Here are some of the main things to highlight this week:
- We will be holding a SAFE DevCon on Monday 23rd April in Ayr, Scotland. The focus will very much be on developers and the event will be livestreamed for those who are not able to attend.
- We are delighted to announce that we have filled the Test and Release Manager role while we also have a new Rust engineer joining the team.
- Earlier this week, the front-end team released a new version of the SAFE Browser (v0.9.0).
- The front-end team will be focusing on UX improvements in the Peruse browser as the next wave of changes.
- The C# bindings are being tested on mobile and the code for the messaging app and the authenticator for mobile is being updated with the latest C# bindings.
- The Routing team is going to give test-driven development another go for the implementation of Milestone 1.
- Crust is getting closer to fully encrypted communications.
Marketing
SAFE DevCon
We’ll kick off with some exciting news - we’re putting on a DevCon!
With the whole MaidSafe team descending on the HQ in Ayr, Scotland for a long weekend in April, we’ll be taking advantage of that fact that we’ll have everyone in one place by putting on a one-day conference. It will be held on Monday 23rd April at Ayr Racecourse (near MaidSafe HQ).
We’ll confirm the full agenda in due course but the focus will very much be on developers. Numbers will be very limited for this event, with MaidSafe covering the costs of accommodation for attendees on the evenings of 22nd and 23rd April. Food will be provided during the day as well. So if you are a developer and would like to come along, please email outreach@maidsafe.net (please include your Forum name). If as we expect, we see demand exceeding the capacity, we’ll be drawing names from a hat in the interests of fairness.
Obviously there will be many who won’t be able to attend for a variety of reason so we’re happy to confirm that we’ve arranged for the event to be livestreamed, with the videos being made available after the event. Much more on this to follow.
Marketing Metrics
We’ve compiled a handy summary of SAFE Network marketing metrics over the past three months.
We’ll be working hard for improvements across the board and will publish these fairly regularly in future updates to allow you all to monitor progress.
Out and About
Team outings last week included @nbaksalyar giving a talk on Rust to a packed room out at FOSDEM over the weekend…
…and @dugcampbell speaking on a panel at Glasgow University yesterday on decentralisation and the rise of FinTech.
This Saturday (10th), @dugcampbell will be at the Durham Blockchain Conference - so do say hi if you’re planning to head along.
Recruitment
As you are aware recruitment has been, and continues to be, a major focus for MaidSafe. Growing the team will increase our capability while improving the speed, reliability and usability of future releases. We are delighted to announce that we have filled the Test and Release Manager role while we also have a new Rust engineer joining the team. Both candidates are currently working their notice periods and we will introduce them to you in due course.
SAFE Authenticator & API
A new version (v0.9.0) of the SAFE Browser was released early this week. The main objective of this release was to upgrade Electron to v1.7.11 and to port all DOM API changes, enhancements and fixes we’ve been working on during last few weeks on Peruse in order to make all existing applications fully compatible with both browsers. Please look at this post for more information and details for downloading it.
We continue to maintain our safe_app_nodejs package, this time by just upgrading the safe_app library to the latest available version (v0.6.0), as well as researching on features/functions that can be incorporated for the next version.
We continue working on stabilising Peruse and adding features which will ease the development job of it, e.g. we are working on being able to connect with mock routing, or otherwise with the actual network, without the need to re-install or re-build the Peruse application but by just providing an environment variable. We are also trying to focus on enabling automatic tests for the DOM API and the Peruse UI itself which can be integrated in our CI environment.
More time has been spent this week in discussions related to UX improvements in the Peruse browser. We are planning to freeze the list of changes/enhancements by this week and get them as tasks into JIRA. The team will be focusing on UX improvements as the next wave of changes.
The C# bindings are being tested on mobile. There are a few issues on mobile with the C# bindings and we are looking into them right now. The code for the messaging app and the authenticator for mobile is being updated with the latest C# bindings. Once the test cases pass on mobile, we will test the applications with the latest bindings before we get the code merged to upstream.
SAFE Client Libs
This week we added FFI tests to Client Libs to rule out a possible source of memory leaks, brought up by this JIRA task. We also removed a hardcoded toolchain version in CI which was preventing the CI from deploying release artifacts. We have deployed the missing release artifacts.
Routing & Crust
The tweaking of the ageing simulator is completed. One major finding is that an age of u8 (an unsigned integer of 8 bits) is found to be sufficient with the current setting of ageing and relocation rules - this means the maximum age of a node would be 255 (note: the starting age will be higher than 0). We’ve detailed JIRA tasks for the Milestone 1 implementation and started to prepare the codebase (dev branch of the Routing repository) for the implementation work. We’re going to be giving test-driven development another go for this milestone. This will involve one developer completing the tests for a given task before a different developer writes the actual code to be tested. This should force the tester to think very deeply about the part being tested (its implementation and API) whereas normally he would have had existing code to use almost as a mental crutch while writing the tests.
We now are embarking on the journey to code Milestone 1. The tasks have made it to JIRA, under the label, dc-1 for devs to pick up. This milestone reorganises certain parts of Routing and as we can all guess the introduction of data chains and improved security is an involved change. It is necessary to create a foundation for other new features to be built on top of it.
There is an active discussion about how to handle data density attack (raised by @mav) in the forum, and some promising approaches are being explored.
Crust is getting closer to fully encrypted communications. This week we implemented encryption for direct and bootstrap connections and with that in place it’s only service discovery and address echo requests that are unencrypted. Which we’ll hopefully get working by next week. Also, network simulator will soon be ready for use. This week we’ve been working on reusing some code from smoltcp which is a pure Rust implementation of a TCP/IP stack. We’re also proud to note that we made some contributions to this library 
Excellent news .
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