Things have certainly been heating up for us as we near the end of 2017. It’s been an exciting couple of weeks, with a slight break for the Thanksgiving holiday here in the States. We have some development updates to share, new social platforms to explore, and something for your viewing pleasure. This update will be a little shorter than normal, as a couple of the topics I wanted to cover had to get moved to next month.

Before we jump into the update, I urge you to get up to speed on the recent Net Neutrality news. Net Neutrality is something that affects every Internet user in the US, and the implications of the FCC vote scheduled for December 14th could influence policy in nations around the world. There are plenty of posts detailing the issue, and they aren’t too hard to find.

Now, on with the show.

In this update

Sia makes it Facebook official Developer’s Corner David Vorick gives a talk

Facebook

Keep up to date in our Page and Group

Facebook has two separate things that its members can use to follow topics they care about — Pages and Groups. Pages are usually run by companies themselves, and give that brand a platform on Facebook to announce news and stay in touch with their users. Groups can be administered by anyone, but importantly act as a channel for open discussion on a topic. Sia now has an official Page and Group.

I want to thank Andrew Pratt, who up until recently ran the Sia Facebook Page. He curated the Page from nothing to a group of over 6,000 followers, and represented us very well in the process. We had an incredibly smooth transition due to his help. The official Page is the best source for Sia news and announcements if you are a Facebook user, and now has over 7,000 followers.

Follow the Page.

To go along with the new Page, we also made an official Group. Hop on and talk with other Sia enthusiasts. Say hi (and thanks) to our moderator Karl while you’re there!

Join the Group.

Updates from the…

Discord user @tbenz9 has started releasing fantastic weekly development updates on behalf of the Sia team. Much of the info from these updates is drawn from Github, the tool used by the dev team and community contributors to create, update, and improve Sia’s code. All of the work the team does is available in public repositories (repos) so you can follow along with the development if you’re so inclined. Think of a repo like storage space for everything related to a specific app or project.

@tbenz9’s updates can be found in the #announcements channel in Discord, but I wanted to feature some of that info here as well for our broader community.

Over the past three weeks, the Sia dev team has contributed to 6 Github repositories. Over 45 pull requests have been merged and almost 30 issues have been closed. For reference, a pull request is when a team member or contributor grabs a section of code to improve or add something.

Much of this work is in service of the 1.3.1 update, with a new release candidate version — 1.3.1RC2 — expected in December.

Finally, you might recall when @dvstate completed the Minio integration bounty. Well the Minio team has officially merged in the Sia Gateway code enabling the Minio integration. Congratulations and thank you to everyone who helped along the way.

Becoming a contributor

If you’re interested in contributing to the Sia codebase there are a number of issues waiting for community development. Please read the Guide to Contributing To Sia and comment on any issues you plan to work on.

Issues in need of a developer

All of the following issues are looking for a home. If you’re interested in contributing to Sia development and want to tackle any of them, click through:

Issue 1478, 1554, 1715, 1920, 2109, 2216, and 2465.

David speaks

David Vorick, Sia’s founder, recently gave a talk at Scaling Bitcoin 2017 on the impact microchains could have on the crypto industry. Watch below:

Our updated community populations

For those that care about the cold, hard numbers. We’ve seen significant growth month-over-month on Twitter, with a 17.5% jump. Our other communities are humming along nicely with no shortage of helpful members to talk shop with.

Join the discussion on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Discord.

The wrap up

Thanks for reading! Like I said at the top, next month’s update will be more substantial. As always, I appreciate any feedback you have. More importantly, I’m always available via email or Discord if you need something.

Steve