Well, we did it

Was it easy? Hell no. Tuesday really was squeaky bum time and it was 50/50 as to whether stubborn CI issues would scupper our plans for launch (to be clear, we would not have gone live at all had not all those issues finally turned green). But thanks to a heroic final push by the team we got it over the line. Special thanks to @chriso and @shu who pulled all-nighters in their respective time zones to chip off the final blockers, but really it was a magnificent team effort.
So what exactly is the āitā that the team has delivered? Well itās an MVP network, an early phase launch, a starting point on which we will build the more advanced functionality in the coming weeks, allowing the community to become more involved and ultimately to take control of a network that preserves our data and where security and privacy are built in by design.
Some might quibble with the definition of launch. Fair enough. We hear you. But as weāve repeated: launch would never, could never, be a big bang. The network needs to get on its feet, grow, integrate, and work its way into the fabric of the internet. Thereās too much at stake and itās too important to all of us to risk it all on the flick of a switch, a one-and-done moment.
More importantly though, the network is bigger than just the team. We have you folks in the community to think of, partners waiting to upload their data, shareholders to thank and users and collaborators among whom we must build trust and understanding. It was vital, therefore, to set a deadline and then stretch every sinew to meet it. Weāve been at this for 18 long years. No more drift and delay.
Milestone passed, over the next few weeks weāll be paying much more attention to the UI/UX, with the stable APIs that developers need to start building. We will also be keeping a close eye on resource usageāCPU, memory and bandwidthāand putting in fixes to optimise those; most will be rolling updates, but be aware we have two checkpoints at which to make breaking changes should we need them. And most importantly at this stage, weāll be monitoring and fitting out the tokenomics to make sure that functions properly as we build trust with exchanges and future users.
Thanks for sticking with us folks. Letās take it to the other side.
General progress
The team are watching the metrics as well as fielding comments from the community, including the apparent inconsistent flow of attos, CPU and bandwidth and the launchpad. Weāve spotted a few inconsistencies and are monitoring those closely. Thanks to those of you who have provided logs, and, in the spirit of continuous improvement, keep the observations coming.
@rusty.spork has been fielding comments and questions on Discord. Mostly positive so far this week, but there have been a few questions around resources.
@bzee and @qi_ma are looking into periodic spikes in CPU usage, while @chriso is on uploaders and checking out occasional memory-use surges in some nodes.
We are also noting some discrepancies in measurements of network size, depending on the method used, as reported by @riddim and others. We are looking to see which is likely to be correct, and why thereās a difference.
Meanwhile, @anselme is digging into some PUT discrepancies where verification and resolution appear to be being mishandled for registers and scratchpad datatypes. Ermine worked with Anselme on what may be the same issue which has been causing discrepancies with creating vaults (our safe private storage metaphor).
Also on verification, @joshuef found more complexity in replication verification which was generating more messaging than necessary and implemented a more efficient solution.
Elsewhere, @mazzi continues to integrate metrics into the Launchpad coming from services wallets and nodes.
Exciting news on the GUI front: @mick.vandijke has worked up an exciting demo (for some sneak peeks that Bux dropped on launch day), as well as moving forward on CLI wallet integration.
Talking of UI and integration (not to mention perseverance and determination), @dirvine is steadily returning to the front line, adding a PR for Python bindings to the self_encryption
crate.
Welcome back to the pixel-face David!