By Chris A
This is our biweekly engineering update, which happens after the conclusion of each engineering sprint. You can check out last week’s update for recent news on community and communications.
This team focuses on development of the zcashd client, lightwalletd, librustzcash and protocol upgrades. Follow along with team discussions in the Community Chat #community-arborist channel.
“We are rounding the final bend on the insight PRs, having spent a bit of extra time on those, making sure the documentation was up to our standards and addressing a bug that was found by gareth, who has been testing it. ZIP208 has had several updates based on the actual implementation of that code, and it should be finalized now. Daira also added ZIP206 for Blossom activation. The implementation of ZIP208 is in review and being tested. Sean has been reviewing Rust code, working on bls381 updates, and researching recursive proofs.
We plan to have the RC cut on Monday, and the release cut the following Monday (Aug 12) this will include Blossom activation on testnet, which we plan to happen not long after that.“
Development Infrastructure Team
The Development Infrastructure team ensures developers have the tools and infrastructure they need. Join this team in the #dev-infrastructure chat channel.
“We are finishing up final migration prep work for the z.cash website. Considerable clean up of dated infrastructure components was completed. The Gitian build system is being updated to accommodate some minor issues we found in v2.0.6. Additionally, we hope that these updates decrease deployment time for v2.0.7. In the next few sprints, we hope to address some performance issues in the existing Homu/Buildbot system.“
This team is intended to work on projects that interface with external parties not including the zcashd core client) and handles business development in the phases after initial contact by providing technical insight and support.
“The final PRs for insight explorer support should be merged in time to be included in version 2.0.7“
This team’s current charter is to build a Zcash reference wallet. Follow along with team discussions in the Community Chat #community-wallet-team channel.
“Another sprint down, and here’s what we did:
[1] We’ve got mainnet support!
[2] Increased test coverage of lightwalletd and begun dockerizing it.
[3] Relevant parts of the Zcon1 zwag app have been merged into the reference wallet.
[4] Implemented transparent inputs in the transaction builder for librustzcash; the first steps for making t -> z sends possible on the reference wallet! We still need to do work to integrate it into the SDK and need a source of information for taddrs on the wallet.
[5] Met with the security team to threat model and discuss fixes to the Android SDK.
[6] Got a review for librustzcash PR #92, the last general functionality PR. 1 down, 3 to go.
[7] Interviewing great candidates for the iOS developer contract position.“
Product Team
This team leads product decisions and feature prioritization.
“NU4 items added to the UPPL
Took a deep dive on adding a public requirements-gathering process, to sit alongside the ZIP process. We are investigating this possibility to include more people in public discussion around features and also to enhance our requirements gathering for features that require a long lead time. Updates on this idea will be upcoming as we work out the details.“
