September 14, 2018 - Weekly update (Engineering)

Ecosystem Updates Weekly Forum Updates
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This week concludes a 3-week sprint. Last week’s update was light being mid-sprint and all so we’re making up for it this week!

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

Accomplishments

  • Major progress on Sapling RPC support
    • z_getbalance and z_gettotalbalance PR 3436
    • z_sendmany PR 3489
    • Shielded HD for all Sapling keys PR 3492
    • (in review) z_shieldcoinbase PR 3518
    • (in review) z_importwallet and z_exportwallet PR 3491
    • (in review) z_listunspent PR 3510
    • (in review) z_listreceivedbyaddress PR 3499

Goals

  • 2.0.1-rc on Monday, Sept 17 (perhaps will slip a day or two)
  • 2.0.1 on Monday, Sept 24

Consensus Protocol Team
The focus of the team over the next couple months will be protocol code cleanup/refactoring and eventually doing some research groups to study potential improvements in the next network upgrades.

This marks the beginning of this team’s first sprint after having been merged with zcashd team for the past several months to focus on Sapling wallet support. The upcoming sprints will be focused on refactoring and you can follow along in the #zcash-refactor channel in the community chat.

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:

  • Initial fixes into Explorer underway
  • Beginning implementation of Windows Dev-CI worker
  • Phase 1 of test-suite profiling complete
  • Added benchmarking for initial block download
  • Initial auto CI deployment tool features complete
  • Preliminary POC projects for alternative CI tools complete
  • New #dev-infrastructure channel in the community chat

Goals Next Sprint

  • Audit existing infrastructure tools for Sapling updates
  • Deploy Windows CI worker to production
  • Release initial draft of Development Infrastructure Design document
  • Run Phase 2: trials of POC CI projects

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

Most of the members of the team this last sprint were focusing their time on zcashd to get as much Sapling RPC support in the upcoming 2.0.1 release.

Accomplishments

  • Working on the Sapling Readiness Framework document which integrators can follow to verify their implementation is Sapling compatible.

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

Goals

  • Add testing instructions to developer/contributor guide
  • Complete payment API updates for Sapling changes
  • Begin to add more translations and complete Spanish
  • Move repo to official Zcash gitlab org
  • Make docs.z.cash a thing
  • Continue Sapling related updates to NU integration guide
  • Add documentation about Zcash Rust architecture
  • Add docs for MacOS and clarify Debian stretch support

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 include design + protocol work but no implementation work yet.

Objective:

  • overall: deliver PoC as fast as possible, reference wallet before Sapling activation.
  • design: all screens in framerX with material design, perform user testing with invision prototype, learn framerX scripting.
    • converged on the user interface for the reference wallet and now are moving on to testing the application with users.
    • working on creating an interactive prototype with scripting so that we can have a prototype that mimics a fully functioning application
  • protocol: set a timeline, implementation of light wallet backend, refactor sapling code to be more compatible with reference wallet.
  • implementation: hire an android developer ASAP.

Community Spotlight
The Zcash Company donated this forum to the Zcash Foundation and on Monday, we officially transferred ownership and domains. More info here: Forum handover + URL change

The Zcash Foundation has set up a network using the meetup platform to support local community groups that want to gather for discussion on Zcash and privacy. More info here: home - zcash foundation

There’s a Zcash meetup on September 27th in Zcash Company’s homebase city of Denver so join us if you’re local too!

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