By
Paige Peterson
Releases & Upgrades
Just after last week’s update, we finished the process for releasing the first Overwinter compatible Zcash version, 1.1.0. We urge users to
upgrade their Zcash clients in anticipation for the Overwinter activation on June 25th. If you upgrade now, you’ll be ready to go for the activation. For users interested in confirming with the third party Zcash services they use, it doesn’t hurt to reach out with a reference to the
Overwinter information portal which references the
upgrade integration guide for developers. We’re focusing the next several weeks on doing outreach ourselves, of course, and hope to get a list up of services who acknowledged readiness for the activation. Note that most services won’t need to do much other than making sure their Zcash clients are up-to-date.
We’re working diligently on implementing the consensus changes into zcashd for the 1.1.1 release. This upcoming release will also include an activation on the test network, just as we did for Overwinter at 1.0.15.
We also have kept up with reviewing various fixes and improvements beyond the scope of Sapling in our ongoing effort to maintain security, stability and continuous improvements. One thing we’ve bumped up in priority is build support for Windows with the goal of officially covering the 3 major platforms (Linux, Windows and MacOS). Keep track of the issues we’re aiming to address in the
release planning project.
Communication & Documentation
We’re interviewing a handful of brand and design agencies to help us in a revamp of the website, visual assets and generally align our brand. This goes hand-in-hand with our progress on a central documentation source which is approaching a state where community feedback would help a lot so stay tuned!
Team & Community
As the team grows, we’re formalizing development processes by creating sub teams and 2-week sprint cycles (3 per release). Next Wednesday will conclude the first sprint in this new system so the weekly report will include recaps on a per team basis. We hope that in addition to better internal organization, these teams and sprints will enhance accountability to the community. Not to say any of you have complained or criticized about accountability thus far, but I definitely miss things here and there in these reports so being fed bi-weekly reports from each team should fix that.
This week, on the est coast of the US, we participated in the
Blockchain Career Fair and next week will be at
SHE256, both hosted at UC Berkeley. On the east coast, we presented at the
Blockchain Economic Event in Toronto this week and will be on a
Privacy & Identity panel as part of
Boston Blockchain week. Regarding the far East, we put out a
blog detailing Zooko’s travels to India and Singapore.
Check out the Zcash Foundation
announcement for Zcon0 and the community governance panel they’re organizing. You’re encouraged to apply ASAP to Zcon0 now that it’s more publicly shared especially those who seek scholarship.
https://z.cash.foundation//zcon
If you’re interested in participating in UX surveys of services in the Zcash ecosystem, keep an eye out next week for our first official community spotlight announcement. The idea with this is to broaden the UX research to gather more data points so we can continue enhancing our guidelines for developers and work towards achieving some standards.
