Checking on Urbit
Recently we’ve got an e-mail from Urbit, the alternative version of the internet that’s been under development for the last decade, with their latest achievements. Now we want to share them with you.
💡 Before going further we recommend you read our other articles, which give more detail on Urbit ecosystem and its structure. Otherwise, all these ships, galaxies, stars, planets, moons, and comets might just confuse you.
Now let’s go through the most important parts of the newsletter:
- Urbit now provides courses for developers in online and offline formats, which cover Hoon programming language and the development of applications for Urbit. If you’ve already done with the introductory phase, you can inscribe for the first-ever App Workshop Live which starts next week on April 12th.
- After learning you can take part in the grant program. Even if you don’t have an idea of what to build, you may choose one of the ideas that Urbit team wants to see built.
- For those who are not into studying Hoon, Holium released TomeDB, a library for building Urbit applications in JavaScript. That will make Urbit development accessible to the largest pool of developers and will definitely speed up ecosystem expansion.
- Urbit Studio, a content platform with the capability to handle paid subscriptions for self-hosted content, was launched. Creators can get monetize their content and also earn revenue from hosting, by bringing their audience onto Urbit .
- Multiple apps were developed including %blog and portal which allow creating and sharing various content on Urbit.
- Core development is moving fast as well as development of the apps. Lately, the core team at the Urbit Foundation has made over a dozen releases across the Urbit OS and runtime. These releases contain contributions from 30 individuals. A main component of the network workflow are everyday meetings which aim to review and advance open pull requests. These meetings are open to anyone that wants to attend and contribute or just listen.
- Tlon, the company responsible for creating Urbit itself and the most popular hosting provider, who runs your Urbit for you and takes care of any maintenance and updates required, opened up free planet hosting. A limited number of ships are available each day on their website, so you may try your luck.
- Early March an application-only Urbit developer conference “Volcano Summit” took place on the slopes of El Salvador’s Santa Ana volcano. Unfortunately nothing was recorded except for this talk. As the Urbit team says, “you just had to be there.” Well, we’ll try to attend the next one.
Seems that Urbit has been developing rapidly lately. According to the project roadmap, we will see a lot of updates this spring. We are looking forward to more announcements and achievements and we continue to Observe.