By: Matthew Carano

Swarm City development is split into five major releases: Terminal, Boardwalk, Boardwalk v2, Storefront, and Hives. For a complete overview of this and more, please visit: http://thisis.swarm.city/

So far we have released Terminal and Boardwalk v1, but we soon realized that the way the app was developed would not work efficiently on Ethereum without major upgrades. This lead us to completely refactor and redesign the app from scratch, into what will become Boardwalk v2.

You see, it’s not good enough for us to have a working app. That could have been achieved with the old build. We insist on building an app that sets the standard, not just for decentralized commerce, but all interactions. We want to build an app our community loves to use, and we want you to be able to use our platform to easily create marketplaces your community loves to use.

Development is hard work, but it should be fun

In a decentralized, distributed, open source, coercive-free environment, one can only inspire, not command, because if you tell people what to do, Niks Moet and they’re out! That’s why we aim to seduce devs with the dream that Swarm City represents. But we believe it’s important to do so in manageable chunks, so with that in mind, we created an inspirational roadmap for them to follow, broken down into short dev sprints.

What does that look like? Our roadmap is a bit different than most. We like to have fun, so when Swarm City Dev came together to write these sprints, they organized them the same way the writers of a TV show would; into Seasons and Episodes.

Each Season is a collection of Episodes, and each Episode is broken down into user stories we call Epics. These Episodes are the development sprints used to build a major release, (in this case Boardwalk v2) and the High Level Roadmap is the organizational structure of those Episodes.

It’s important to know that chunk size is important. You don’t want to over-stimulate a creator with too much detail, and too long of an assignment. You do want to keep them inspired and busy by providing dev sprints that can be accomplished in rather short order. Small, routine success-experiences help people stay motivated, particularly when building something novel.

Season 1: Boardwalk V2

Season 1 has 8 Episodes, and each episode is a development sprint. When all 8 Episodes are completed, Boardwalk v2 will be completed. The Episodes are broken down into a set of Epics devs must work though to create the functionalities highlighted in that Episode.

After each Episode is complete, the dev team will be able to show a functioning Dapp demo in which the scenario described in the Episode is played out. Once an Episode is completed, devs are free to move on to the next Episode.

Each Episode in the Overview is full of great information. First is the high level story describing the capabilities a user will enjoy. Then, all Epics are listed with a short summary and link to their individual pages. Each Epic page gives a concise explanation of app functionality, as well as actual app screens.

We will be publishing each Episode individually, but here is a link to the complete roadmap on Github: https://github.com/swarmcity/SwarmCityConcept

Please consider this Roadmap as our dev timeline for Boardwalk v2.

Next up: Episode 1.

Glossary of terms

Check out these articles to learn more about the general concepts of Swarm City.

Connect with the dev team

The Dev Team is always on the lookout for other developers who want to get involved. If you have Polymer or Solidity experience, feel free to reach out to #devhive in Riot. You can get a peek at the project by reviewing Github, here. To hang out where our community is, join us in Swarm City Slack.