As March ended here is a report on milestone 3 and a new milestone 4 proposal.
It had been a difficult month for everyone, i hope the zcashers reading and their families are all ok. In here the daily life changed but my work routine is by now the same.
The vacations mentioned in the last post (i should be leaving this weekend) are of course cancelled and by now moved to July, we will see if that actually ends happening.
Almost all the tasks planned were done, as usual some of them are merged, some others are pending but they all have at least some code attached.
Let me comment a bit in regard to the first 3 tasks of Week 1. The 2 that are crossed out are because the state may no longer be reproducible as commented in Zcash core developer proposal - #15 by oxarbitrage .
The work in the logging was started actually in week 4 of the milestone(I don’t respect the weeks where the tasks are added to the milestone, just try to do them somewhere in the month), an initial PR was submitted for the balances part of it but implementation is discarded by performance issues. With some suggestions from @daira i now have another implementation very close to be submitted(between today and tomorrow) but it will still need some attention in the first week of april to finalize properly so i added it again as a task in week 1 of milestone 4(zf-grants/milestone4.md at master · oxarbitrage/zf-grants · GitHub).
With the end of April the milestone 4(zf-grants/milestone4.md at master · oxarbitrage/zf-grants · GitHub) is now closed. The majority of the tasks were done, a lot of good stuff. In this milestone several tasks were pretty big so it is costing some more time to get them reviewed and finally merged.
For that reason and because a bigger task was planned when the grant was initially discussed the next milestone will be a bit different:
It will be focusing mainly on 1 single task, a ZIP about wallet format. This is considered of importance to the ECC developers and a good candidate for me to take.
At the same time, old pull requests will be bumped and of course new requests can be added as the milestone is going.
For ZIP402 i will like to do the implementation, i already have some code, however i think it will be more productive if we leave the zips open for review, suggestions, etc from the editors and from the community in general for the next period while we get back to some smaller issues. Work in this 2 documents, with the feedback collected will continue in the background and implementation of ZIP402 can maybe be done in milestone 7.
Also in milestone 5 and specially after zcash v3.0.0 was released we were able to tweak and merge several older pull requests that were in queue.
In recent discussion between me and @acityinohio from the foundation i started to do some zebra research for a future collaboration. As the zebra project is moving very fast in this stage there is plenty to do.
I asked the zebra team before taking this decision and they are happy to have me around with them so very appreciated for that.
Please note this do not mean no more work will be done in the c++ repo ever, i will just shift a bit the focus in this milestone but will make suggested changes to the open pull requests while they get reviewed. Still, if anyone is after a feature that think i can do please let me know and i will try to take care as well.
Milestone 7 is a bit different in regard to the list of tasks i always submit, as i am very new to rust and to zebra in general, it will be too risky to plan for a month so detailed. So the idea is keep learning the codebase, the language and do some useful stuff for the benefit of the software in the path. Items will be added as they are taken instead of beforehand as usual. Hope this is understandable.
The “experiment” of the last milestone(moving to zebra) was pretty successful and even if i still have a lot to learn the period was very productive in my view. I am very grateful with the zebra team for allowing me to get adapted fast.
Zebra will remain the main focus for this period but i also plan to make some room for doing some zcashd, as the milestone explains there are some pull requests that had been reviewed and i will probably take a look to my currently open prs, check if they need rebase, do changes if needed, close if they are obsolete, maybe take some new issues, etc.
The full block subsidy calculation and validation is taking some more time than expected, progress was made but there is still work to to. For that reason the next milestone is about the continuation of that work.
There was some back and forth that could be avoided with a better planning so it will be good to write an RFC for the next stages of the validation.
In another subject, by the end of this month(probably around the 20th or something, i don’t have the exact date yet) i will be out of the office for around 4 days, i hope this is ok.
I am closing milestone 10 a few days earlier as i will be out of the keyboard for a few days starting tomorrow to do some construction work away from home. I will be out from Thursday 29 of October up to Tuesday November 3. Feel free to send me a direct message if needed, i will still check my email once or twice a day while out.
The milestone 10 was almost entirely dedicated to block subsidy and consensus rules implementation in zebra. A lot of progress has been made, some code was merged, other in progress but the task is not fully finished. The block subsidy is of course very important but it is not a top priority so we decided to finish the most we can and start working on tasks needed for the first alpha release.
Plan for milestone 11 is to focus on issues needed for the first zebra release. Work in consensus, specially in flight pull requests will also be done among other zebra minors and some zcashd.
Milestone 11 was closed. Items planned for the first alpha were done, i had the help of the zebra team members to do them and in that collaboration work the code is now merged and it is being tested for the first alpha release.
I am planning on submitting a similar contract for 2021 to continue the work, i already spoke about it with the foundation side and they are compliant, with all the errors, mistakes, wrong decisions, etc someone like me can make in 1 year i think the ECC folks are going to be ok with it(i didn’t asked them directly but i think so) and the community in general seems compliant too(at least in 1 year i never received any complain).
From my side i am very comfortable working on zcash, it is a very stable project and a great place for being always learning.
I will post the new proposal as soon as i have it written. Thank you all for supporting me over this great experience.
Happy new year to all the Zcashers. I closed the milestone 12 which is the last milestone of this proposal. I want to take the opportunity to thank all the Zcash community for supporting me over the last year
I have a new proposal written but it is under the Foundation review. As this are difficult dates my situation will be resolved in the next few weeks. The plan is to continue working in a similar way to what i had been doing until now, the details are not here yet but they will.
I am taking some vacations from today up to Jan 15th, the plan is to be communicated, follow up the development the most i can but no heavy work will be started during that period.
From now on i don’t need to write this milestones anymore however i think i can keep doing it to have the community informed on what i am doing, maybe keep using this thread.
Congrats @oxarbitrage, well deserved, I enjoy reading this update thread and am looking forward to seeing how you get on in the new role. Best of luck!
