This is the frontend team. They are pushing ahead with many different app helpers and examples. Helped by Lee and Fraser from the core team (nearly all Lee though in the Posix and Rest like API (amazon type s3 interface) Fraser as usual is everywhere really). This is where all the visibility will go when us lot in core have done what we are supposed to. We are really annoyed to have taken so long, but this is nice actually, when the core is stable again there is a lot to show on the frontend (the part users will see).
That team have really been chapping at the bit to get moving and we keep pushing them back, so they have diverted into many more areas in the hope that we can show significant progress on launch as far as user app development goes.
There is no point making this team core devs they are too important for that and their skills are not aligned (well except Lee and Fraser) with [edit core ] code.
FYI This team is growing fast and nobody has seen their output apart from some web interface stuff/visualiser and some designs and videos. I think this is our wee secret mission force who will surprise everyone with a whole new raft of additions showing the capability of the network. They deserve it for sure, but you will see them all soon. This team are as large (or small == perspective ) as the core dev team so imagine what they may have up their sleeves. I really do not fully know, but I see parts and its impressive. A way to go and a ton of work but these folks will make sure the front-end progresses fast whilst core implements safecoin and compute and so on in core.
I should say this team is Shona, Viv, Spandan, Krishna, Scot, Gildas, Shankar with help from Lee and Fraser as I said, its a great team and they are really great at working closely on slack.
OK, this makes great sense! Guess that’s the part I didn’t see while following the project. The moment the core team decides to implement something new which takes some extra time, they divert into different platforms. That’s actually a great thing than Again, I can wait for some more weeks… I know that you’re all are working very hard to make this thing happen. keep up the good work. You will blow a lot of people away with this project
Well if we were no closer than 6 months ago, it would be infinity
Seriously we have put in a ton of work and not in a non SMART way either. You may have missed lots of the updates etc. but there has been a pretty tremendous and I think brave effort to make a huge improvement before launch that we will all benefit from from many years. It was brave and it frightened the living daylights out of us doing it but the outcome is a much simpler and should be significantly more efficient and certainly secure system.
You won’t find people more dedicated and desperate to launch, we have incredible focus on that, but I have also a razor focus on doing that right as well as fast as possible. So we won’t be perfect, but we will be much closer to that than we will be to sloppy.
I would think so, I am very aware of timescale dangers and folks desire to pin down a timescale. It is something I am working very hard to improve upon. If you stick around a wee while you will see some pretty big changes. At the moment we report everything weekly, but we can be even better than that. Takes effort, but with a very complex system timescales are a nightmare so the key is to remove the complexity where possible. That’s my current issue and I am taking it head on and the I guarantee this will make a difference as we improve further.
We have some of the top names in c++ but that itself is not good enough, so I hope to push a lot of developments through. Again its all very much pressured, but the testnet3 network is on track and I would hope to see that very soon. Importantly I feel we need to not only rush this out but manage expectations and upgrades better. The latest delay was me forcing through the language of the network, which is massively important. Things are greatly simplified and more obvious now, so lets see what we can accomplish now with all the Engineers we have more focussed on simpler goals with much less complexity. I think you will be surprised.
I’m not sure if the roadmap is outdated (is it?), but as you can see a lot of, what I think are major, milestones have yet to be reached, for example :
Introduction of public name registration
Implement messenger / mail system
Initial apps - Desktop Drive, Messaging
Establish Safe App Launcher
If the roadmap is indeed up to date, do you intend to complete all of these “major” milestones within the next 1/2 months, before TestNet 3? Have you guys started actually work yet on these milestones? If so how much progress has been made so far, is it nearing completion, or just starting out?
These are actually mostly in place in terms of code complete (not 100% sure launcher is 100% yet) , you will see it in code. We made a decision to not allow the roadmap to update until code was pushed to master branch, a bit tough I agree but it’s more accurate. So where we now tick off points it means they are not only complete and Qa’d etc. they are in the master branch of the codebase.
We are finalising a huge change right now, but pushed most of these things to master last week, so I expect some will be ticked off, but again we have not got testnet3 up to confirm these points.
So the roadmap is accurate, but we have put checks in place to make sure when they tick off it means more than just coded. When testnet3 goes live much of this will just all get ticked off, but possibly beforehand if we check on the current testnet (which we have down right now to focus on all the changes).
It would be easier to tick these off, but not so honest really as we have these new tougher criteria, I suppose we should explain this part more fully though.
No, understandable as we have just dived into a huge amount of work and should be more vocal about it and the changes, its a hard balance between doing and talking though
@dirvine I can’t even say how happy I am to find out the creator of Maidsafe takes the time to explain milestones and progress to the mass community… it fills me up with confidence seeing you guys do all you can to have the best code in place before launching. Cheers to you and the team!
Thanks David for all the information once again! As the poster above mentioned, it’s a pleasure to be in a community where the project lead takes time out to discuss with fellow community members.
Am I missing something or is TestNet no longer part of the Roadmap? I guess too many people obsess with TestNet instead of the other progress made but the new roadmap still confuses me as to where we are in terms of release.
It should now be taken from granted the network is running, it will be from this week hopefully as we release all the components of last sprint. It will initially be tcp only and then fully able to break through NAT etc. See each lib readme for more info on each part as well.
So that’s technical, but from the other side, say user only, then the download point and click apps will hopefully start to be created now. There is a lot of community interest and we hope some apps running on AWS etc. can switch their API and use the network now. It will enter beta after dev bundle three and possible 1 security audit and tech debt sprint, if that helps. We will keep everyone up to date weekly though as we progress and let folks know what we have released and (hopefully) why.
Even more so, I checked routing to see when we started with the test of rust, I played for a week or two then the test team started on 15th March (a couple of the app devs I pulled aside). Three weeks later most of the team were involved.
In routing alone there are over 1600 code commits in that time, so it’s more like three months (or under) but with a tremendous work rate (routing is one lib from 11). Been very rapid indeed with daily meetings to make sure everyone is as productive as possible and not blocked. So another 2 months like this and we should be very comfortable indeed.
2 months should be just enough to get me started with the programming again…I have some great ideas for applications .
I remember reading in some thread that apps can be written in C#. Is this still valid?
What is your recommendation here? What should I/we start with ? @dirvine
I think for windows apps c# is probably great. Many languages are now getting more platform agnostic and c# included (@Viv knows much more). Python, JavaScript, ruby et al’ are also fine. I suspect c# and family will make improvements fast. Go, Java etc. also my be fine. Go is very nice in many ways. I think though if you know c# a bit then go with that, but check out how portable it will be, I know MS released a write once run everywhere type initiative recently.
Will you use pub extern "C" on the APIs in the end so that we can build shared libs and bind them to other languages? I’m especially interested in Crust right now, but ultimately the whole stack. Thank you.
) as the core dev team so imagine what they may have up their sleeves. I really do not fully know, but I see parts and its impressive. A way to go and a ton of work but these folks will make sure the front-end progresses fast whilst core implements safecoin and compute and so on in core.
Again, I can wait for some more weeks… I know that you’re all are working very hard to make this thing happen. keep up the good work. You will blow a lot of people away with this project 
.