This past week, we hosted the hackNY fellows class of 2019 at our office in One World Trade Center! hackNY is a program that connects talented student technologists with innovative tech startups in New York City, seeking to empower students with strong technical skills and promote inclusivity in tech. The two founders of hackNY, Chris Wiggins, Associate Professor of Mathematics at Columbia University and Chief Data Scientist at NYTimes, and Evan Korth, Professor of Computer Science at NYU, spoke about the history of the tech community in New York City, and how NY can continue to grow to become a resilient community that takes advantage of the multi-dimensional nature of the city.

We are excited to introduce Sinan Karabocuoglu from Istanbul as our newest software development intern. Fun fact in his own words: “I’m a huge fan of Marvel and DC comics; and I love playing volleyball and basketball with my friends.”
Sinan will be working on the Cardstack Protocol implementation, where he gets to build new cards using the recently upgraded Card SDK. Our goal is to make it easy for someone as young as Sinan to build applications with Cardstack.

Here’s a general update to bring you up to speed on our recent developments! In case you missed some of our previous announcements, just have a look at this new blog post, which summarizes what we’ve been working on in the last few months and shows you the progress we’ve made this year. https://medium.com/cardstack/whats-new-at-cardstack-d1e24add82f1

What’s Gitchain?
Gitchain is the back-end technology used by the Cardstack Hub to synchronize data in decentralized storage via public blockchains, like Ethereum.
Using Gitchain, Cardstack app creators can manage their cards through version control. Say you’ve made a mistake editing the blog content in your Article Card—Gitchain allows you to find the previous version of your blog and revert your card state back to that version.

Here’s our quick guide for writing your own quickstart guide! Jen Weber explains the principles she follows to create the quickstart for the Card SDK, so as to deliver a great user experience for developers. This includes the role the target audience should play, ways to enable developers with no prior knowledge to use the provided features, and ideas for testing the work to collect helpful feedback. Watch Jen share her insights and apply them to your own projects!
https://youtu.be/LIPMftwNGSE

Here’s an in-depth article to go with our video presentation and demo of the dotBC media registry—which is based on song data from Warner Music Group and Warner/Chappell music. Chris explains what it takes to build a high-quality, decentralized music metadata management system and how the Cardstack Framework made it possible. He gives an overview of the concepts and architecture behind the registry, plus ways in which it can be used.
https://medium.com/cardstack/building-decentralized-media-registries-a953fd36d3d4

In developers’ eyes, Cardstack is an open-source software development kit (SDK) that enables them to build full-stack applications efficiently—to bring software to the users in the form of cards. Based on those cards, the users create their own cards for their digital presence, which they collect in My Cards. In their eyes, Cardstack is an application environment built on top of cards. But they need someone else to run their cards for them as a service. That’s why the blockchain sees Cardstack as a provider of tokenized software as a service (SaaS), distributing revenue fairly to all contributors across the network. By paying the service provider, the user helps generate revenue, a portion of which goes to the developers who provided the software (the tools, the cards, the plugins) in the first place. Thus, while Cardstack offers different opportunities and benefits to different audiences—the developers, the users, the blockchains—they are all deeply connected to make this system work.

How do you write code that writes code? Check out Jen Weber’s newest video, where she shows you how to improve your programming skills with popular JavaScript tools and apply them to the Cardstack codebase.
https://youtu.be/hCp8NxNA7yU

The Card Catalog is a collection of default cards that come with the Card SDK. As an application creator, you can build a simple hosted application using these core cards—which include a Content Card, a Wallet Card, a Message Card, and many more.
Just to remind you: A full application is made up of several individual cards. Each card is a configurable, functional unit that can be easily reused and cross-referenced on the internet.

Our newest video update is all about the Cardstack product! Cardstack sits at the core of a four-sided market between users, developers, service providers, and businesses, aiming to be a catalyst for Web 3.0. Chris sheds light on the essential components of our product—the Card SDK, the CARD Protocol, and the Cardstack Hub—explaining how they are connected to ensure a fair, usable, and sustainable decentralized network.
https://youtu.be/3AmjAvQGSYw

This is the beginning of a series of articles and videos, where we present new cards and features that will gradually be added to the Card Catalog. In this first piece, we talk about the many reasons why publishing needs to be decentralized, to give creators control over their own creations back. Our first step towards achieving that goal is called “Card Board”—our already open-sourced content management system, which developers can add to and storytellers can use to become their own publishers!
https://medium.com/cardstack/we-need-to-decentralize-publishing-again-7828be8c067b

Learn all about the CARD Protocol, our multi-currency payment & billing network! Chris explains how this economic layer makes the Cardstack ecosystem worthwhile for everyone involved—talking about the technical mechanics behind it and the relationships between the main participants (from customers using a prepaid card to service providers and retailers). Find out how exchange rates, token pools, and smart contracts factor into this, and hear which role Tally, Card Folio, CLUTCH, and the Cardstack Hub play in this system. https://youtu.be/FwO_ZGCk410

Last week, Chris met with the team from EOS New York. They discussed how the Cardstack Framework and the Card Board codebase can serve as the foundation of a new community system, which can scale using the EOSIO software. We look forward to future talks and collaboration!

Coming up: Who are the card makers? Watch out for Chris’ next tech talk, where he explains in detail how the different types of card makers can contribute to the Cardstack ecosystem.

Join our brand-new, official Cardstack Discord channel! We’re switching Discord servers in an effort to consolidate and boost the communication between our team and our community. You can read the full announcement here: https://medium.com/cardstack/the-brand-new-official-cardstack-discord-channel-4a2ffd925cee

Our current server will become read-only, but joining the new one is easy—just click on this link: https://discord.gg/Vw3Eyjv. See you on the other side!

Introducing the different types of card makers! Listen to Chris’ new tech talk, where he explains it all in detail: Who are the card makers? Which skills do they need? How many do we need for a rich ecosystem? And at which stage do they get involved? The “inverse pyramid model” presents them all—from the framework and product team to the back-end and front-end engineers, plus the Web developers and the power users.
https://youtu.be/zrGLmAYYpqQ

What have our developers been up to?
Ed is working at the framework level to refactor the Card SDK, which is being enhanced to support workflows with multiple participants. We want to make sure cards can truly move between different workflows, different sites, different hosts, and different hubs. Jen is concentrating on the quick start to building cards using this software development kit. Meanwhile, Hassan and Alex focus on the Cardstack Protocol, while Derrick, Will, and Burcu are working on a library of reusable UI components (for Card Folio / Tally), with the aim to provide an accessible UI that allows end users to tap into our capabilities.