district0x Dev Update - February 19th, 2019

Development progress and product changes from district0x

The past few weeks have been marked by travel and collaboration. Between Aracon and EthDenver, we’ve had many opportunities to explore what other projects in the Ethereum ecosystem are building, and spearhead our own efforts towards necessary integrations with partner projects. Alongside this collaborative effort, we’ve made major improvements for our rapid deployment scheme, we’ve sketched an Aragon integration for the District Registry, and cleaned up some remaining bits from Name Bazaar. Meme Factory moves closer towards a team testing push, and Ethlance gets many of its middleware systems reviewed and refined.

Meme Factory

Several more rounds of developer reviews have been conducted, and there are now just two minor issues and a redeployment inbetween us and a full-on team QA session kicking off in earnest in the next week or two. We will use this time to get non-developer hands dirty, and critically examine any user experience deficiencies lingering in the dApp.

Some of these deficiencies are already being tackled in the interface. We are utilizing a custom hand made spinner which will help inform users when the app is processing requests or transactions, an often underappreciated feature in dApps. We are also sketching the beginnings of a possible “guided tutorial” for Meme Factory. This should walk anyone with a MetaMask and a bit of ETH through the process of acquiring DANK, submitting their first vote to the registry, and buying their first Meme.

District Registry

The District Registry has evolved beyond internal development and has moved towards direct integration with the Aragon network, which is quite the undertaking. Specifically, we need to integrate in order to allow Aragon DAOKits to programatically spin up an Aragon DAO for every district which makes it into the registry. This required some direct communication with Aragon engineers, which produced a completely different development strategy than our original plan (which thankfully, we didn’t get too far along with!). Forking the DAOKit repo and passing/managing certain contract permissions will allow us to see our original vision for the District Registry finally come to light.

Additional external partners and service providers have been assisting us with styling and CSS, allowing us to avoid many of the delays we encountered during Meme Factory’s development by having the source of our designs also implement the final instantiation of them.

Ethlance

Up to this day, Ethlance has been the focus of a single district0x service provider, and being a rewrite rather than a completely new application, its construction has served as a training ground for developers unfamiliar with some of the systems we utilize. Last time, we mentioned that Ethlance development was transitioning towards revising token stores and a list of one-off issues as the more experienced team members performed reviews on the various systems, including the GraphQL resolvers, the data syncer and generators.

With these reviews now complete, we encountered and solved several issues on the generator, the biggest of which involved an operable failure of dynamic binding in clojurescript. This required some updates to the smart contract logic, and afforded us an opportunity to only use asynchronous calls. With dynamic binding removed and all calls made asynchronous, we currently have a working syncer and generator, passing all tests locally but failing our continuous integration tests non-locally, where troubleshooting proceeds.

We have months and months of development progress held behind the above upcoming releases (in addition to the currently resting d0xTasks). For most of us at district0x, the anxiety of quick and efficient execution has migrated to a desire to release a quality product with as few management and upkeep quirks as possible, and with a direct and clear user flow that any newcomer or veteran to the crypto scene can find pleasing.