Team process: A big thing that’s currently missing for Holochain is an accessible and accurate road-map displaying our progress in an easy way to understand.  In moving toward this, one of the team’s practices since the beginning of 2025 has been discipline in estimating issues from our back-log as we work through them.  This is allowing us to track our burn-down rate which enables us to start making predictions about when features will be completed.  If you’ve been following these Dev Pulses, you will have seen me pointing to Github repos where you can see this work, but I know it’s quite hard to make sense of that information, especially in terms of making projections of when a given release will land.

So, our goal is to end up with a roadmap that shows the following:

  • What features and functionality will be in upcoming Holochain releases and related tools
  • When these releases are to be expected
  • How many github issues are involved, and what’s the total story-point estimates for them
  • A projection based on the last 2 months story-point burn-down for weeks till completion

To start with, this road-map will be updated manually on a weekly basis based on the data from our github project, and later we’ll get it automated.  The tooling for getting the work done up on the website is in progress, but just as a demonstration of that, I can report that our current burn-down average is 19.3 story-points per week, and, as of the end of February there are 101 remaining story-points toward the Holochain 0.5 release, which puts that release at about 5 weeks out.  

Here’s a preview of how this may look on the website: 

The point of working this way isn’t to promise a delivery date, it’s to make as transparent to the world what we know about ourselves.   We can’t promise that other un-estimated work will get added between now and release,  and we might also decide that we can move some of the estimated work into our 0.6 release plan.  But we will be able to make visible where we are in the current plan. 

Holochain Core & Networking: Kitsune 2 integration into Holochain core is going full steam and is about 40% done (15 estimation points out of 41).  I’m particularly excited that included in this work are some initial scenarios to run Kitsune 2 on our Wind Tunnel testing framework.

Runtimes: Launcher is in the process of being updated to Holochain 0.4.1. We are testing release candidates with and some of our sample apps KanDo and TalkingStickies plus Mewsfeed have been published to its app library for folks to play with. Our work on the next version of the Android runtime that will be used on the Volla phone for both the messaging and backup app is moving along smoothly.

Dev Tooling: scaffolding We keep steadily working on the scaffolding tool, both doing bug fixes and updates on the 0.4 & 0.5 lines.  This includes fixes to the Lit & Vue templates, upgrading Vue to the default Composition API, improvements to custom handlebars templates, dependency updates, etc.  Our intent here is to make sure that when 0.5 is released, the scaffolding will be fully ready at the same time.

Dev Docs: These last two weeks have provided a bumper crop of developer build guides:

Additional Components: We have started work on a simple tool that will be used by Holo and can be used in other contexts too, which provides connection for HTTP requests through a very simple web-gateway to a running Holochain application.  You can track the progress of this work here: https://github.com/holochain/hc-http-gw.

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