Howdy folks!  As 2025 rolls in, the Holochain team continues progressing steadily toward our goal of delivering stability across the board.  At first I didn’t feel like this because the holiday season just always seems to slow things down, but as I look over all the completed issues and pull-requests I must say I’m quite pleased.  We’ve shown advancement across all our work domains: the networking layer, Holochain core, developer tooling (scaffolding and the hc command-line tool), runtimes (kangaroo, mobile), testing harness, developer documentation, and the human layer including team process.

Here’s a recap of the most important things we’ve been up to since the last Dev Pulse in mid-December:

1. Team Process: We’ve now been able to clear out our backlog review, prioritizing and categorizing work which sets the stage for building out a new road-map. We’ve also been using our project tooling for long enough that we may be even able to produce usable burn-down charts soon and actually predict delivery timelines from data. Now wouldn’t that be cool!I’m going to be showing up more frequently doing communications (like this one), leaving Paul more time to focus on developer documentation.
2. Dev Docs: We are especially keen in 2025 to live up to the pulls we’ve been getting to flesh out the Build Guide as we know that it can sometimes be difficult to put all the pieces together just by reading the Rust HDK docs when trying to answer practical how-to questions.  Just added are the sections on Links and Application Structure.
3. Holochain Core: We’ve got a release candidate out for Holochain 0.4.1 which fixes a bug that could allow the init callback to be called more than once.  This clears the way for initializing cells on headless nodes. 0.4.1 will also include an upgrade to wasmer 5.x, and fixes wasmer module serialization compatibility issues and reduces memory usage by removing redundant caching that was happening.
4. Networking: The Kitsune 2  revamp is coming along nicely, with the peer-store revamp complete, gossip revamp well in progress, refactored fetch queue, and more.
5. Runtimes: Kangaroo (the dev-template for stand-alone Electron-based desktop hApp delivery) has been updated to the 0.4.1 release candidate, and now also has a sys-tray option, improved password management and auto-updating. On the mobile side, our work with partner Volla continues strong on the next version of Volla Messages, with a UI refactor, and integration into the Android Holochain-as-system-service runtime.
6. Testing: Last but not least is our testing harness, wind-tunnel. Here we haven’t made as much progress as we’d like for a number of reasons, including the usual excuse of holiday-down-time-coordination-challenges, but actually mostly because we are still working on upgrading from our home-baked TryCP orchestrator to Nomad, a third-party orchestrator which we’ll be using from now on. Even so, we’ve updated the framework to Holochain 0.4, worked on repo chores, and most importantly have made some progress coordinating with the Holo team on the plan for the updated Nomad-base scenario deployment and execution strategy to Holoports. This is important for Holochain, as we’ll need the Holo network to run many of our Wind Tunnel tests to give us real-world results.

As always, the best place to really see the details behind the Dev Pulse is to look at Github’s Insights page for whichever repo you are most interested in.  For example see Holochain and Kitsune2.