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Comment by zenhack | Hacker News Reader

The biggest change lately is probably: https://zenhack.net/2023/01/06/introducing-tempest.html

But yeah, Sandstorm has been in a state of "not dead but not moving fast" basically since the company went under; things picked up a bit in 2020, and I got oriented-enough on the codebase during that time to keep it floating along, but, per the post, it's never been easy going.

Anyway, I wish I were answering this question in 6 months time, when I'll be able to show off a variation of Tempest that is relatively usable and can do a few tricks that Sandstorm can't.

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Just spent ten minutes delightedly reading your updates on this. It looks fantastic! I'm really excited to watch what happens next, and wish I had time to contribute.

Are there primary areas in which contributions would be most valuable, especially from those without Golang experience/skills?

I suppose that depends on what your skill set is.

At some point the project would greatly benefit from some attention from a UI/UX specialist -- I'm doing my best, but it's not what I'm an expert at. Though right now I'm mostly focused on getting enough stuff to work for it to be of interest, and someone fussing with the UI might just be distracting.

Doing app packaging for Sandstorm might be the most accessible way to help for someone who's not a Go dev -- Tempest will of course benefit from more apps when it's ready to run them, and it'd be a high impact thing for the community right now.

Tempest [0] looks very interesting. What is the current state of the project?

[0] https://github.com/zenhack/tempest

Currently Tempest can run a lot of Sandstorm apps. However, a lot of functionality one would expect or need is not implemented yet. It will be a bit before it can replace a Sandstorm server. But it's architecturally different in some fundamental ways which will make implementing new features that Sandstorm never had much easier.

You've told me about something totally new. I want to get involved with sandstorm. Exciting.

always interested in self hosted solutions, not tried sandstorm and up for giving it a go, however if I was starting a small fairly simple personal project with no need to scale can I get wheels on it with Tempest, or should I consider building on sandstorm then porting?

All of the dev tools use Sandstorm, and Tempest is not at this point, "complete". But if you were to build something on Sandstorm today, you can be reasonably confident it will work with Tempest.

Can you tell me how I can get involved with sandstorm

I've book marked Tempest :) Looks promising. Wish you luck!

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