Thursday’s here again and we have a new stable test network for you as PunchNet winds down. Impressive work as always from the community, and it’s wonderful to see all the dashboards brightening up the thread. Unfortunately they’re not showing much action right now as the faucet is broken and uploads are not working too well. We think this is because relay nodes used for hole punching are taking a beating, so we’ve put in a fix there. The new testnet has this improvement in place, as well as some other goodies, so do sample the PunchBowl - we’ll be taking the PunchNet alpha down shortly.
Thanks too for testing out the TUI pre-MVP. The first iteration went a little bonkers for some folks, spawning multiple screens per second, but that is fixed now. Please try the main branch if you’re happy with building it yourself. Otherwise we’ll have something to download shortly.
And saving the best news for last, we have a new team member @mazzi - He’s got a wealth of experience in a lot of languages, systems and teams and will be helping us push forward on all fronts! 
Over to you Lautaro.
Hi - my name is Lautaro (@mazzi) and I’m a Software Engineer originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina.
I’m an active user of DuckDuckGo, Signal, Firefox, VPNs and Tor. Now I’m trying to get into Autonomi. Decentralised and encrypted internet is the way to go. I’ve worked mostly with scripting languages like PHP, Python, Ruby, JavaScript; frameworks like RoR, Django and React. Sometimes I compile too (Java, C/C++, Rust).
Glad to see that day by day there’s an honest interest in privacy and security on this incredible thing that the internet is. My personal website: https://mazzi.github.io
General progress
The team has been working on the TUI, releasing a test version earlier this week. The TUI is basically a wrapper around node-manager. Soon we’ll be ready to release this as a downloadable binary with which users can easily control, nodes but there are a few issues to get out of the way first. Thanks to all who have tested it – the spawning issue should be fixed now.
Another strand of work is tracking users on the beta testing, so we can tell who has earned what for rewards. We have a couple of PRs in on this from @roland and @joshuef.
There has been some fun and games with our internal processes where minor releases were updating crates.io and causing confusion. This is now fixed so that only stable releases update the crates.io Rust package registry.
@anselme is going over the DAG with @qi_ma, looking for optimisations and ensuring privacy is not compromised by the audit process. It’s a matter of ensuring spends are going to the right place and double spends forbidden, without metadata in the “reasons” field revealing identities. They have worked out a design for Spend reasons that uses a size-constrained cipher to prevent abuse, plus a test.
As well as continuing to probe AutoNAT, @bzee is looking into issues arising from the PunchNet, as reported by the community, including deterioration in performance over time with respect to errors, RAM and connection issues. We suspect this is connected with upload problems and are experimenting with randomising relay nodes so that certain individual nodes do not get hammered. @roland is also filtering out nodes marked as bad from relay duty.
@joshuef focused on release flow tweaks, PunchNet catch up, and some adjustments and reviews related to the TUI. He and @qi_ma also moved forwards with reward_forwarding ie, how to automatically ensure that beta testers are rewarded according to their work (and that should also allow node operators to consolidate rewards in a single wallet down the line).
Finally, @bux @jimcollinson and @andrew are hard at work on duck duty, as in getting them all in a row prior to beta. 
. Looking forward to doing more A vs B testing from home in a few hours from now.
