district0x Dev Update - February 5th, 2019

Development progress and product changes from district0x

Engineering work for the district0x project continues to remain spread across several different projects. Meme Factory continues on its home stretch of bugbashing, Ethlance pushes forward after some key technical reviews, the District Registry moves towards styling and polishing, and Name Bazaar receives some critical bugfixes after an important infrastructure migration.

Meme Factory

Most development on Meme Factory has been focused on internal reviews, bug hunting, and finishing the application ahead of our internal beta. We’ve squashed countless small issues and have several more to address before moving on. Though these issues are quite minor in the grand scheme of a year-long development saga, we truly believe that anything less than a flawless application would be a waste to release with so much time already spent. We expect these small bugs to to be completed in the coming week, and then move on to internal beta testing.

District Registry

In our previous update we mentioned how the District Registry had to undergo a massive contract minimization effort in order to be deployable. This created a new list of challenges and bugs, as well as permission kinks to think and work through. As of today, all bugs resulting from this contract size minimization have been dealt with. With the UI and server side circuitry already in place, we’re fixing some intermittent UI failures, and then expect to move swiftly on towards styling with the help of our external design partners.

While this work proceeds, development efforts have been focused on researching Aragon’s latest DAO kits offering so that we are ready for automatic spin-up of Aragon entities the moment that the District Registry goes live.

Name Bazaar

Name Bazaar had several bugs bubble up to the surface as a result of some infrastructure swaps we mentioned in our last update. Although the affected features were simple, the fixes were not, and we’ve had to make a few concessions. Besides the typical UI components needing some redoing, one feature in particular had to be rewritten.

When searching on Name Bazaar, the URL for the page would automatically update in accordance with the user’s search query. This was a very convenient feature, as every auction and name on Name Bazaar has its own unique URL. The problem was, after updating our infrastructure, this feature would fire much too frequently, and would de-focus the user from the search box before they even finished entering their query.

This fix was complicated by a faulty feature with multimethods and type 2 form components in Reagent — simply put, this doesn’t work at all. We ended up adding a de-bounce to prevent searching too quickly. This fix has been deployed and now Name Bazaar should be functioning as expected once again.

Ethlance

Ethlance development has had several points of focus on the past two weeks. Primarily, development time has been spent taking a second pass on GraphQL resolvers, improving upon the first draft completed in weeks prior after receiving extensive feedback from the team. With this work nearing completion, another review will be conducted and any outstanding issues addressed.

In addition, Ethlance’s backend is being worked on to improve all manner of token transfers to be efficient and cheap. Much of the ERC20 transaction code has been refactored, and research has been poured into the ERC1538 standard proposal. After exploring the potential for us to use this standard in Ethlance, it has become clear that there’s a great deal of support required from the rest of the community before we could adopt such an opt-in proposal. Ethlance work now transitions to a long list of one-off issues to fix while follow-up reviews commence.

Across the entire spectrum of development, the team continues to grow stir crazy to piece together and show off the many different applications and platform we’ve been quietly building. While some unexpected delays have occurred and coupled themselves with understandable disappointment, the team grows ever confident that what we’re are building is, from a technical perspective, truly new and worth experimenting with. Thanks for coming along for the ride.