by Paige Peterson

This is our fortnightly engineering update which happens after the conclusion of each 2-week engineering sprint. You can check out last week’s update for recent news on community and communications.

Zcashd Team

This team focuses on development of the zcashd client and Zcash protocol. Follow along with team discussions in the Community Chat #zcashd-team channel.

The team is working on specifications for Blossom. They have also addressed some issues for the upcoming 2.0.3 release including an update to libzmq (which avoids a possible security vulnerability), a fix for a scalability issue with larger wallets and addressed an issue with an unstable test.

This upcoming sprint we’ll be focused on cutting and testing the 2.0.3 release candidate (Feb 4) followed by the full release (Feb 11).

Development Infrastructure Team

The Development Infrastructure team ensures developers have the tools and infrastructure they need. Join this team in the #dev-infrastructure chat channel.

We are still working on getting the Windows build integrated with our CI system (buildbot). We’re also continuing to work on automating our website deploys to make them faster.

Ecosystem Team

This team is intended to work on projects that interface with external parties not including the zcashd core client and handles business development in the phases after initial contact by providing technical insight and support.

Insight explorer updates are completed in the zcash-hackworks repositories, now focus is on merging in the required changes to zcashd to allow bitcore and insight to run without having to maintain a custom fork of Zcash

Working with multiple exchanges and wallets to support z-address adoption

Documentation Team

This team drives the curation and assists in the creation of documentation. Follow along in the #documentation chat channel. Check out the official Zcash documentation.

After doing some research on ways to sync the Gitlab repo and Github project board, we’re not as confident as before in this being an easy process. We’ll keep poking around at how to hack something together but it’s likely we’ll use our manual process of creating doc-related tickets in GL and creating “cards” in the GH project linking to those tickets for tracking.

We worked on moving some of the user-guide style documentation from the zcash source /doc directory into RTDs. (PR 3819/MR 90) For now, we’ll keep some of the policy/process documentation in the zcash source and revisit moving them into RTDs if it makes sense once their content is more up-to-date. We also started using the “good first issue” label in Gitlab in case community contributors want to take a stab at documentation tickets.

This upcoming sprint we’re investigating RTD styling to match the Zcash branding and revising some of the policy and process documentation including supported products, smoke testing and regular releases.

Reference Wallet Team

This teams current charter is to build a Zcash reference wallet. Deliverables will be a series of MVPs where Android is the first target platform.

At this point, “receive” is functional in the wallet, end-to-end. “Send” is as functional as it can be, with this sprint making huge strides in functionality 0% working to 90%.

Miscellaneous

We announced the results from the 2018 security audits focused on Overwinter and Sapling.

Zcon1 applications are open! Zcon1: June 22 – 24 in Split, Croatia