district0x Dev Update - June 12th, 2018

Development progress and product changes from district0x

The past two weeks have been largely focused on a constant acceleration of our hiring efforts. We’re onboarding two engineers between now and the beginning of July, and we are still looking to hire more Clojurescript developers. We are also reflecting on the costs and benefits of our trip down to Argentina, and formalizing strategies around these kind of technical conferences going forward.

As a corollary process the district0x team is writing documentation to allow more rapid on-ramps for engineers both external and in-house. With the bulk of our development time in 2018 being dedicated towards developer tooling and infrastructure, what defines a district is starting to take form.

Our strategy is to continue the deliberate, calculated march towards a fully functional Meme Factory — one that leverages Aragon and combines the beginning of the many necessary ingredients for our original vision into one coherent minimum viable product. We are avoiding any half measures, at the expense of expedited releases.

Meme Factory Updates

Completed:

The primary initiative for part of our development team over the last few update cycles has been the GraphQL server components. In our last update, we had begun implementing test routines. We have covered the code base completely with tests, and even managed a refactor of several smaller pieces before completing this.

Additionally, we’ve undergone a very significant and unexpected task of “Gardenizing” our SemanticUI styling. In essence, by abstracting away as much of the visual representation or UI of districts into the style layer, and by constructing a new compiler, we were able to make our code not only rendering-context free, but conform to Clojure, the we are already using across the codebase. In general, efforts like this homogenize the codebase and make it easier to read, easier to learn, and easier to spot bugs within.

In Progress

Utilizing the various major functional design assets from our designers, we have begun to lay out the individual components on the front end. This work currently involves making sure any functional button/object on the webpage reacts within appropriate time for the user. For instance — agreeing on the various sources of “time” for certain actions.

Additionally, work proceeds to connect the “Gardenized” styles mentioned above to the original Meme Factory styles, and to flesh out the tooling required to allow easy choice of individual style sheets within any given instance of a district.

d0xINFRA Updates

In Progress

In conjunction with our new focus on hiring and onboarding, and in reflection with all the progress that d0xINFRA has made in the last few months, we have authored a standard for the creation of districts. This serves as the first true functional definition of what a “district” really means in the purest sense of the code.

Completed

Several smaller devops tools and optimizations were made and pushed in the past two weeks. One included options to watch over all contracts within our solidity compiler plugin, complete with a boolean switch to control the verbosity of the plugin. Additionally, after a bit of wrangling, we managed to significantly reduce a rogue Elasticsearch instance.

What’s Next?

As mentioned in the intro, the district0x team is approaching our next 6 months with a straightforward two-prong gameplan. We want to deploy a complete Meme Factory in the original spirit of the district0x network — rich with governance processes for users to utilize through Aragon, and to generalize it for other districts to leverage along the way. This includes, specifically, district0x writing, auditing, and deploying our own instance of the ERC900 staking interface.

At the same time, we want to continue to scale the size of the core team until the remainder of the pivotal infrastructure work is complete. At this time, we can make a hard pivot into chasing down bids from external development teams and conduct more outreach in order to bring the next wave of interest in our platform. This strategy bleeds over heavily into our operations strategy. Hiring will proceed not just to build code, but to find evangelists for the technology stack we’ve constructed so we can force multiply development efforts down the line.