Bi-weekly HERO Dev SPRINT UPDATE

Review of Week 36–38

Listen instead of reading

As you may have already noticed transparency is very important to us, thus we share our dev progress and regularly update you on what has happened in the last two weeks.

Back-End Infrastructure

Unfortunately, Thomas Strohmeier, one of our blockchain and software developers who was also very active in setting up the whole HERO backend infrastructure, will leave us, since he decided to go back to university. Thomas has been a great asset, working very passionately, contributing a lot of knowledge and expertise to the team. Our backend infrastructure is very complex, consisting of many servers which are also secured by the highest standards. Locking out one of the main architects resulted in a workshop held by Thomas, where he once again guided the team with the help of a detailed documentation and forwarding his main responsibilities to Abel, who from now on will take the lead.

Security Upgrade

For the next topic we will not be able to get into great detail, because it’s very sensitive, but security is one of our main priorities. This topic has been essential for us in the past and will always be. As a matter of prevention, we once again have increased our security measures. Every contest which is hosted and offered on herosphere.gg is a smart contract. Of course, we need to sign those, thus the storage of our private keys is crucial. The way this has been handled, in addition to the enhanced measures we have taken, now sets us in a more than satisfying position.

Data Provider Communication

The communication with our esports data provider has been majorly improved. An unwanted scenario occurred, when we tried to query data from Abios more than four times per second. This resulted in a short time block, which again led to delays in our database. In this case it was complex to access the wanted data at the wanted time, consequently the results on herosphere.gg were not as up to date as we wanted them to be. This issue was solved by setting up a new server which communicates with Abios and functions as an intermediary. The server gathers our data requests, bundles them and handles the communication with Abios, hence gives the needed information back to us without the risk of getting blocked out.

Daily Bonus Bug

Every active herosphere.gg user will be aware of our good old friend, the “daily bonus bug”. Occasionally our sneaky friend, who grants bonus spheres to our users, thought that it will be a good idea to pop-up more often than it should. Besides being a little bit annoying, this bug led to granting more daily bonus spheres to our users than intended. As nasty as our bug friend was, it managed to successfully hide from our dev team for quite some time now. It was amazingly surprised when it found out that our devs now are in possession of the newest bug hunting equipment, meaning that it has been taken care of. We will miss you, old friend…#not

Gas cost improvements

Since we also want and do provide the maximal user experience on herosphere.gg, the transaction costs are handled and paid out by us. In order to be more efficient, we reworked how our blockchain backend system that handles the transactions. We implemented an API which communicates with ethgasstation.info so we exactly now how high the average gas price is, as well as which gas price is safe to use.

UX redesign

Besides that, we are very proud of our lead UI/UX designer Gabriel, who created two amazing prototypes for herosphere.gg. They are exclusively shared with our highly engaged beta testers. We have a great opportunity to seek direct feedback and valuable insights from our hardcore supporters. The user interface of herosphere.gg is changed almost from the ground, implementing all the valuable feedback we gathered through the time. This way we build a product entirely based on real customer journeys. Thank you for that HEROES ❤

Also, there are minor backend and IT tweaks which were made, resulting in a again better performance of herosphere.gg, as well as better internal communication between our servers. Of course, at the of the day this benefits our users, resulting in a better performance on our platform.

Connect with our dev team, best at: Telegram: https://t.me/joinchat/FsEwOwtrCZMWwHokEj70Gw

If you have questions or would like to discuss this anywhere, please get in touch. We are also active on any of those channels:

Bitcointalk: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2116864.0

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/HEROcoin/

FB HERO: https://www.facebook.com/HEROcoinio/

FB Herosphere: https://www.facebook.com/herosphere.gg/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/HEROcoinio

Youtube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi6gLMu21XrnWcdS0VOwdw