLO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Welcome to our monthly roundup! October was nothing short of exciting as we gear up for a public release of Elemental Chat and shared our new Holo roadmap to keep our community up to date on what the future holds.

Q4 2021: Update on Milestones and Progress

Earlier this month, we shared our latest Leadership & Org Update with you all. You may have noticed an uptick in stories, blogs, apps, news and announcements coming from Holo recently. In large part this is simply because there is much more that can be built on Holochain than ever before. The proof of this reality is that the wider community of projects and developers are beginning to move with haste in their respective projects. Simultaneously the Holo development team is now unblocked. Certain feature development had been on pause until Holochain had finished updating to a necessary level of features and stability. This is huge.

In order to make the sequencing of our interdependent work more visible to our community, we refreshed our roadmap for Holo and included some key Holochain releases.

Read the full Leadership & Org Update.

3 More Holochain ReleasesI

In a Dev Pulse that was published last week, Paul talks through the latest 3 versions of Holochain that have been released. This Dev Pulse is packed full of information on not only the releases, but Dev Camp updates, networking fixes, and more information on Sweettest, a Rust-based Holochain testing framework. You won’t want to miss this update!

Read the full Dev Pulse.

Gosh, now that the dev team has moved to weekly releases, there’s a lot to catch up on when I skip a week! The most recent Holochain releases have a number of bug fixes that improve performance and reliability, along with a new feature (post_commit) and a few breaking changes.
- Paul d’Aoust

Regular Holo Dev Updates on Twitter

If you are curious about the — hot from the press dev updates — those can be found on Holo Twitter.

RedGrid: Carbon Neutral By 2030

Earlier this month, Paul wrote an excellent thought piece on RedGrid, which is building the internet of energy on Holochain. Throughout the article, we tackle the complexities of climate change, and exactly how RedGrid is making a difference. Read the whole article here.

Holochain Ecosystem Sessions

Ecosystem Sessions are long-form conversations with Holochain app builders on beliefs, the ins and outs of building distributed solutions, and a featured demo of the latest progress.

• Ecosystem Session — Elemental Chess

Rust In Blockchain Newsletter

RiB Newsletter #28

Holochain Dev Camp Continues

Holochain DevCamp #8 is continuing to go strong! Dev Camp participants and community devs are getting real-time support for their Rapid Application Development (RAD) tools from the Holochain dev team. These community-created tools make it much easier to build Holochain applications. Dev Campers have been building their own app using these RAD tools. These apps will then be easy for non-developers to install and use using the new Holochain launcher.

We will continue to post updates on the Holochain Twitter.

Watch the replay of AMA 48

Earlier this month we hosted AMA 48, where we gave vital details of the HoloPort Alpha Program. You can watch the replay here.

Join the Holo Team

We’re Hiring! Holo is excited to continue our mission by expanding our team. Check out the open positions below:

• Framework/App Test Developer
• Manager, Ethics & Compliance
• Full-Stack Web Developer w/ Node.js & Vue
• Legal and Operations Assistant

Interested in building a hApp? Join the Holochain Developer Forum and start your journey!

If you have general questions about Holo, Holochain, or HoloPorts — or want to join our community — the best place to start is on our Twitter, Holochain or Holo Reddits.

For specific questions or any technical issues regarding Holo or HoloPorts, you can read more, or contact us directly at help.holo.host.

We’ve loved sharing all of the progress we have been making with you, and look forward to what the future has in store. I hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s short news collection and will catch you with more updates and news next month.

— Sarah @ Holo

Monthly Roundup for Holo & Holochain was originally published in HOLO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Lead/Org Update

You may have noticed an uptick in stories, blogs, apps, news and announcements coming from Holo recently. In large part this is simply because there is much more that can be built on Holochain than ever before. The proof of this reality is that the wider community of projects and developers are beginning to move with haste in their respective projects. Simultaneously the Holo development team is now unblocked. Certain feature development had been on pause until Holochain had finished updating to a necessary level of features and stability. This is huge.

In order to make the sequencing of our interdependent work more visible to our community, we refreshed our roadmap for Holo and included some key Holochain releases.

Milestones Clarity Tied to Weekly Updates

We’ve renamed a few milestones for clarity but mostly we’ve included additional milestones to be able to more effectively tie our regular development updates to the milestones so that everyone can better understand where we are.

