Last week we released another playground for the community to get their hands dirty with. We were particularly encouraged with its stability, given that a few things are still in flux - we are definitely moving in the right direction. A huge thanks to everyone who took part 
Weāll be launching more of these wee āplaygroundsā as well as more official testnets soon enough (as weāve noted elsewhere), and will work towards making those nodes smaller and more accessible for the community to join in with as we go.
General progress
Last weekendās playground threw up some odd results where data chunks would seem to be missing then reappear again. @joshuef has been digging into this one and believes it could be down to a change we made recently when we started storing mutable data (register data type) on adults. During this refactor, it seems a bug was introduced where we are storing client-node connections based upon the data address, but only storing one at a time. So if two different clients requested the same data, only the last one would succeed. A fix using many-to-many client connections and operation IDs instead of the data address appears to have been successful (our many_client tests go once more). This change should also allow popular data to be served more quickly to waiting clients (rather than each waiting for their own response as it used to be).
Last week we talked about the membership consensus mechanism which ensures elders can keep track of the adults and other elders in their section. @Anselme has been working on extracting the common functionality from the sn_membership algorithm and the elder handover process (where new elders are given all the info they need) and putting it into a new sn_consensus crate that can be used by both processes.
We also mentioned the belt-and-braces supermajority over supermajority consensus system to manage situations where elders disagree. For example, when a node requests to join, first a supermajority (5) of elders must agree that the new node is needed, and then, second, a supermajority of elders must agree that a supermajority of elders have accepted this proposal. @davidrusu has been working on the key share aggregation that produces a valid BLS signature at the end of this process, and is working on investigating a failing property based test.
And finally, weāre absolutely delighted to welcome Heather to the MaidSafe fold. Some of you already know Heather from her combative Twitter presence and her Webdevlaw blog in which she champions data privacy and freedom of expression. Having spent a few days familiarising herself with the company, the project and the community, sheās raring to get stuck in.
Over to you, Heather!
Hi, Iām Heather Burns. Iāve joined MaidSafe this week as Head of Policy and Governance.
Iāll be doing my part to make sure the Safe Network project has the transparent and accountable governance that its community deserves. Iāll also be speaking up for MaidSafe as a British tech startup focused on privacy and freedom of expression, at a time when that is a bit of an occupational hazard.
I have a background in privacy, open source, digital rights, politics, and startups, which makes MaidSafe a pretty good place to be. Prior to MaidSafe, I worked at Open Rights Group, where I led on the freedom of expression portfolio, most specifically on the UKās Online Safety Bill.
Prior to that, I worked with Coadec, the political advocacy body for UK tech startups, and was also a freelance policy and regulatory advisor to digital agencies and businesses. I was also a contributor to open source software communities, most notably helping to build the privacy suite of tools for the WordPress CMS in 2018.
But if weāre going way, way back to the beginning, I built my first web site in 1996, hand-coding HTML in the Lynx text browser on my universityās dial-up Unix system.
I live in Glasgow, Scotland, which means Iām delighted to have a local employer again for the first time in 16 years. Iām looking forward to engaging with the Safe Network community as we bring the projectās vision ever closer to reality.
Useful Links
Feel free to reply below with links to translations of this dev update and moderators will add them here:
Russian ; 
German ; 
Spanish ; 
French; 
Bulgarian
As an open source project, weāre always looking for feedback, comments and community contributions - so donāt be shy, join in and letās create the Safe Network together!
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