NEAR Community Update: January 17th, 2020
COMMUNITY
January 17, 2020
Welcome to our first Community Update of 2020. This is a weekly summary of our progress and community. As you might realise, we decided to change the structure of our community update. If you have any thoughts, please let us know what you think. Want something mentioned? Tweet us at @NEARProtocol or send us a message.

Content 
Tune in to Ep. 32 of NEAR Protocol’s Whiteboard Series with @celoHQ to hear from Time Moreton
Evgeny’s tweet thread explaining transactions in NEAR
Have a read of Flux’ use case series. The best part? — They publish new ones every Friday
Our must watch

Alex’ sharding jam with Dean Eigenmann and Ryan Zurrer

Call for Participation
We want to hear from you! Will you take 15 seconds to fill out this survey so we can make more of the kind of content you love? 
Stardust: One of our beta program projects just released their integration guide. If you have experience with nodejs and would like to help out by providing some feedback, please reach out to Canaan: [email protected].
Community
Illia, Amos and several NEAR core developers just came back from an event series and hackathon in China. Have a look at the pictures on our Discord.
We did a complete overhaul of our community channels. Please join us in our new Telegram channels for development and validators.
Engineering
108 PRs across 31 repos by 28 authors. Featured repos: nearcore, near-bindgen-as, near-explorer, near-bridge, nearlib, near-runtime-ts, near-wallet, create-near-app, near-fiddle-api and near-shell

Responding to view requests from a different actor than the actor that produces blocks to ensure requests do not interfere with chain maintenance in nearcore
Limiting the number of blocks / chunks per height to prevent spamming in nearcore
New infrastructure to execute smart contracts from python tests in nearcore
Release 0.4.12 of nearcore
Added near dev-deploy which allows developer to deploy contract easily on throwaway account (similar to studio) during development in near-shell
We made our tooling compatible with GitPod (for now onlyhttps://github.com/nearprotocol/near-chess converted)
Added account list in near-explorer
Added EthRelay in near-bridge
Use near-bindgen-as in near-runtime-ts
Expose batch action promise API in near-runtime-ts
Stake Wars is on hold until the implementation of Doomslug is fully finalized and our internal testing becomes all green.
Upcoming Events 
We are going to be at ETHDenver between the 14th and 16th of February
And at the same time, you can meet us at SF Developer Week Expo and Hackathon
Are you a developer, student, or entrepreneur interested in joining us at DevWeek2020? Fill out this brief survey for a chance to win two free tickets!

@One of our events in Shanghai earlier this month; kudos to our co-hosts HashQuark and IOSG
https://upscri.be/633436/