Hello everyone,
TEST 4 has now been up for a week and is proving to be stable and ticking over nicely; we have so far seen approximately 6,000 nodes that have ran and connected to the network via a droplet. From the client side we have observed around 1,500 client connections that needed a droplet for proxy. If a client had a local Vault to use as proxy then we would not capture that statistic, so we expect that this number is much higher. So, a massive thank you to everyone in the community for taking part and continuing to participate in TEST 4. I know we say this quite often, but it is true âŚit really does help a lot!
Today we are introducing details of the CEP (Community Engagement Program). Without duplicating all of @nicklambertâs post, think of it like a community funded âkickstarterâ process to encourage developers, artists and others to form teams to bid for projects, accessing part of the 5 million available MAID fund for bounties, community projects, etc. For all of the details and to get involved, follow the link and make your voice heard.
On a personal note, but in the spirit of transparency and openness, at the end of this month I will be starting a 6-month unpaid sabbatical from MaidSafe. So this might be my last Dev Update for a while, although I will still obviously be tracking progress and still dipping in and out of the forum. This is for positive personal / family reasons. I would like to take this opportunity to personally thank everyone for the support and feedback we see from the community in the update post every week - it is very much appreciated.
Catch you all soon in a SAFE-r world! 
##Crust, Core: Andrew, Spandan (tl) & Vinicius.
With most of Crust now stable and as we are consistently seeing impressive CPU usage even under stress, there have been only internal changes to improve the code, test and design in some areas this week. These refactors also squashed one or two hard to find bugs which would show only in remote corner cases.
As far as the API is concerned, there have been no significant changes; however as far as Crust behaviour / functionality is concerned, there has been one major change - if Crust can detect another instance running on the same LAN as itself it will fail to start up. Apart from this it is mostly the same as last week - so all calm and stable there.
The team are also currently working on safe_core, which is going to see some changes as we are planning to inform the front-end of intermediate steps of every operation that is performed. This will require us to come up with a strategy to extract information within a series of function calls and inform back and across FFI.
##Routing, Vaults: Adam, Andreas (tl), Fraser & Qi.
After having to disable it due to message splitting for TEST 4, we are now working on re-implementing caching in a way that works together with that feature. This should lead to another great reduction in network traffic. We are also making the chunk store directory configurable instead of always putting the files in a temporary directory.
Meanwhile, we are continuing to improve our tests: many of them use randomness to allow testing a variety of different situations, but we are working on making it easier to reuse individual random sequences. That way, we can run a test 100 times and if it fails once, we can reproduce that exact failure as often as needed to fix the problem.
##Client : Krishna (tl), Scott & Shankar.
We began our implementation of the launcher v0.5 from the middle of last week. We are hoping to complete the implementation this week and put it through its paces by testing the following week.
@scott has began working on a few new improvements in Launcher. We are expanding some of its features with a strong focus on UX. Our aim is to help avoid confusion and keep users informed on network actions. Some of the things weâre looking to add are application specific logs and statistics, improved error messages and more informative loading and status screens.
We have decided to scrap the weekly transcript as it was becoming a little generic and, we feel, didnât add much to the overall update. I will sign off now and as always we all thank you for your continued support.
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