Hello friends, collaborators and community members!
Next coming Thursday (late Wednesday night US time) I will be hosting a code deep dive and Q&A on the Holo-REA resource coordination framework.
The call will be held for a pacific/EU audience at Feb 20 7am UTC / 6pm AEDT / 5pm AEST / 4pm JST / 3pm AEWT / 8am CET / 7am WET (night-owls from the USA welcome). An invite link can be found on the public Holochain community calendar— please click here to access the meeting invite.
We’re seeking the attendance of experienced Rust developers, as well as Holochain core & hApp developers who are experimenting with complex architectural patterns and seeking to push the envelope of what is possible for highly modular & extensible app frameworks.
One of our goals for the Holo-REA project is to make experimenting with distributed coordination technologies as accessible as possible. The broader context of this call will discuss the role that modularisation of zome code plays in working toward this goal, and the successes & shortcomings of the current tech stack in providing an accessible environment. We will discuss how non-technical users can innovate with complex social architectures by plugging together general-purpose DNA modules in various arrangements.
We are also hoping to have a few people on the call who are new to Holochain but experienced in developing with other distributed systems (eg. blockchains & gossip protocols), so the hope is that we can have some very deep technical discussions that explore Holochain’s particular architectural patterns and design decisions in relation to other systems.
We estimate there will be 60-90 minutes of content to cover but have allocated 2 hours for the call so that there is plenty of time for questions after the planned deep dive. The current plan is to explore the system from the UI downwards, and then to loop back and reflect on the current state of affairs and explore how we can streamline complex Holochain app development processes for new contributors. We will discuss:
- UI frameworks, tooling & ease-of-use vs developer safety
- GraphQL, its benefits and its role in distributed systems
- How to write really nice integration tests for your Holochain apps (and why this is good even though integration tests are a scam)
- Zomes vs. DNAs and best-practises for app composition
- Zome API patterns: inter and intra-DNA record architectures
- Storage abstractions, best-practises and principles for addressing data in distributed systems
- Transactionality and consistency guarantees
- The guts of Rust and low-level code optimisations & type guarantees
- Common gotchas in hApp development
- Aims & desires for mixin zomes & library functionality
- Possibilities for declarative hApp generation and “compile-time development meta-frameworks”
- Various comparisons between Holochain app development, design concerns and those of blockchain & other distributed systems
There will also be some time to discuss integration of Holo-REA into other projects and code examples showing how this may be achieved, though the focus of the call is on technical architecture and so most of this will be covered in the context of “best practises for app composition”.
We hope to see as many developers as possible on this call, but for those who can’t be present to ask questions in person we will be recording the call and posting online shortly afterwards.
Looking forward to seeing you all then! 
