August 3rd, 2018 Weekly update (Engineering)

This week concludes a slightly longer sprint as most of the teams had opted into a one-time 3 week sprint in order to reorient after a couple of distracting weeks with Zcon0 and folks taking time off around the 4th of July. So a lot was accomplished this sprint!

Zcashd Team
This team focuses on development of the zcashd client. Follow along with team discussions in the Community Chat #zcashd-team channel.

The team continues to focus on working towards a Sapling MVP for v2.0.0.

  • Integrating wallet support for Sapling
  • Some RPCs have been updated
  • Completed a transaction builder for testnet
  • There has been continuous improvement to Sapling crypto with both fixes and optimizations
  • Discussed the impact of ZIP32 on RPC design and wallet key management
  • Discussed that we may have to release v2.0.0 as Sapling consensus ready, if the activation height for mainnet goes into the release, but place all Sapling related RPC calls behind an experimental flag while work continues to finish the RPCs and ZIP32 for v2.0.1
  • A future goal is to create and test Sapling transactions on testnet

Development Infrastructure Team
The Development Infrastructure team ensures application developers have the tools and infrastructure they need to efficiently collaborate, design, implement, review, test, and ship high quality projects. These responsibilities include: CI/CD, release automation & execution, coverage reporting, simulations and testnets and “spin-up-a-box-for-arbitrary-work-tasks” service for engineers.

Accomplished:

  • Deployed fix for macOS worker to production CI
  • Windows test suite is becoming more stable
  • Investing and implementing new node auto-provisioning schemes in CI
  • Found fixes for existing workers in CI

Goals Next Sprint

  • Deploy CentOS 7, Gentoo, Fedora, Arch, and Valgrind fixes to production CI
  • Build zcashd natively in Windows
  • Upgrade testnet faucet

Ecosystem Team
For the time being this team handles business development in the phases after initial contact by providing technical insight and support.

Accomplishments

  • Launched ecosystem@z.cash support channel for external development teams to request support.
  • Created and provided training documentation for how Zcash Co. employees should use the support desk
  • Begin planning with Documentation team on Sapling support needs

Documentation Team
This team works on improving the accessibility of zcashd and Zcash overall by creating and moderating documentation. Follow along with team discussions in the Community Chat #documentation channel. Check out the official Zcash documentation.

Accomplishments:

  • Reconfigure emergency banner + tested on staging
  • Replaced remaining auto-senescence references with EOS halt
  • added: top-level Zcash contributor guide & elaborated on Overwinter specific issues
  • moved: UX and network upgrade guidelines to RTD
  • documenting which wallets support certain zcash features in new website wallet page
  • Readme update (will be released with 2.0.0)
  • Moved readthedocs to Gitlab
  • More investigations towards RTD translation support

Goals:

  • finish up backend work needed for translation support
  • test emergency banner on production website
  • add a glossary to RTD
  • include testing instructions into Zcash contributor guide
  • Collaborate with ecosystem team on Sapling readiness guides for third-parties & developers

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.

Accomplishments:

  • Hashed out the difference between proof of concept, reference wallet, and a zcash wallet product and documented it in detail
  • Chose our stack: sketch for design with anima, craft (another craft, not craft.io), and material design plugins , abstract for version control, craft.io for project management, slack call for pairing once a week.
  • Narrowed down the feature list for the proof of concept
  • Rough sketches for most screens required for the proof of concept
  • Finished first round of wireframes for the proof of concept

In progress/goals:

  • Design specification to document design decisions and technical requirements
  • Increasing the detail in wireframes to include some design and text elements
  • Turning the more detailed wireframes into a clickable prototype

Community & Communication
You can check out last week’s community and communication update on July 27th for the latest info.

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I know I’m running equihash and supporting the network but I am not receiving any Zcash … any advise ?

@123 I’m afraid that just running a Zcash node won’t earn you any Zcash. You will need to use a GPU or invest in special hardware to mine for coins: https://www.zcashcommunity.com/mining/

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