Tableland wrapped up its Launch Week with new features, blogs, and the start of Pilot Program 3.
Launch Week recap
A brief retrospective on Launch Week—a series of new features with supporting blogs & docs.
By @Dan Buchholz
In case you missed it, last week, Tableland was running Launch Week. It’s not the first time we launched something big, nor will it be the last (👀). It was mainly a week of new features, blog posts, Tweet storms, and Pilot Program 3 crystallization.
Synopsis
The TL;DR of Launch Week releases:
- Refactored JavaScript SDK (v4) (well, almost released—it’s still in pre-release v4.0.0-pre.4 since we’re making some final touches to ensure everything runs smoothly).
- Interactive CLI + ENS support.
- New SQL features for
UPSERT, functions (BLOCK_NUM(),TXN_HASH()), and compoundSELECTstatements. - Protocol separation between the testnet / mainnet (with gateway DNS separation) and a fine tuned Validator API + release process.
- A Hardhat-Tableland plugin.
Developers can take advantage of all of this tooling with a greatly improved developer experience, and we’re only just getting started! And along with these new changes, there was a wealth of new articles published to help explain what we did and why:
- Upgrading from v3 to v4 of
@tableland/sdk - Floating Point Numbers are a REAL Problem for Blockchains
- Crack open the new Tableland CLI Shell
- Less is more, especially when it comes to APIs
- What to expect when you’re expecting to write SQL on Tableland
- Announcing the Hardhat-Tableland Plugin v0
- Announcing Validator Releases
- Welcoming Tableland’s Pilot Program 3 cohort
- Bonus: What’s wrong with web3 metadata?
Learnings
We always at processes retrospectively to understand what worked well and what could have improved. Overall, we felt we did a great job within internally planning everything; there were a lot of moving parts that touched both technical and functional stakeholders! We tried to give users plenty of heads up about what was coming, such as the new SDK or DNS definitions for testnets / mainnets (testnets.tableland.network, tableland.network). Continued re-amplification of any software changes / intentions / messaging is something we’re continually getting better at (and hopefully, it was clear this time around!).
The software changes were a massive undertaking by the core Tableland engineering team. To make sure things work as expected for all types of developers (React, Node, Vite, etc.), there was a slight delay in the official release of some these features. All in all, it was the right decision to keep things in a pre-release state while the final touches are made, allowing developers to still use the latest and greatest and, in parallel, enabling the core team to smooth the edges.
Pilot Program 3
Two of the primary reasons we timed up Launch Week to happen before the Pilot Program were:
- Ensure our revamped SDK, API, and tooling was accessible before builders started to build.
- User feedback—we love getting input directly from the Pilot Program folks.
We view our Pilot Program team members as our early adopters from a technology perspective. (Of course, the Rigs community are early adopters as well…some technical, some art, some just here for the vibes.) Anyways, the Launch Week timing allows us to directly source input from folks that are seeing Tableland for the first time. Their experiences with the most recent tech leads what features we add, refactor, and/or documentation / tutorials we’re missing.
Next time
The team behind Tableland is always building. Although there is no set plan for another Launch Week, history often repeats itself. Stay up to date with all of the happenings by following us on Twitter and keeping in touch within our Discord—tell us about what you’re building over in #dev-chat!