Thanksgiving with NEAR | November 29th, 2019
COMMUNITY
November 29, 2019
If you are celebrating Thanksgiving, we hope that you have an amazing time. Our team has taken the holiday off but there is always time for a community update. So here it is – Enjoy!

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, we want to give a shout out to our community i.e. to You! We are building NEAR with a large ecosystem of developers, users, and supporters. Without your feedback, support and contribution, we would not have been able to move at this pace.

Our warriors are still going strong on Stake Wars. Fun fact, someone launched a phishing attack (stay sharp and don’t get fooled). You can read more on last week’s retrospective here. Note that we are publishing a retrospective every week on our blog.

Consistency is key! We are working hard on providing more educational material on NEAR Protocol. Continuing, the fourth NEAR Lunch and Learn Episode is out and focuses on Nightshade. Alex covers block production, approvals, separation of transactions into chunks, data availability, and finality.

Happy Thanksgiving! Photo by Randy Fath on Unsplash
COMMUNITY UPDATE
We are heavily working on community programs and redefining the structure and goal of existing ones. Stay tuned for further updates. 
Anais Urlichs (i.e. me) showed off some of the developer tools available on NEAR and gave a sneak peek into some of the new documentation at LederZ’s developer meetup in Berlin.
UPCOMING EVENTS
Next up, our second Hack Night! We had a lot of fun welcoming community members in our office in San Francisco. This Wednesday is the second edition. Not only are we able to provide 1-to-1 support and answer dev questions but the feedback also allows us to improve NEAR developer tools and the documentation. 

If you are unable to come, we would still love to hear from you! Your feedback will help us shape the developer experience on NEAR.

Anais showing off the Docs
WRITING AND CONTENT
If you want to learn more on how to get started building smart contracts on NEAR, Colin Eberhardt shared his experience in his post “WebAssembly on the Blockchain and JavaScript Smart Contracts”.
The fourth episode of our “Lunch and Learn” series is out. This time Alex is focusing on Nightshade, NEAR’s consensus design. 
Curious how Stake Wars is going and how you can get involved? Here is last week’s retrospective; also available in Chinese, translated by one of our amazing ambassadors. For further updates, join our Discord. 
Answer to “What gets you excited about the crypto space?” by Sasha
ENGINEERING UPDATES
178 PRs across 25 repos by 25 authors. Featured repos:nearcore,nearlib,near-shell,near-wallet,near-bindgen, assemblyscript-json, nomicon, near-fiddle-api, near-runtime-ts, near-contract-helper, borsh, stakewars and near-explorer;

Published v0.4.7 of nearcore
VRF implementation
Runtime stability improvement
Nightly test infrastructure
Making the Finality Gadget respect weights in nearcore
Release binary to gcloud in nearcore
Version 0.17.2 of nearlib
Switch rewards to 30% for function call only in nearcore
Allow genesis tool to specify shards to track in nearcore
Allow having conditional compilation and other method level attributes in near-bindgen
Release of version 0.14.2 of near-shell 
We now have a search box in near-explorer
Expose locked balance to smart contracts in near-bindgen
Dashboard transaction history in near-wallet
We’ve hit the 400 stars mark on GitHub!
https://upscri.be/633436/