News this week, for those that missed the Discord Stage session on Tuesday, is the imminent launch of the WASM web app, which should now really be called the Vault. This will allow users to interact with the network without needing a CLI, so obviously that’s a big step forward in making it more accessible to “normal” people (whatever they are).
The latest release tackles some CPU/memory concerns that we’ve observed and which is why we’ve been going softly-softly with the uploaders. These include some changes to range based searching to reduce resource usage.
In addition, pressing L on the Launchpad who show an individual node’s logs, and the upgrade screen has an estimated upgrade time. Launchpad now runs on multiple threads to allow operations to be performed while nodes are being started and upgraded. More instructions here.
As mentioned, there’ll be more of these fixes and features incoming, including some with breaking changes. We’re aiming for a code freeze on 10th December. It’s going to be a busy old five weeks, but we’re quietly confident of being ready by then.
We’ve also launched a new reward system for node operators, allocating 1.5 million test tokens over six weeks, with points earned based on data hosted. You can get going with this now by downloading the latest Launchpad (v0.4.4)
Thanks to @loziniak for his PR on unifying register names.
General progress
@chriso worked on the latest release, which includes data pruning and key management upgrades, among other things.
And out back, @shu has been analysing metrics to inform our choice of instance types and capacities for upcoming networks, and wrote up some documentation for prune and cleaning Influx DB as and when required as part of our monitoring process.
Meanwhile, @anselme has been running a review of all the performance and data security features and needs, so that, with the basics in place, we know what to focus on over the coming weeks. @Qi_ma has also been heavily involved in this area too, as well as putting in several bug fixes and analyses.
@bzee has been profiling CPU by joining with a port-forwarded host on his PC. Most of the CPU usage seems to come from either QUIC handling (connections) or XorName::from_content. He’s also succeeded in getting web workers to work with self encryption, correcting an error that was blocking the UI of the WASM Vault.
And @dirvine has improved his Python module for interfacing with the network, with recursive data maps, functor based decrypt (for direct network reads), and more.
On testing, Ermine worked on vault integration tests, fixing some issues with Windows CI, and raising a PR that adds functional test cases to the Autonomi Vault CLI utility.
@roland has been looking into the behaviour of the ExternalAddressCandidate event including setting up tests with websockets. Roland is also looking at edge cases in payment flows to make sure this vital aspect is working smoothly.
@mick.vandijke Implemented private file/archives upload through the WebApp, including showing the quote prices and paying using MetaMask. He also implemented listing all files from a user’s vault, and opened a PR to check a wallet’s balance before uploading a file. This is to avoid the situation where an uploader runs out of tokens during a file upload, having already paid for a bunch of chunks.
And @mazzi has been working on improvements to the Launchpad including individual node log view, and adding and removing nodes individually. There are also fixes allowing Ctrl+V on rewards address popup, and to eliminate a bug reported by Windows users.
that’s impressive if it’s what I think it mean’s 
