By
Paige Peterson
Releases & Upgrades
Well, Overwinter activated on testnet this week and so far so good. We’re working on updating the testnet block explorer that we maintain to work with the change in transaction format introduced by the upgrade.
We are also starting a more active push to communicate with third-parties regarding preparation for the
Overwinter activation on the main network which is still scheduled for June 25th of this year but as we mentioned before, security and stability take priority so we will not hesitate to push back if necessary. Related, audits of the Overwinter code are progressing and we’re getting great feedback. Reports from these audits will be made public as soon as they’re ready.
We’re also finalizing a public rendering of our release and upgrade roadmap so it will be easily referenceable by users and developers. As always, you can track our progress for releases in the
milestones and planning
project.
As with last week, there was a lot of engineering focus on review and editing of pull requests.
Documentation & User support
We’re making good progress on cleaning up our documentation and placing it into a central location using Readthedocs. There’s a ton of scattered documentation so it’s taking a while to gather everything up. That said, this will be a major improvement in usability for developers and users who are looking for a bit more detail on using Zcash (like those who use the command line client).
While I rarely reference it, user support is an ongoing project that several of us take time to meet about once a week. We go through new tickets filed in Github and try to collect information needed to resolve issues users are having with zcashd or features users would like to see implemented.
Community outreach
This week we participated in the MIT Bitcoin Expo in Boston and the Zero Knowledge Summit in Berlin. Next week, Zooko is headed to India and Singapore in part to touch base with the developer communities there and speak at meetups and events.
Team coordination & Hiring
We’re generally working through establishing an efficient process for working on various projects as we incorporate a bunch of new engineers into the team. Obviously our focus is on maintaining zcashd and the Zcash network but there are many auxiliary projects that don’t necessarily fit in Github for tracking. This is a methodical process and we’re not rushing anything. So far, the new engineers are diving in where they are most useful and it’s been a great help.
We finally got bios from all the new hires (it’s always like herding cats getting everyone to submit bios :p) and
announced the new group in a blog. Welcome to the new engineers and marketing director! Big things to come from ZcashCo with an ever-growing and strengthening team!
