district0x Dev Update - December 11th, 2018

Development progress and product changes from district0x

The past two week cycle of development has been an unexpected smattering of big wins as we wrap up the final pieces of development for individual applications like d0xTasks, Meme Factory, and the Dank Faucet; and unfortunate lows as we encounter sticky issues in our deployment pipeline preventing us from syncing our test applications to Ropsten and pay down technical debt on Name Bazaar. As the various service providers complete all necessary work and exit their application silos, we are left with an opportunity for an all-hands-on-deck push to troubleshoot these issues and drag Meme Factory and the rest across the finish line.

Meme Factory

The never ending story of Meme Factory styles continues, this time with a special focus on the Dank Faucet. In our previous update we discussed the work done to handle failing user paths. With some clever construction of the user experience and early error detection we’ve also prevented several scenarios of contract calls that would cost the user gas unnecessarily. The Dank Faucet is now complete and ready for testing.

Deployment to Ropsten for Meme Factory and has been held back largely due to a lingering issue with Parity syncing in our newly built containerized QA environment. Though many solutions were tried, ultimately we were left with no choice but to revert back to a simpler setup this week where we sync on a hosted server before firing towards our containers. This is something we will tackle again in the future, but for now we’re skipping it to move towards a more rapid release.

However, other progress was made while this blocker remained in the cycle. The ZeppelinOS integration for Meme Factory is now complete. We expanded the district server code module to support clients in a way that doesn’t require unlocked accounts. We also added requisite code to make compiling and deploying from Truffle artifacts. Along with several other modifications, the troubleshooting we’ve been doing has led to a much wider array of compatibility in the future.

d0xTasks

Last time we mentioned that d0xTasks was all but complete except for some final bits of styling and the mobile interface. After matching every last font and pixel, d0xTasks development is also currently held up by the issues with our current deployment configuration, and as such, these extra resources are being poured into the problems mentioned above.

Ethlance

Work on Ethlance continues along three main lines. The first is data modeling work needed for the IPFS integration. Most effort in this regard was spent in the weeds with an IPFS wrapper, before finding a hotfix to fallback to. This an ongoing effort and will continue in the coming weeks.

The second line of attack involves building a new data syncer and generator for Ethlance in line with the expectations and architecture we developed for Meme Factory. This initially involved a bit of research and training before development could begin, but in the past two weeks we’ve managed to build an initial draft of the generator and have begun on the same for the syncer, which has ran into a small issue with the instrumentation library.

The final stroke is an update to the smart contracts in wake of review of the first completed draft. Chief among the changes made is the addition of more event emitters to better log and handle our new data schema. We have also taken this as another opportunity to security harden these smart contracts once again.

At this point, we are looking forward to having a complete version of Meme Factory to play with on testnet for the holiday season, and expect d0xTasks and the District Registry will be close behind. There has been quite a bit of anticipation built around our next release and though we’ve said it before it’s worth mentioning again that our transition to parallel development has lead to an exciting confluence of progress where we are likely to release most dApps we’ve been working on in very quick succession