Updated Quick Start Guide, the Gift of HoloNET, and Conversations that Matter on the Holochain Forum

Holochain Dev Pulse 44

Summary

The focus this week is less on updates from the Core development team and more on highlighting contributions that are helping to build recognition for Holochain and foster community among Holochain developers. We have a new and improved Quick Start Installation Guide, as well as a community-contributed library for connecting .NET applications to Holochain instances. Last but not least, check out the Conversation that Matters on our Holochain Forum.

Highlights

1. Improvements to Quick Start Page

2. Introducing HoloNET

3. Forum participation and community responses

Details

Holochain Dev Pulse August 25 — September 1, 2019

1. Improvement to Quick Start Page

We listened to the feedback from many of you over the past few weeks about the challenges you were having with the Quick Start Guide for Installing Holochain. We’re always looking to improve the Quick Start Page so that people can begin developing without any hiccups. It’s so easy for things to get out of date or for one seemingly minor change to derail a developer’s experience.

Hopefully, these latest updates will make installation easier to understand and address any challenges you’ve been having. As always, we welcome suggestions for how the Quick Start Page — or any of our documentation — can serve you better.

Quick Start Page

2. Introducing HoloNET, a library for connecting a .NET application to a Holochain instance

David Ellams, an active developer in the community, has gifted HoloNET to the public as an open-source library.

HoloNET allows you to manage a conductor, connect to running DNA instances, respond to disconnections, call zome functions, handle signals, and more.

It’s part of a much larger project, which includes an effort to build an HDK for .NET that will let you write DNAs in C#. David would also love help maintain HoloNET and get his .NET HDK project started. You can discuss HoloNET with him on our forum.

Thank you to David and all the developers and visionaries who make our community so vibrant and collaborative!

Vibrant Community

3. Forum participation and community responses

We’ve been thrilled by how many of you have been participating on the Holochain Forum.

You’re making it a place where developers can not only learn more about Holochain and solve problems, but also collaborate and build community.

As one commenter put it in a recent thread, “It warmed my heart to see all the people coming into the intro thread with their own personalities and desires to share a bit of their story, greet old friends, and make new connections.”

Conversations That Matter

Others have expressed appreciation for the Forum in helping them get out of their silos and see all the potential opportunities to be had with Holochain technology — in many different types of projects and in many different parts of the world. For an example of the thought-provoking discussions happening on the Forum, check out the recent thread answering the question, “Why does Holochain matter to you?” Many of you see Holochain not just as an innovative technology, but also as a vehicle for addressing societal problems. Needless to say, we hope you’re correct!

We hope you will continue these discussions by weighing in on last week’s Conversations That Matters topic on the Forum, “What’s your greatest challenge in developing a Holochain app?”

The responses so far have been really illuminating. For example, one commenter said,

“The responsibility of the developer to consider all possible attacks and exploits is overwhelming. This constantly disrupts my creative flow and limits my ambitions. But that’s also kind of the point of a data integrity engine — in a sense, the DNA is the data security layer. hApps are also much more than that, since most people interested in building Holochain apps aren’t as keen about how they “enable you to define validation logic” as they are about the new capacities Holochain apps grant us on a collective level.”

Join the conversation by logging in or registering on the Holochain Forum today!

Holochain Development Status:

For all changes related to this release, please see the changelog.

Dev Pulse — Vol 44: HoloNet

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