district0x Dev Update - July 9th, 2019

Development progress and product changes from district0x

The past development cycle has been rather productive, despite a string of holidays and vacations for the organization. Large strides have been made towards some major Meme Factory update including tooling and infrastructural upgrades, as well as major milestones with the District Registry as we manage to deploy a testnet instance. With work humming along across all 3 applications, we also recognize that we’ve had time to cool off from the Meme Factory launch, and have begun paying down some of the technical debt we’ve incurred from its very long development cycle.

Part of this involves a completely new project management strategy for development. Using a more clear but flexible approach allowing variable length development sprints followed by appropriate length QA cycles, we’ve committed to this schedule as of this week and have been using it to field and prioritize the variety of issues reported both from the operations side as well as the development side of the organization.

This should have many benefits. First, it should significantly decrease the likelihood of bugs slipping through the cracks into the production build on mainnet, and should give us a nice formal cadence for making sure every feature built is complete and tested well ahead of it’s deployment. Next, it makes our deployment timing predictable, which greatly streamlines our processes that typically gather all of our development resources, and gives the entire organization a known goal post to work towards in agreed-upon chunks.

Additionally, this change should give us a much clearer picture of exactly what changes have been deployed to users, meaning updates like this one can contain far clearer changelogs for apps that are being actively maintained. Lastly, as we enter into a deeper non-silo’d form of development collaboration, across multiple apps in pre-and/or-post production phases, sharing resources on their QA server instances and design patterns on the final product, this should simply keep our documentation and headspace far more organized, and prevent the kind of wire-crossing that’s all too common in long-running projects with many contributors.

Meme Factory

Meme Factory has seen several separate initiatives brought forward. The persistent database, designed to make redeployment of the app far smoother with continuous availability of IPFS data, saw a huge chunk of work completed. Synchronous event pathing was built, with some minor fixes to current event pathing. All of these changes were deployed to our QA instance. As this is a rather massive refactor involving many modules and individual events, we will need thorough testing to confirm no odd quirks have emerged.

Parameter change pages and their corresponding functionality have been built and tested. Everything is working rather well except for the most important step, actually committing the changes to the contract. We’re currently seeing an unexpected reversion that prevents changes from being permanent. With some more testing in the cards for this week, this bug is expected to be fixed, and parameter change pages deployed, with the coming release.

Additionally, a whole host of fixes and improvements are coming from issues discovered from exploratory testing, including more accurate scoreboards, upgrades to the twitter bot, and other quality of life improvements that will assist in social engagement not only for users, but also for the organization as we run manage the site and future social media campaigns like creator or curator contests.

District Registry

The most visible progress in the last two weeks has been made on the District Registry. After switching hands between developers, we’ve gotten the Aragon integration all squared away and built, and now consider ourselves experts on their prolific solidity repositories. Last week we were able to launch a Kovan testnet instance of the District Registry, and have since been testing the creation of and staking to districts on the Aragon network. Although a simple app to design, there are quite a few critical features involving fund movement that we must test. In the coming weeks we will proceed with this and onward towards audits, following which we will move towards deploying to mainnet and the eventual public launch.

Ethlance

Ethlance remains in a development pattern focused on the front-end. We’ve managed to shrink and complete many of the stubbed components built thus far. We’ve refined our styling with more mix-ins so more pieces are reusable between page layovers. We resolved a bug with in-line .svg components, and now have all the components in the correct place for proper UI testing. With one more kink on the main page left to resolve, massive strides have been made making the reworked app mobile friendly with much improved responsiveness. Ethlance will continue to see this kind of slow but steady progress until the District Registry is live and available to launch the remade district upon.

Across all service providers, it feels like the past month has marked a determined shift in the organization to “level-up” from previous development habits, all in the name of efficiency and avoiding slowdowns or unnecessary frustrations. It’s wonderful to see how quickly we can adapt to new workflows even after nearly two years of continuous development. Thanks for coming along for the journey.