district0x Dev Update - March 5th, 2019

Development progress and product changes from district0x

The last two weeks of application development have been a direct continuation of all the lines of work mentioned in our last update. Namely, Meme Factory has been successfully deployed to Ropsten and is in the middle of a team testing effort, the District Registry continues to work towards a smooth integration with Aragon’s DAOKits, and Ethlance proceeds with a modular component set for UI development.

Meme Factory

After much anticipation, Meme Factory has finally made its way on to the Ropsten testnet, and the team has been proceeding with all manner of testing. Certain parts of the application remain constrained (for instance, the file types we allow for upload) as we test the moving parts and introduce more complexity piece-meal. This has been effective in helping us isolate any degradation in performance or bugs that may have otherwise taken searches through multiple layers of code if discovered in testing.

The team is also using this time to produce supporting documentation and launch-day content. This will include written tutorials and FAQs, education portal content used to explain some of the more nebulous concepts, and video walkthroughs to get a complete overview of what’s available in the application.

There are several other important pieces the application that, as of the writing of this update, haven’t been deployed to the current QA instance. The biggest of these is the faucet. In the coming weeks we’ll get these parts deployed and continue to find bugs, missing convenience features, and nitpick every last line in preparation for a deployment to mainnet. This is by far the largest and most complex thing we’ve put on-chain as a project, and given the “no do-overs” nature of the blockchain, we are taking all necessary precautions to ensure we’re building what we set out to.

District Registry

The District Registry is currently moving forward on two different branches. The first involves our in-house service providers working through a fork of the Aragon DAOKit model, and finding a way to call out to their contracts in every place needed in the District Registry. This has led to some more meta-level coding questions of how to house the necessary pieces across repositories (where the tradeoff is akin cleaner organization requiring more duplicated work or external calls). This is expected to take several more cycles to hammer out, at which point we’ll be ready to shop around for audits.

In addition, we’ve employed a different strategy for UI development, which involves our external partners at Griflan doing a bit more complete HTML/CSS work to match their originally supplied designs, and from there we code up an equivalent page in our own language suite, and use a specific function to generate an output to match what we’re given. It may seem unnecessarily complicated at first, but in the long run should save us countless man-hours we’ve previously burned (for instance, on Meme Factory’s stylings) getting our own front-end to match up with the supplied designs.

Ethlance

Ethlance development continues to be varied across more lines of attack than most. With feedback from reviews mentioned in our previous update, the GraphQL resolvers got a week’s treatment in bashing a few inefficiencies that lingered from initial drafts of the model. Tokenstores were also honed.

From here, Ethlance transitions towards development of the UI components, borrowing heavily from the updated Meme Factory UI. Similar to the District Registry, we’re attempting a different strategy here wherein we lay out every individual component needed for the UI in it’s entirety, and categorize the reusable parts, starting with those first and building outward towards the individual pieces needed to make unique pages. This should help ensure a more unified path towards any additions of buttons, tabs, or pages we may need to make in the future.

Overall, it’s a very exciting time for the development team here, as we finally get to start using what we’ve created, and build the content that will carry it on to the world. We can’t wait for you to join us in the Meme Factory!