September 28, 2018 - Weekly update (Engineering)

This week concludes our first 2-week sprint since we had a couple extended sprints. You can check out last week’s update for recent updates on community and communications.

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

An important note from this team: 2.0.1-rc has slipped further due to several factors including extended review needed for upgrading wallet RPCs for Sapling.

Accomplishments

  • Sapling RPCs merged z_importwallet and z_exportwallet PR 3491
  • Other fixes and preparation for Sapling:
    • Design and implementation of ovk when shielding from t-addr PR 3516
    • Network upgrade peer management logic improved PR 3512
    • Added Sapling fields to JSON RPC output PR 3521
    • Replace Sapling support asserts with JSON errors to improve user experience PR 3536
    • Enable Sapling features on mainnet PR 3537
  • Fixed signing raw transactions with unsynced offline nodes PR 3520 and PR 3535
  • Tests added and cleaned up PR 3452, PR 3479
  • (in review) z_shieldcoinbase PR 3518
  • (in review) z_listunspent PR 3510
  • (in review) z_listreceivedbyaddress PR 3499

Goals

  • 2.0.1-rc (hopefully today??:pray::pray::pray:)

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. Follow along in the #zcash-refactor channel in the community chat.

This team has already begun refactoring work of existing libraries and will continue with this as it’s main objective.

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.

Much infrastructure work is delayed while engineers focus on release candidate work.

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

No major public updates as much engineering effort is still being put towards zcashd team work on 2.0.1

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

  • Added testing instructions to developer/contributor guide
  • Added documentation about Zcash Rust architecture
  • Brainstormed tutorials and workshop curriculum’s

Goals

  • Complete payment API updates for Sapling changes
  • Begin to add more translations and complete Spanish
  • Begin to rebrand docs
  • Move repo to official Zcash gitlab org, make docs.z.cash a thing & finally nuke old GH wikis
  • Continue Sapling related updates to NU integration guide
  • Add docs for MacOS and clarify Debian stretch support
  • Begin overview whitepaper for reference wallet

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.

Accomplishments:

  • Hired an android developer!
  • Threat modeling work
  • First round of user testing & analysis; planning next rounds
  • Continued work on client and server side architecture design

Community Spotlight

We hosted a Zcash meetup last night in Zcash Company’s homebase city of Denver. Many of us were in town for a co-working week and almost outnumbered the non-employees. :relaxed:
Keep an eye out for the recording of the presentations!

Also keep an eye out for a major branding update on Monday!!!

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