Aloha, welcome to Uqbar’s weekly rollup. Every Monday we’ll provide you with exciting updates on everything Uqbar: dev reports, media mentions, and general happenings around the Urbit ecosystem.

Media and News

0

Cometh the hour, cometh the new episode of The Network Age podcast. The boys are joined by esteemed CoinDesk reporters Marc Hochstein (~fodrex-malmev) and Tracy Wang to discuss the major crypto narratives of 2022. In particular, they dive into FTX (covered in-depth by Tracy for CoinDesk) and its implications for the coming year, as well as the general craziness of crypto reporting and the importance of being "long volatility." Then, the crew looks to 2023 to consider federal crypto regulation, the rise of zero-knowledge rollups, and protocol-level advances for Ethereum. All this plus polycules, Urbit, and buying Bitcoin in person from a man in the park.

1

Our own ~dachus-tiprel built his own %blog software in a weekend just to prove it could be done. According to dachus, his blog software differs from other Urbit blog offerings in a few ways:

• much more customizable in terms of

  • adding new themes (just put arbitrary CSS in the markdown)

  • binding to a URL (literally anything goes unless it's / /apps* or /~*)

• lives in one unified interface, as opposed to several separate apps

• has a realtime preview while you are writing

• it is an extremely small codebase (just 100 lines of hoon + ~200 js)

• posts can be viewed by anyone (no planet required) by default

Can’t wait to write about this in my Livejournal.

Urbit at Large

2

Riva Tez has had her Urbit Assembly 2022 talk turned into a movie. The talk is all about conviction in the face of moral relativism and ends in an emotional crescendo on the line “The World Still Fights Holy Wars”. But if you want real emotional energy, check out the movie made of ~hocwyn-tipwex’s Assembly 2022 talk.

3

AJ LaMarc & co. have released Urbit’s first app written entirely in JavaScript. Why would anyone do this? Is it cursed? The logic is that Urbit actually already gives a great product fit for self-hosted web3 apps, as AJ previously demonstrated with a Uniswap front end. TomeDB offers a networked Urbit database and JS client package so users can start building these sorts of apps themselves right away. One imagines Urbit’s two native fart apps will soon be joined by a chorus of Urbit backends.

4

The DC Urbit Meetup is happening February 23. If you are already living in DC by choice, this is another no-brainer!

5

Dalten Collective and the Quartus boys have done another Urbit first, in that they have crowd funded an update to Wordle clone %wrdu. The new version, dubbed %urdl, has already met its $2000 funding goal, thanks in part to international money man and professional %wrdu player ~habsul-rignyr and other generous patrons. %urdl upgrades to 5 letters and multiplayer components, so when it comes out ~habsul invites you all to come get rekt.

Uqbar Network: Developer and Operations Updates

Another busy week for the Uqbar team—check out some of their accomplishments:

6

~fabnev-hinmur got %pongo to a working, stable state. The not-Tennessee of apps!

7

~hodzod-walrus introduced a PR to change the sequencer to processing transactions on a rolling basis, with signed receipts returned to callers for business finality. He also did work towards using receipts in %pokur. (BPA free.)

8

~hosted-fornet did bugfixes, better error messaging, and added file templates to avoid blank new files. Thus ending The Curse.

9

~sillus-mallus also did tons of bugfixes and UX polishing, making the app better than code + editor and communicating the status of the ziggurat agent*.

Recommended Reading & Listening

10

Our Fearless Leader, T. M. Basile Sportif, pontificates on the post-Kraken world.

Fin

That’s it for this week. Be sure to follow everyone and everything listed in this week’s rollup.

Also, drop by our Twitter to learn when Uqbar’s Office Hours will be. And remember that Urbit’s On-nomi (Happy Hour) every Thursday at 1830 Eastern at the Urbit Hacker House on Gather Town.

And if you’re on Urbit, join our group at:

~hocwyn-tipwex/uqbar-event-horizon-forever.

If you’re NOT on Urbit, amend your living. We can help you with that: find us on Discord (preferred) or Telegram.

Until next time!

*It is possible to get sick of writing bad puns, so this one is left as an exercise for the reader. A strict requirement is reference to Mesopotamian real estate.