I speculate that this update might be among the set of least exciting (though also least terrifying) news broadcasts of the week, but the metronome must tick on.

Progress Since Last Update

The offsite trip to Las Palmas (which is now over, we’re back in Berlin) was a fantastic event for the whole team. For the developers, this was a chance to break the routine and analyse ourselves at a higher level than we usually take the time to do, as well as take the time to plan the next stage of the project at a solid level of detail.

As a result of spending most of last week in workshops, there’s not a huge amount that I can say that we’ve done at a code level since then, though we have made one important change that we hope to push into Soundcheck on Monday, provided that today’s testing goes well. We did however get time to plan our next major release, and it seems like we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet when it comes to the future development plans and processes.

Soundcheck Update

Now that we’re more confident in our process with respect to a regular release cadence, we’ve let Soundcheck sit in a semi-broken state for a couple of weeks, though we did hit some good numbers in terms of signing/keygen participants before it fell over. Monday’s update (0.2.3) will seek to resolve an Ethereum witnessing issue within the CFE, which is currently not recovering if the event stream stops feeding it blocks. We could just tell all the Validators to reboot and the testnet would be “fixed” again, but that’s not really good enough, is it?

Once this fix is in, we don’t expect anything major to come up, and we reckon that we can run the program as originally intended to its end in a couple more weeks. Hopefully everyone gets a chance to be an Active Validator, we’ll do our best to make sure that you have the opportunity but we can’t guarantee anything for various reasons.

Goals for the Next Fortnight

Some quick bullet points detailing the major points that we hope to achieve by the time the next dev update rolls around.

Development Goals

• Release 0.2.3 to Validators (witnessing bugfix)
• Epoch-specific witnessing
• Migrate Staking app to the new GraphQL schema

General Thoughts

The sun and routine-break was a welcome shift, I think I speak for the whole company when I say that we’re now more invigorated than ever to ship this thing.

Until next time.

Tom