Skycoin Development Recap | July 2019

Dmsg Becomes Independent & Bip44 Support Nears Completion

During July Skycoin was ranked as #1 according to CoinCodeCap.com every week. Coin Code Cap is a website run by CoinMonks, the 60 fastest growing publication on Medium with over 12k current readers. So the importance of our recent uptick in recognition from Coin Code Cap cannot be overstated. As both website and publication become more known, this will be a huge driver of traffic for Skycoin.

In July we switched from weekly to bi-weekly updates, as a result, there was just the two development updates this month: Week 27| Week 28 & 29

Below are some snippets from those articles.

Skycoin Core Update

Over the past week we have been working to redesign the wallet management library to support multiple wallet “types” (a prerequisite for full bip44 wallet support).

Skywire Update

Skywire has now implemented benchmarks for dmsg structures. Meanwhile, we have moved the dmsg library into its own repo and created a wrapper for it in Skywire, as well as increasing test coverage for dmsg. Because we want other services to be able to use dmsg, we have now made it independent of Skywire. As a result, Skywire imports dmsg so that projects using it for communication do not need to import Skywire.

Among other developments, we also fixed a data race on the SSH server.

Skywire Update

The past two weeks’ work on Skywire has centered on two main objectives: switching to dmsg and improving the public deployment’s performance, and writing automated integration tests. Both of these are essential to migration; along with a stable, working public deployment, we need automated integration tests that accurately resemble it in order to ensure the code we push doesn’t break the mainnet.

A lot has gone into achieving this:

First, we have made the switch to dmsg transport, a rewritten messaging transport that replaces the previous one. Toward that end we fixed a range of issues that were affecting SSH on the public environment, and also changed the way the setup nodes interact with regular nodes. Specifically, we removed the transport settlement handshake between regular nodes and setup nodes, decreasing the number of interactions needed to set up the network. This in turn increases the speed of the public environment for users. Yet another benefit of this is that it eliminates the potential issue of transports between regular nodes and setup nodes being used accidentally for the network data plane, as these transports will not be registered in the transport discovery.

Meanwhile, we renamed the Skywire node module to disambiguate the physical node from the software — it is now called Skywire visor.

Finally, we created a setup for automated integration tests that use docker and that mirror the public deployment in terms of network topology and conditions. This helps support the deployment process, as so far we have had to run manual, interactive integration tests.

Core Update

Skycoin Core is currently preparing ledger support and additional security and convenience features for Coin Hour Bank and general Skycoin use, for instance with HD wallets. To that end we have implemented wallet support for the HD wallet and BIP 44 (a wallet standard needed for ledger integration). This functionality is already available to use through the CLI and will be integrated in the front end as soon as this becomes necessary.

As a sneak peek of what will be included in the August 3rd update from Skycoin (located on the Skyblog) here’s a tweet from Inge, on of the developers working on CX.

You can find the CX 0.7.1 release and notes here.

In July the Skycoin team completed 693 commits (946 last month) by 23 developers! This was counted manually across all public repos for the period of June 30th— July 30th.

Commit Leader Board:

This leaderboard is for fun and doesn’t reflect individual developers work output. Commits vary in difficulty and time taken to complete, lots of work is also still done in private repos (not detailed below) and also in personal repos. I’m going to start tracking 4 months of commits per developer separated by a /, with the most recent month on the left and NA for months “Not Active”.

stdevHan | 93/56

gz-c | 90/66

stdevPavelmc | 54/110

Iketheadore | 45/1

therealssj | 44/32

corpusc | 42/82

nkryuchkov | 40/39

stdevAIDen | 39/25

Darkren | 38/160

stdevMac | 34/2

stdevRulo | 34/NA

Senyoret1 | 32/44

amherag | 30/21

Olemis | 22/35

Mihis | 17/NA

evanlinjin | 14/135

stdevStark | 7/22

ivcosla | 6/36

berli96 | 4/NA

jdknives | 3/NA

YuraYelisieiev | 3/NA

Asgaror | 1/NA

ingwal | 1/13

Active last month

ayuryshev | 70

BigOokie | 13

asahi3g | 2

0pcom | 1

Top 5 Most Active Repos for July

135 commits to all branches

91 commits to all branches. (98/70/92 Last three months)

80 commits to all branches. (217/99 Last two month)

73 commits to all branches.

55 commits to all branches. (109 Last month)

June’s Top 5 That Missed Out In July

22 commits this month. (223 Last month)

42 commits this month. (82 Last month)