It’s Thursday again, and this week finds us working on smoothing the road for Wave 2 Beta Testers. This includes improving the Node Launchpad, updating the dashboard and the DiscordBot, and tightening up the way we gather data from Beta testers.
It’s also about managing expectations and support. Honestly, we’ve learned so much in the last couple of weeks. As a small team it’s impossible to predict real-world conditions and there’s no substitute for having a bunch of clever, enthusiastic and curious folks out there doing their thing. We never expected people to use the node-manager to launch hundreds of nodes, for example, but we’re very glad you did as it taught us some important lessons.
For Wave 2 we will need to tighten up the terms a bit as to what we are able to support, so the team doesn’t get too stretched. We want the improved Autonomi Node Launchpad to be the primary way that people participate, and will likely limit official support to that. If folks want to use the CLI and node-manager that’s fine, but support will need to be through the community.
We’re continuing to build metrics into the Launchpad and node-manager and want to have these in place before Wave 2. We’re also debugging some spend anomalies, looking at the weirdness when chunking small files, continuing with DAG, auditing and bot improvements to ensure the nanos are going out in a timely fashion, and making uploads faster. We have an internal alpha network in place now to test some of these things.
Overall, we’re hugely encouraged by the response to the Beta and by the way the network has performed. Of course, there have been a few teething problems, but nothing that we can’t handle. We do want to get everything shipshape before the next Wave though, so thanks so much for your patience.
General progress
@roland has been churning out PRs this week in response to community findings and bug reports (keep them coming guys!) and with logging. He’s also looking into the weird behaviour seen when chunking small files and worked on exposing metrics on our deployment infrastructure.
Fresh back from holiday (poor guy) @chriso has put together a better Windows VM setup to help us reproduce and analyse Windows issues spotted by the community.
Onto @bzee who has been tinkering with the auditor to get it to store the spends we’re crawling so that we can restart the auditor without trouble. He’s also having a nose at some of our documentation and preparing the launch of our (internal) alpha testnet.
@qi_ma is also in and about the auditor making improvements to the collection of UTXOs and royalties as well as helping with community queries.
@mazzi continues to work on tweaking the DiscordBot and aligning it with the DAG and auditor changes ahead of Wave 2, including introducing a time-series database to store Beta rewards.
@jimcollinson has been looking into renaming features, repos and modules as we move fully to the Autonomi brand.
And @joshuef has been working on improving the speed of the data uploader clients, which has been a source of some frustration, as well as digging into replication too.
Great update, big thanks to the community for their patience and commitment ! 
- those brave people offering to test or build on Windows and Mac.
