Feels good to carry interesting updates from the past week . Hiya, Let me start off by introducing myself. I’m Krishna and I’ve been working for MaidSafe as a remote dev from India. I have been contributing to the front-end team for the last year and since we transitioned our codebase to Rust, I’ve been contributing to the Core team. It has been a really interesting process so far! Being app developers it seems fitting that Spandan and I are maintaining the Client libraries. I anticipate we will be exposing increasingly dev friendly APIs in the near future
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Another planning week finished. These are critical and yet even though we are not supposed to (sorry @Viv) we all sneaked a wee bit of code and tests in place. So a few weeks ago we thought lets test self_encryption and as you now know it worked! Then we tried Crust, same result! OK we figured, let’s attach routing and yes you guessed it, it worked off the bat! So during the planning week we thought lets plug in the vaults, a component like any other that has been coded independently of the other components. So we switched Vaults to use the Routing interface as opposed to the test interface and you guessed it, they work! We won’t give these out this week though, we feel they need at least the next version of Routing (almost done and @BenMS currently working on this) to make them simpler to use. Of course a Client would be nice and Spandan and I are also working toward that during this sprint .
In addition to the progress we are seeing bringing the libraries together, the stability we are experiencing is very reassuring. This represents a contrast to our C++ code as we now have efficiency, speed, safety and a vastly reduced codebase. This feels like a perfect storm of development; greater code safety combined with efficiency and a massively reduced debug time.
Things are not just going well internally, we have also experienced some community contributions in Self_Encrypt and Crust and now Routing is seeing contributions. These are not random, developers are looking at our next steps and just picking up the codebase and submitting pull requests with associated Jira tasks where applicable. It is worth noting that for this sprint, we have gone back to JIRA for task management with the todo’s in each repository linking to the corresponding Jira task. The following link will take you to the sprint dashboard.
In a similar vein, we also have @HappyBeing installing the browser plugin code (this does almost nothing at the moment, it will intercept calls to safe: URLs though). He has already started to imagine some possibilities we had not really thought of, again highlighting who needs to think of everything when you have a community .
So last Thursday this current sprint (rust-2
) got underway, what will we be tackling in this sprint? The plan is to get the client library bashed into shape with a REST API and the addition of the safecoin farming rate (auto supply/demand balance at vault level) to the network logic. We are also looking to ensure that Crust successfully beacons across OS’s on a LAN, while also implementing a reliable UDP library (UTP). There are a few tasks (80 ish) for us to crack through over the next couple of weeks, so busy times ahead, especially with @Viv snapping at our heels. David is all over reviews and questions as this finely tuned development approach of the last six weeks keeps going. The SAFE Network is enormous in terms of capabilities and recently it has shown that it not only works, but we have tamed the complexity beast with some very neat finds in the core logic. So yes we are later than we would like, but I feel like we are making up for that in spades and the iterative component release is enabling everyone to be much more aware of the system and the way in which the libs all fit together.
I should mention Ross is all over the installers so expect frequent updates to the binaries, he is also planning to bundle installers even for the examples that you can find in the libraries. I am sure @Ross will chime in with progress report here. The idea of getting installers for the examples is to enable the community to quickly install and play around with these console apps without needing to be hugely technical. You can expect the example installers once the actual vault binaries get rolled out
That’s it for this update, our continued thanks for the amazing support you have shown!
Here is the weekly dev update trascript.