district0x Dev Update - April 16th, 2019

Development progress and product changes from district0x

The most recent development cycle from our service providers at district0x yielded several important enhancements across our open projects. Meme Factory received crucial administrative upgrades to the DANK faucet, as well as improvements to several navigation features and many content filter upgrades. Meanwhile, the District Registry continues to be hammered into shape, with several more pages and features being designed and worked into the app. Similarly, Ethlance previously received several pages of work from our designers, and since we’ve been building out the front-end components needed to house these designs.

Meme Factory

At this point, Meme Factory has had all of it’s basic functionality thoroughly battletested on Ropsten testnet. However, several aspects of our original implementation were ripe for deeper updates. Primary among these is the infinite scrolling feature to Meme Factory. Our previous implementation was inconsistent at best, and often slow to perform it’s duties when a user scrolls to the bottom of the page. We proceeded with several infrastructure updates to improve the speed of content polling, and refactored the pieces needed to smooth out the infinite scroll feature. Along with our ongoing work on the guided website tutorial, this has unfortunately introduced a few regressions, some of which we’re continuing to work through currently.

In addition to infinite scrolling, we’ve also been making smaller enhancements to grouping and filtering systems across the marketplace. We’ve added several radio buttons to group memes by different parameters — including the order of issuance and the cheapest memes on offer. We’ve also made several devops improvements to the re-syncing process on our test server, allowing us to reboot and resync quickly from cache instead of a complete sync from nothing. We’ve also introduced several redundancies to our IPFS services to prevent any unexpected loss of pinned content. This has come hand in hand with some optimizations to improve fetch times by minimizing image sizes.

Lastly, work with the DANK faucet has been proceeding accordingly, with several upgraded administrative features now in place. These include things like an auto-check against double claims, whereby we can verify a phone number as unique and unused before calling out to the contract to check. This will prevent all kind of unnecessary waste through gas and transaction fees. We’ve also added a variety of functions to allow us to reset the DANK distribution to particular users, as well as up the total allocation amount for all users (in case we ever want to re-distribute DANK to participants in the future). On the whole, we have gone from having a simple straightforward faucet that spits out DANK when you give it a number to a more complete tool for managing alll manner of DANK distribution post-launch.

District Registry

The District Registry remains in a very similar development state as the previous update. With the arrival of a new batch of design work, we were able to start constructing the final versions of each registry webpage, and identify any blind spots or missing buttons/feature we would have missed earlier in the development cycle. With each passing week, as more of the larger issues are resolved, the smaller ones appear, requiring additional design work. These include very minor elements (like a custom made 404 page, and additional fancy loading spinners) that will ultimately lend to a much fuller and unique experience. Efforts will continue in this manner until we can no longer see any room for improvement, at which point we will return to the requirements for completing our Aragon integration.

Ethlance

Ethlance, like the District Registry, is at the point of receiving most of its design assets and hammering out any unexpected or missing assets for further development. As mentioned in prior development updates, Ethlance is sharing development resources with service providers also contributing towards Meme Factory, and as such has had little visible progress in the past two weeks in favor of further polishing of front end components for Meme Factory. However, with these aspects to Meme Factory’s development nailed down, efforts and resume towards restyling Ethlance components in accordance with the process we’ve used for the District Registry.

In the coming weeks, the team will be working to migrate Meme Factory to a real production server environment, as well as testing ghost contracts on the actual Ethereum mainnet to confirm nothing has changed from our QA instance to a live public one. It’s been a very long journey for Meme Factory, but we’re excited to get our latest application into the hands of the users, and to apply the hard lessons we’ve learned from this development journey towards future projects.