Musings from our fourth Holochain Meetup
It had been just over a month since our last epic gathering of Holochain enthusiasts and curious newcomers. Generally people sign up through our Meetup page, but we had a new one this time.. a person came because it popped up in his Delta crypto wallet! Hey, whatever works.
We hold our Meetups in the ballroom of the reverent old YBF building, originally a wool store and warehouse (“YBF” stands for “York Butter Factory”, which is just around the corner).
While we were setting up a random Danish dude (apologies, random dude, if you aren’t Danish) wandered in looking for the AWS Meetup. I explained this was Holochain, received the usual “what’s that”, and this time I started talking about grid computing and the SETI screensaver that searched for extraterrestrial life while you slept. His eyes lit up: he explained where he worked long ago their accountant had burst in flipping out over phone charges overnight. As I started to explain Holo, he took over the narrative, correctly extrapolating to thousands of computers, and coming to his own conclusion about the future of cloud computing. He wandered off muttering and decidedly more uncertain than when he walked in :).
We also had a visit from YBF’s Courtney and her husband Farley, making sure the A/V worked and we had everything we needed. Courtney is this human dynamo who answers our emails from everywhere in the world; they had just returned from sailing their boat off the coast of Maine after successfully selling a fashion magazine in the UK (as she pointed out, not an easy task in these lean times). They had a few Meetups on that night in the building, and then were off for a week in Sydney early in the morning.
For this Meetup I sat in the audience, with key Holochain developers Philip Beadle and David Meister running the show. Like each Meetup before it, we were in new territory: this time it was we plebs seeing a HoloPort for the first time, and David leading us through Holonix, the Linux flavour that runs on it as “HoloPortOS”.
David went first and emphasised that a Holonix design goal is “predictability” for the developer, since there are so many moving parts at the moment (and probably forever). Holonix is based on NixOS whose main deal is a “declarative system configuration model”. This theme of trying to define as much of what can be defined runs to Holochain’s choice of the Rust language, an environment I like to call “brutal”.. an unforgiving compiler and a language that cares about memory management (not your optional malloc and calloc here). It also compiles to WebAssembly or “WASM”, making it fast. (Phil made the offhand comment that they had made their own version of the Rust compiler as well.. just another casual statement that puts me in awe of these people).
The evolution of Holochain products is also moving fast (from June 2018 when I first met Phil and October when my company RedGrid chose Holochain, the rate of change, and the rate of rate of change, has been phenomenal). Holonix is now available in an operating system-agnostic shell called nix-shell (at the time of this writing, you need a Vagrant virtual machine on Windows, but I have no doubt that will be unnecessary in a month or so). Running
nix-shell https://holochain.love gives you everything you need in one hit.. the latest Holochain code, but also the latest Rust compiler. Everything is rescanned by hash each time the shell is opened, and cleaned up afterwards. This is very cool. A few months ago David and I talked about configuration management in this brave new world, where a change, any change, changes the hash and the build becomes different. In terms of Holochain nodes, this means that those who haven’t updated lose their neighbours on the DHT, something I’ve dubbed the “where did everybody go” scenario. That’s the thing about distributed networks, the future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed. Phil coined the phrase “eventual” on how code behaves.
You also have the option of leaving things setup through a default.nix file for finer control, but we’ll see for our own development which works best.
Phil was up next with slides and a demo. His passion is identity, and taking back control of your data from Web 2.0, instead of your current state as a “marketing meatbag”. He has been working on Personas: you are still you, but different social situations require different conventions.. you may be “Phil” to friends, “Philip” at work, “Dad” at home, etc. Personas are a key component going forward on almost any Holochain hApp and RedGrid will definitely be working with it.
Next up, HoloPorts. Phil had a few key points he wanted to impress: he has been working with his device for months, and this is NOT a prototype. They’ve done that, “this is not a drill”. Working with the Holochain community for eight months is far from the madding crowds of the cryptocurrency scene (I talk at length about the “unlearning” from blockchain to here). They are quietly building an ethical community, and it is profound. Even producing hardware devices is not for the faint of heart; for a world market you must pass and affix safety certifications from each jurisdiction: UL, CSA, CE, and RCM (formerly A-tick and C-tick) here in Australia. All of them. Each proving to that part of the world you will not electrocute someone, or screw up radio signals, or be screwed up by someone. And because a HoloPort connects to the Internet, you need more certifications by telco regulators like ACMA (Australian Communications and Media Authority). And then it has to run Holo, connecting “your grandma’s” browser to these new hApps with no change in UX. These people are changing everything (they are even changing and creating project management tools for how to run a worldwide distributed organisation).
Phil provided a demo of the Holochain Basic Chat hApp, which “bridges” to the Personas hApp. Way back in October was a rudimentary version written in Golang.. this one is light years ahead. The front end is clean (because Holochain now allows that separation) and as a developer I was thrilled to see “discovery”.. the Phil persona “found” the David persona on the same DHT in a second. Again, my company is keen to exploit this.
He ended up showing more new stuff: your Holo admin console page, and the Holo Store. Very nice.
We ended the evening like we always do, with extremely animated discussions (our first Meetup went to midnight). The fact is, these demonstrations and last month’s closed Devcamp sessions, tell me the best is yet to come, and Holochain will fundamentally shake up a Web 2.0 world that desperately needs it.
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