You will notice that we now have 9 of the Phase 3 milestones completed. An additional 7 of the milestones are what we call our work in progress, each of which is focused on by a specific sub-team. Every week, across the board, we are delivering features into test networks, usable builds for our community, and public releases.

Sharding Ready for Developers

In the past month the Holochain team released what we call the “Sharding Ready” release. If you are looking at it on Github, it is the release that is numbered 0.0.107. They have since delivered two additional releases that solidify and make those fundamental changes usable by community developers and by the Holo team. These releases of Holochain are precisely what the participants of the Dev Camp are using now for building, testing and deploying their own Holochain applications.

New Tools Make Rapid App Development Possible

Some amazing tools have also been made available on the tails of the Holochain release. The Launcher, our scaffolding tool, and the Dev Hub all make it easier for developers to adopt Holochain by saving them work and shortening their learning curve.

The Holochain Launcher is a dashboard that allows end users to install and run Holochain applications locally. This means that Holochain apps are easy to demo, easy to configure for testing by QA teams and community members — and ultimately easy for non-technical users to simply install and begin running on their own computers.

The scaffolding tool is the first in a set of Rapid Application Development tools — what’s known in the software world as RAD tools. The scaffolding tool provides a kickstart to the process of building an application. It allows new developers to lean on patterns that other more established Holochain developers have designed. It will also let non-developers who are members of product teams use business terms and logic for setting up the basics of an application. For example, if you are designing a blog, the scaffolding tool is where you would define concepts like a post and a list of posts.

Dev Campers Show RAD Tools Working

Session 3 of Dev Camp is where they introduced the RAD scaffolding tool to the participants and then assigned homework to participants to scaffold their first Holochain application. After that they will package the application and then run it from inside the Launcher.

DevHub Makes hApps Testable, Available to Devs

The DevHub is another tool that is being tested by a few of our community developers now. It’s a developer console where hApps are uploaded and tested, and where they will be reviewed/rated by other ecosystem developers. This component is critical to Holo in the sense that our Publisher Portal will look to it as the source for all Holochain applications that can be published to the Holo network for hosting.

Work in Progress

This week our team just finished getting all the various applications and services related to the Holo Platform updated to the Sharding Ready release of Holochain. This means that now Holo hApps and Infrastructure are working with a version of Holochain that exceeds all of our prior baseline performance metrics as compared to the previous releases of Elemental Chat.

There is so much underway — so we’ve added a small overlay to the roadmap that shows the following parts we are already working on.

Next Up: Elemental Chat Public Release (still just a Prototype)

Yes, with the performance gains with Holochain, we’re now preparing to let people use Elemental Chat on Holo. We’re working through testing and release processes now so stay tuned for announcements.

Publisher Portal & HoloFuel Readying for Pre-Release Testing

The Holo team is steadily working on the first pre-release of the Publisher Portal as well as a release of the HoloFuel app with basic transactions of Test Fuel. Development on these two applications had paused previously because certain features required changes in Holochain that are now available with the recent Holochain update.

Holochain 0.1.x HDK Release

Holochain is preparing to do their first bump to a 0.1.x release. This indicates a greater level of usability and reliability. Our release numbering is based on the standard of Semantic Versioning, where the first number is a major release, the second is a minor release and the third is a patch. Each time a project moves over one decimal in a startup project, it is a milestone worth celebrating as it typically indicates increased stability and documentation for the developers who are dependent on the project.

HoloPort Registration Useability

Another effort currenlty underway in the Holo team is the new key generation process for HoloPorts. This work will revise the current HoloPort Registration process, adding in critical steps for security as well as making the process more extensible for both our operations team and for the hosts who are registering. This will specifically set us up to build other features required for beta like multi-port registration and identity verification.

Wrapping it up with Community & Customer Service

As we move forward today we are entering a period of increased complexity for our Community and Customer Support folks. For most of our Dev cycles up until now, we’ve had two sets of users — Hosts and Holochain developers. Others who follow the project have wanted to know what is possible with this new tech, what is available and how it works, and many others have wanted to better understand how it all relates to our token and eventually HoloFuel. This past month, however, saw us push forward to have multiple new tools and applications that are being used by many more developers and now also the end users of the applications those developers have built.

