This is our Product Updates newsletter we sent on Feb 19th, 2020. You can subscribe to our email updates here.
We just finished up our team retreat in Fernie, BC – a small mountain town known for its skiing. We did a snow hike and some snowshoeing, but the main purpose was to come together as a team and sync up on our next plans. We shipped some product, marketing, and SDKs, and feel good about what we’re building. Read on for all the details.
Fission Drive Preview
We launched the Preview release of Fission Drive . Fission Drive is the first-party app we’re building on top of the Fission infrastructure and SDKs. The Preview release works with any public IPFS files. As well as showcasing what can be done, it provides an interface to the web native file system we see as the basis of the apps we can enable. Underneath, IPFS and service workers are cutting edge tech, but we stick to our constraint of making this work in all web browsers, including mobile, with no plug-ins.
You can read the blog post for the full background, and visit drive.fission.codes to try out file browsing.
We also shipped a refresh of the tech that powers our home page. From Jekyll on Netlify, Steven migrated us to Elm Pages running directly on Fission’s IPFS gateway. It feels great to be self hosting!
Upcoming Events
We had a great time hosting remote presentations around a broad set of Web3 / Decentralized Web / Portable Computing topics as part of our retreat. We’re still gathering the videos and presentations from presenters, everything will get linked into the agenda on the Fission Talk forum.
Brooke will be in SF the first week of March, presenting at Code BEAM. Stay tuned for a potential dev meetup earlier in the week.
The next IETF meeting is in Vancouver at the end of March. There is a hackathon planned that we may participate in, and talking to people about potentially hosting a decentralized web / identity discussion that week.
We’re just getting started to plan early April plans in Europe. We’ll be in Berlin, and then Brooke will be presenting in Bologna, Italy, at Code BEAM Lite on April 6th. We’ll organize a Serverless and Decentralized Web meetup in Bologna the next night, on April 7th. We’ll have various Berlin meetups and likely poutine again 
Get in touch if you’d like to get involved in any of these events!
Here are some extended product updates that didn’t make it into the newsletter:
At the infrastructure layer, we have the foundations to support custom domains, which is a precursor to enabling multiple Apps per Account, and Custom Domains. This will give users the ability to deploy multiple Fission apps.
We merged in our implementation of public/private key based identity. This is wrapped in JWT and will be DID compliant, as well as enabling passwordless login for our services. We’re adding these capabilities into our default TypeScript library for developers to use to build apps of their own – logins and user-controlled, end-to-end encrypted data.
These pieces all come together to showcase a full release of Fission Drive: your files, available everywhere, both privately encrypted as well as publicly hosted, and the ability to attach apps. This lets front end developers build apps very quickly, and opens up early adopter users to build mini-apps on top of the files they use every day.
The Fission Guide has been lightly updated to reflect these changes, including a new section for Drive.