district0x Dev Update - November 26th, 2019

Development progress and product changes from district0x

Since our last update two weeks ago, our organization has made progress across all three of our applications in development, nearly all of which was pertaining to ongoing migrations of libraries or deployment to our production servers or new services, most of which are not actually application specific. Regardless, we’ve arranged these updates by application as usual. Let’s hop right in.

Meme Factory

In our last update we detailed how the recent Meme Factory update deployed with the NSFW tag feature was unexpectedly failing in a way that escaped our testing. After discovering what was wrong with our tag parsing, we managed to quickly push a fix for this, so as of last week the tagging features for Meme Factory should be in fully working order. We also finished all the code needed for our Web3 v1.0.0 migration, but had additional work to complete on the test suite for this after uncovering a couple of painful issues with a couple of our GraphQL resolvers. Essentially, we weren’t returning promises in all of the places we needed in order to sync correctly against timestamps. This was fixed, and the migration was completed, but remains in testing.

Currently, we are fast-tracking some changes to our server infrastructure that will migrate Meme Factory (and eventually, all of our applications) away from a Parity instance and instead leveraging Infura. The reasoning for this is explained more below.

Ethlance

Ethlance has been moving forward on two fronts. The first involves an enhancement to our scroll bar interface using the simplebar library. However, as this doesn’t come packaged in our native Clojurescript, we had to make some modifications for our purposes and port it to CLJS-JS. As of today, we are currently attempting to make these modifications work through the react wrapper that will allow us to use simplebar-react.

The second front is related to the work that was done with Meme Factory. As we wrapped up the totality of Web3 migrations on Meme Factory, we began updating these libraries across our application suite. Ethlance being in redevelopment made it a prime subject for testing this migration. Luckily, after all the kinks encountered and fixed on Meme Factory, this went through very smoothly on Ethlance.

Following this, we began integrating the standard bounties contracts into Ethlance. This is where our work will continue in the following weeks.

District Registry

After a bit of tinkering, we were able to successfully deploy the District Registry to the Ethereum mainnet, and have been spending the past week running through all test routines to ensure everything is working correctly. This has been slow going, as the network transaction fee has been quite high recently, however, we’re able to confirm all of the core functionality works.

One of the obstacles we’ve faced in testing, however, is stability of the entire server instance when relying on our Parity node. While we’ve sunk quite a bit of time and effort into making Parity more reliable in the past, none of this makes much of a difference when we launched a second application to the instance. For a long time, we’ve had preliminary plans to migrate everything to an Infura node instead. But with this experience in the past week in mind, we decided to continue with our Parity instance supporting the Registry while we immediately begin the process of migrating Meme Factory to Infura. This will be one of the primary projects post-launch of the District Registry.

We’re in the final weeks of preparation prior to the public launch of the District Registry. As we get closer to launch day, we’ll undoubtedly pull more hands off of other projects and place them on support duties for the coming launch. But what’s particularly exciting is the amount of momentum we’ve established for transition work *after* the launch. This marks a significant organizational change from previous launches, and is one we’ve deliberately brought about. We can’t wait to see where it takes us!