“When Trinity???”

Regular visitors to the IOTA Discord will be well-accustomed to this phrase.

Trinity is the long-awaited user-friendly IOTA wallet that has been in development for the last few months. What started life as a little glint in my eye — okay okay, Charlie Varley may have played a small role here too 😄 — has blossomed into a project which has gained the support of the whole community.

The development team was aided by members of the community, who raised the mobile wallet to new heights, and who began working on the desktop implementation. However this project was run as a loosely controlled community project, and this has led to delays in delivering the final product.

This is where I put my hands up and take responsibility. Let’s call this article my catharsis.

After Action Review

Looking back, there are factors which led to delays.

Pulling a Travis, the temptation to own the whole design process (see here, here and here). Luckily we have had some talented designers help us along the way, to mould these early designs into what we hope will be a pleasurable experience for all users.

Standardisation of coding guidelines. In a drive to increase participation, there was a lack of standardisation. This led to technical debt which had to be made up.

Use of the React Native / React framework. React Native does not give great performance off the bat compared to native code, therefore a lot of time has been spent working around performance limitations. However we feel it will pay dividends in the long term as it will be easier to make cross-platform updates.

Communication — probably the most important factor! After a good start, we subsequently failed to communicate our timelines well. We have tried to improve over the last few weeks, with weekly updates of progress, but yet overall timelines have remained elusive.

But we will learn from these issues.

Combine this with the challenges of developing on a rapidly evolving technology, and the added challenges of a permissionless architecture, and I think we underestimated the size of the task from the outset!