This means that non developers are asking more questions on our support channels and forums. This will only increase as we do pre-releases of HoloFuel and the Publisher Portal and as other projects make more and more Holochain apps available on the Launcher. We’re going to be working diligently with the community on ways to direct those questions to all the right places.

So thank you for all the interest and engagement — and a special thanks too for your patience as we stretch and evolve through these wonderful growing pains.

-Mary

Q4 2021: Update on Milestones and Progress was originally published in HOLO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Welcome to our monthly roundup! August has been a very exciting month for us, as we opened the HoloPort Alpha program, look to grow our team, and made an important update to our Elemental Chat.

Launch of the HoloPort Alpha Program

Earlier this week, we officially launched the much anticipated HoloPort Alpha Program. Individuals can choose to volunteer their HoloPort or receive a small stipend in HoloFuel based on meeting the minimum metrics each month.

Learn more about the HoloPort Alpha Program

Holo Hosted Elemental Chat Reaching New Heights

We’ve been testing the Holo hosted version of Elemental Chat for two weeks now, and so far everything is working well. Most messages arrive quickly, even as new participants join and post messages. Earlier in the month, we reached a new record of 245 participants who’ve posted 5405 messages in 94 channels! We are thrilled to continue iterating on the Elemental Chat and will continue to update as it grows.

Read the full Dev Pulse 101

Holochain v0.0.103 Release

This is the big news in Holochain v0.0.103. Many of you who follow Holochain come from the cryptocurrency world, so naturally, you’re probably interested in Holochain as a platform for building new cryptocurrencies. But you probably also know that they won’t work like traditional cryptocurrencies. So how will they work? Using a technique called countersigning. Because every participant in a hApp has their own source chain, every transaction is a bit like a cross-chain atomic swap (not exactly, but close enough).

Paul has put together an incredible explanation on how countersigning will work on Holochain in the latest version update for Holochain.

Read more on Countersigning in Holochain v0.0.103

Regular Holo Dev Updates on Twitter

If you are curious about the — hot from the press dev updates — those can be found on Holo Twitter.

Holochain is the Ideal Network for NFTs

Are non-fungible tokens the biggest thing in crypto ever? Apparently, they are bigger than DeFi, Hip Hop, and Hollywood. We’ll see. But the prospect of immutably tracking ownership of things without centralized intermediaries certainly has people’s attention. And, in many cases, their money: the first half of 2021 saw close to $2.5B in NFT sales, with some tokens going for millions apiece.

So, it might seem that NFTs rely on blockchain technology. It turns out, though, that NFTs are more straightforward, more versatile, and more efficient to run on Holochain than on blockchain. In this article we look at three ways this is true and why. But first a word on what it means for something to be ‘fungible’.

Read Art & Josh’s collab: Holochain Is an Ideal Framework for NFTs

Holochain Ecosystem Sessions

Ecosystem Sessions are long-form conversations with Holochain app builders on beliefs, the ins and outs of building distributed solutions, and a featured demo of the latest progress.

• Ecosystem Session — A Cultural Computer
• Ecosystem Session — Mechanics of Memetic Bridges

Rust In Blockchain Newsletter

RiB Newsletter #26

Holo is Hiring

We’re Hiring! Holo is excited to continue our mission by expanding our team. Check out the open positions below:

• Framework/App Test Developer
• Technical QA and Software Delivery Manager
• Manager, Ethics & Compliance

Watch the replay of AMA 47

Although it may seem like old news, last month we hosted AMA 47, where we gave vital details of the (just launched) HoloPort Alpha Program. You can watch the replay here.

Interested in building a hApp? Join the Holochain Developer Forum and start your journey!

If you have general questions about Holo, Holochain, or HoloPorts — or want to join our community — the best place to start is on our Twitter, Holochain or Holo Reddits.

For specific questions or any technical issues regarding Holo or HoloPorts, you can read more, or contact us directly at help.holo.host.

We’ve had an exciting month, and are (as always) thrilled to be sharing our journey with you. I hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s short news collection and will catch you with more updates and news next month.

— Sarah @ Holo

Monthly Roundup for Holo & Holochain was originally published in HOLO on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.