NEAR Community Update: March 27th, 2020

Welcome (back) to NEAR community update, This month has been a doozy. We have community and contributors from around the world: Havana, Russia, Ukraine, Berlin, NYC, Texas, Montana, Italy, North Carolina, Denver, Spain, Africa, India, etc. Now, more than ever is the time for community and action.  We've been meeting every week to share local updates, ideas, and to talk about building solutions to the spillover challenges from the rapid changes we're experiencing globally. If you want to have a chat, listen, or join the next virtual hang please join our Discord or Telegram and drop us a message. [caption id="attachment_3075" align="aligncenter" width="2276"] NEAR Coffee Chat[/caption]

NEW NEAR example applications

We're excited to showcase our examples page at https://near.dev. We've got a number of simple smart contracts that will boost new developers building projects. Each example demonstrates various capabilities of NEAR from basic NEAR Wallet login to cross-contract calls. These examples are written in Rust and AssemblyScript and tagged by technology and category. We'll be building more examples and would love to add user-contributed examples as well! [caption id="attachment_3077" align="aligncenter" width="918"] Check-out our example applications[/caption] To provide the lowest barrier to entry we're using Gitpod, a service that spins up a development environment with the example running. The workflow is simple: visit the examples page, select one from the grid and click the "Open in Gitpod" button. You may use the online IDE in Gitpod to alter, build, deploy, and test right in the browser. After trying an example in the Gitpod sandbox, the next natural step is to clone the repository and work locally. Each example has a "Browse on Github" button for that. Happy coding!

ARterra’s simulated sport games 

ARterra is a fan engagement platform that elevates engagement by rewarding fans with NFT tokens, coins, and AR gaming rewards. Flux and ARterra have partnered to bring custom markets to esports simulations including Madden and 2K. [caption id="attachment_3079" align="aligncenter" width="790"] Check-out the tweet here![/caption]

Engineering Update

We have enhanced the user experience of our CLI tool NEAR shell, which now features a smoother login flow. Just run ‘near login’ as normal and you'll see how easy it has become. Additionally, we’re upgrading some tooling such that we’ll now require NodeJS version 12. Makes sure to upgrade with ‘npm install near-shell -g’. The last outstanding feature, namely garbage collection of old states, is undergoing thorough review:

• Part of it, responsible for maintaining refcounts on blocks, is already added;
• We are working on backward compatibility and migration tests;
• Network metrics are recorder here.

Other than that we are full speed stabilizing and fixing issues, e.g: 

• Addressing the memory leak in the Reed Solomon library we use; and
• Fixing tx forwarding on epoch boundaries.

How You Can Get Involved

Join the NEAR Contributor Program. If you would like to host events, create content or provide developer feedback, we would love to hear from you! To learn more about the program and ways to participate, please head over to the website. If you’re just getting started, learn more in The Beginner’s Guide to NEAR Protocol or read the official White Paper. Stay up to date with what we’re building by following us on Twitter for updates, joining the conversation on Discord and subscribing to our newsletter to receive updates right to your inbox.