MaidSafe Dev Update - 21st June 2016

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 …it really does help a lot!

Today we are introducing details of the CEP (Community Engagement Program). Without duplicating all of @nicklambert’s post, think of it like a community funded ‘kickstarter’ 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! :slight_smile:

##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 we’re 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, didn’t 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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I’ve greatly enjoyed the regular updates over the past months, so thanks for your work! Hope you have a fantastic sabbatical :slight_smile:

Progress sounds good - getting closer & closer to a stable product!

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@Ross, Thank you for everything you’ve done and good luck in all your future endeavors!

I’ll expect to see you lurking around the forum. :wink:

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@Ross couldn’t have asked for better community outreach! Thank you for the updates, good luck, and hope to get more updates from you in the future!

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Thanks @Ross for all your help, helping me personally and of course with these excellent updates. Enjoy your sabbatical!

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Thanks @Ross! Enjoy your time, you deserve it.

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Thank you Ross! You have done a very invaluable job with the weekly updates. Be happy!

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Thanks @Ross for the nice update again, lot of great stuff going on. Your 6 months are well deserved, enjoy them :thumbsup:.

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Thanks @Ross for your update!

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Am I the only one who read those? And keeping a public record of your minutes is important. Aside from the record keeping aspect the transcripts also listed specifically who was working on what and kept a record of what had been worked on this week and the specific goals that would be worked on the following week. While these summaries are awesome they are often more generalized than the transcripts.

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The question is also one of resource. That transcript can represent a single person day in chasing up, getting it right etc. then posting etc. It should not be underestimated. Even the teams filling in the dev update takes them off the work, but there has to be something and I feel that part is very important.

The transcript is becoming more of a PITA with folk chasing other folk to stop work and fill it in. I don’t think the devs see the benefit from it as they have 3 separate team meetings each day then another with team leaders Viv and myself. So it’s a lot of talking and meeting to get this done. Then we need to code and test :wink:

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Step by step the ants are coming

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Don’t you keep minutes at these meetings? Just copy the relevant minutes from the meetings. That’s another reason one keeps minutes. There shouldn’t be any chasing anyone down, it should be a quick copy/paste of already recorded information. Even slack chat logs or something would work in a pinch. You post the logs somewhere, search through them, find the relevant data, and post it. Or if you’re in a real hurry just slap a recorder on the desk when you do your team meetings and transcribe or directly post that. I mean there’s all kinds of solutions for record keeping, some more efficient than others. But saying you don’t have time because you’ve got an efficiency problem isn’t an excuse. Think about what it will be like when you look back at this point in time a year from now, or 10 years from now and they’re trying to figure out what you guys were up to. Nevermind we’re all rabid trying to get every scrap of information we can.

No we don’t that would be even more resource. We do record them for checking back etc. but not forever [ edit team meetings are not recorded unless somebody is missing now or it’s a complex meeting subject] . Our internal slack is extremely busy with the day to day events and questions/answers of work being done. We would not post these as folk do not use them as freely if they think everyone is looking over them. Some devs do not want to be too distracted and just get on with work. It’s much harder if we look over their shoulder.

With github commit messages/ reviewable review messages / forum / RFC’s and the dev update we have more than enough for now IMO. There is no excuse involved really. It’s a matter of practicality and efficiency.

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Good luck @Ross . Smart commitment to family. Keep it real.

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It was fun to be on TEST 4, for a whole week.

Thanks Maidsafe devs for another great update & delivering cutting edge tech.

@Ross thanks for all your hard work & enjoy your well deserved “time out” :stuck_out_tongue:

(secretly I hope the rest of the Maidsafe team can also have something like this and that they can just mindcontrol “Watson” to do the programming & testing (unfortunately there is reality))

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@Ross Thanks and Have a Nice sabbatical!

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Excellent moderation :slight_smile:

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As you have noticed I also deleted your response because it only derails the topic when members respond to such posts. Please use the flagging option next time so we can get rid of such trolls. :slight_smile:

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Kepp moving!! Good job.

The ants are coming :slight_smile:

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