Golem GitHub Digest #5: diving into the New Golem alpha testnet

What’s in store for this Digest?

Welcome to the 5th GitHub Digest! We sneakily pushed back this release one week longer than usual since GitHub Digest (#4) 3 weeks ago. With having covered much of the non-technicals in the Community Update, our goal of the technical development being contained in the Alpha Reveal, and not wanting to spoil anything there was not much content left to cover. That brings us to this week where we’re excited to cover our progress AND not spoil it! Let’s dive in.

So, what’s new in the Golem GitHub?

Since our last update the development team working on the yagna repository, which is the implementation for New Golem, have been busy to say the least. There have been 7 new releases leading up to the alpha reveal. The team wanted to make sure that the features of the alpha were as ready as they could be for external testing so we could provide bounties for developers to run through and provide us with valuable feedback.

To guide developers along the journey of the alpha and hopefully show how easy this test process can be we created a flash tutorial and video run-through. While the alpha reveal and feedback is targetedtargetted towards a developer audience, stillsill anyone with just a little bit of command-line knowledge should be able to run through the tutorial. If you happen to be on Windows 10 you could always give it a go by activating WSL and following the ubuntu tutorial/video steps from there, we’d be interested to hear how it goes!

If you watched the tutorial you would have heard us mention “yapapi” which stands for Yagna Python API which we Git Clone and use the “blender.py” file to render some frames on the New Golem devnet. Yapapi is installed using pip and has had a number of releases leading up to and even after the alpha reveal.

It’s important to note that this is simply an example, in this case, 70 lines of python code using New Golem’s High Level API to render 3D frames but you could do whatever you like. The reason we are building New Golem is to make a much more flexible set of infrastructure to handle use-cases which wouldn’t have been possible on what will eventually become Legacy Golem (currently, Clay Golem).

Digest wrap-up!

The most important topic we wanted to highlight in this GitHub Digest is of course the Alpha Reveal for New Golem. For any of you curious bees 🐝 out there who want to watch requestor payments being sent, you can follow the NGNT Rinkeby testnet token on Etherscan.

It’s important to note that this release is focused on requestors only, we understand that a large portion of the Golem community are providers-only and on Clay Golem CHEM@Golem will continue to run (creating up to a potential of over 1 billion tasks) over the next coming months, provided Ethereum gas prices can stay reasonably low enough.

For feedback and with the hopes to help facilitate Golem requestor discussion, we’ve decided to create a Discourse page. Currently, most developer discussion is contained within our Discord community chat we notice that it’s easy for important discussions to quickly becoming difficult to find for new community members joining. We will continue to build up the Discourse community to gradually make it a more valuable resource for requestors and developers.

That’s all we have for you for this week’s Golem GitHub Digest. See you next time!