district0x Dev Update - October 29th, 2019

Development progress and product changes from district0x

Development over the last couple weeks has been defined primarily by a continuous battery of testing and refactoring across all of our pending application updates. Meme Factor’s new features, including the NSFW tag, were prepared for deployment (and hopefully, live as of the publishing of this post). Ethlance has had it’s developer space reconfigured in preparation for more parallel development. The District Registry has been completely run through with some user-friendly updates after testing. We provide some more context and detail in the post to follow.

Meme Factory

In our last dev update, we mentioned how Web3 libraries were being prepared for migration and deployment on Meme Factory. A couple more changes were needed before we could proceed with getting these into the QA staging environment however. This included most notably a redesigning of the way we detect dropped connections from our node, since with the updated libraries, we no longer use a watcher but instead a typical websocket.

As a result of these configuration issues, we’ve decided to roll out the otherwise fully tested parts of our newest Meme Factory build into a separate update, in order to give us a more stable environment for testing the Web3 updates. However, due to an unexpected problem with our QA environment being bottlenecked by an unknown rate limit, we were unable to finalize testing of this build until this week. As mentioned above, this update should be live today, and includes a NSFW filter that can be applied to new meme submissions, but will also take into account any previous submissions that have applied this tag.

District Registry

The district0x service providers conducted our first full deep dive testing session since finalizing the fixes made post-audit. We were happy to find that the vast majority of core functionality works flawlessly, with a few button experiencing intermittent issues. Using the app end-to-end as a typical user in this way also revealed a couple of areas of improvement with “nice to have” features. These include simple things like a calculator to display exactly how much vote share a user can receive before the commit to staking a given DNT amount to a district. We will continue to test the entire application through several more cycles as we roll out these 11th hour features and continue confirm fixes to uncovered issues.

Ethlance

In the past two weeks, Ethlance has seen a lot of structural work. First, as more developers hop off Meme Factory or the District Registry and on to Ethlance, we’ve thought forward and reconfigured the whole development namespace to more cleanly reflect the organization style of Meme Factory and our other repositories. Following this, we started looking for whatever remaining modules from Meme Factory could be brought directly over to the remake of Ethlance, and utilizing some knowledge sharing across the projects, we’ve saved some developer time by re-using previous work as we churn through front-end issues and dive into the weeds of scrollable components for tables and the like.

Alongside this, we have completed the respecification of our arbitration architecture and backend as described in previous posts. Based off the design of the Bounties Network, we will be implementing a system of arbitration for job completion that will incentivize regular, trustworthy users to participate and earn on Ethlance, even if they aren’t working as a freelancer themselves.

In all, the past development cycle has been like the few before it: full of steady, determined progress towards our few outstanding larger goals. We’ve been growing increasingly aware as an organization of efficiencies we can gain and time we can save through collaborations and utilizing our previous efforts. In the coming weeks, we’ll begin to release content surrounding the launch of the District Registry, which will bring some of the last few months of work into the public light.