April 26, 2019 - Weekly Update (Engineering)

This is our fortnightly engineering update which happens after the conclusion of each 2-week engineering sprint. You can check out last week’s update for recent news on community and communications.

Arborist Team
This team focuses on development of the zcashd client, lightwalletd, librustzcash and protocol upgrades. Follow along with team discussions in the Community Chat #arborist-team channel.

We continue to review the ZIP drafts for NU3 as well as work on the Sapling to Sprout migration tool and testing the counterfeiting detection consensus rule on mainnet. The migration tool and the consensus change are currently on track to be included in 2.0.5.

Development Infrastructure Team
The Development Infrastructure team ensures developers have the tools and infrastructure they need. Join this team in the #dev-infrastructure chat channel.

We are working on a build factory to run the zcash test suite on windows workers. We finished setting up most of the pieces of the new website on the new domain and are turning our attention to improving the CI system.

Ecosystem Team
This team is intended to work on projects that interface with external parties not including the zcashd core client and handles business development in the phases after initial contact by providing technical insight and support.

We are continuing to work on merging Insight code into the main zcashd code base, and have opened our last PR to achieve that. We are working on documentation for the Insight changes as well.

Documentation Team
This team drives the curation and assists in the creation of documentation. Follow along in the #documentation chat channel. Check out the official Zcash documentation.

We’re working on documentation and communication for the migration tool planned for release in 2.0.5. We’re continuing work on putting together release, smoke test and support policy documentation.

We’ve begun compiling word counts for various documentation to prioritize translations across the 8 languages we support for z.cash.

Reference Wallet Team
This teams current charter is to build a Zcash reference wallet. Deliverables will be a series of MVPs where Android is the first target platform.

We are working to handle reorgs better across the SDK, lightwalletd and librustzcash code. We are also working on better error handling in the SDK and fielding questions from the community on how to set up the wallet.

Miscellaneous

Per our release schedule, next week is the planned release candidate for 2.0.5, and May 6th is the planned release for 2.0.5. As mentioned in the Arborist team update both the migration tool and the turnstile enforcement consensus rule change are planned for that release so long as final testing doesn’t reveal any issues. Keep up to date with that progress in the Arborist team community chat room.

Next week on May 1st the Reference wallet team at ECC is hosting an AMA on Twitter. You can ask questions now with the #ZcashRefWalletQA hashtag to be included in the answer queue.

Zcon1 applications are open! Zcon1: June 22 – 24 in Split, Croatia

3 Likes

I do like the idea of a reference wallet AMA, but looking at the questions makes me wonder if Twitters short format answers will be enough to get into detail.

1 Like

Yeah… I guess long answers could be stringed together?

Thanks for raising this point. Hopefully a thread will allow for some longer responses to questions that are raised. However, since this is our first try at a Twitter Q&A it’s possible that this approach may not suffice in practice. We will see! :slightly_smiling_face: