district0x Dev Update - March 19th, 2019

Development progress and product changes from district0x

The past development cycle has seen the nearly entire district0x organization shift energy into testing and improving Meme Factory. The District Registry continues working towards a complete Aragon integration, while Ethlance has been put on temporary hold to free up additional resources for the final stretch of Meme Factory improvements prior to launch.

Meme Factory

Meme Factory has seen an great number of issues created and dealt with, from all manner of minor bugs to completely new features and overhauls. A new model for usernames, new filtering and ranking features for memes, and improved meme card flip animations, as well as a new button and interface to send memes between two different addresses off of the marketplace have all been added.

Additional hurdles have been cleared in getting the DANK faucet on testnet as well. After battling some parts of external vendor’s contracts that would only call out locally, not on Ropsten, we were able to get the first run of the faucet up and tested. Although SMS verification and the full range of external calls was working, there was an issue requiring a small tweak to our faucet smart contracts, which revealed a deeper problem. The deployment scheme we’re using for Truffle requires a complete redeployment of all associated smart contracts, which is obviously an unnecessary hinderance towards a small fix of this type. We’re currently exploring reconfiguration options that will allow us to deploy only the changed contracts and their dependencies, and will proceed with more testing of the DANK faucet from there.

In light of some recent devops issues, there are several more bugs and improvements we’d like to work through before moving towards a mainnet release of Meme Factory. While some engineers proceed with infrastructure improvements to introduce failsafes and prevent manual rollovers in the future, others will continue bashing front-end issues and improving the rougher parts of styled components.

District Registry

The District Registry has seen quite a bit of progress in its own right in the past two weeks. The Aragon integration has seen a little progress before being put on hold temporarily to focus on the rest of our styled pages. In a previous update, we described how we were implementing a new process for handling and producing styled pages, involving a sort of “engineered to match” process whereby our design partners at Griflan produce finished CSS/HTML work for us, and we use a manual process to produce an output from our native stack that results in an identical page. This work is proceeding along nicely, and although a bit opaque at first, is bringing us much faster and cleaner results than in previous applications.

The rat race of the preparing for Meme Factory’s launch has been commanding the majority of time for the team, but we have still taken some time to plan for the future roadmap items post-launch, and are planning an update (in the form of a blog post) to follow. Until then, we are continuing to push and grind through each and every page and button on Meme Factory’s QA instance in order to bring the best experience we can to the wider public.