August 24th, 2018 - Weekly update

This week marks the end of a 3-week sprint and start of another 3-week sprint. We extended the last sprint because the final push for the 2.0.0 release took priority over sprint planning but the goal for the future is to keep the 2-week sprints regardless of any related release delays. You can see last week’s update which covers the 2.0.0 release.

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

Last week’s update covered the focus on shipping 2.0.0 which was the primary accomplishment for this team this last sprint.

Engineers are focused on two key areas for the upcoming sprint:

  1. Implementing wallet and RPC functionality
  2. Sapling crypto documentation, refactoring & specification updates

Development Infrastructure Team
The Development Infrastructure team ensures application developers have the tools and infrastructure they need to efficiently collaborate, design, implement, review, test, and ship high quality projects. These responsibilities include: CI/CD, release automation & execution, coverage reporting, simulations and testnets and “spin-up-a-box-for-arbitrary-work-tasks” service for engineers.

Accomplished:

  • Upgraded testnet faucet
  • Built zcashd in Windows natively
  • Resolved issues in MacOS workers

Goals Next Sprint

  • Deploy CentOS 7, Gentoo, Fedora, Arch, and Valgrind fixes to Dev & Production CI
  • Begin work to resolve test-suite issues on Windows and MacOS
  • Begin Phase 1 of Development Infrastructure Roadmap

Ecosystem Team
For the time being this team handles business development in the phases after initial contact by providing technical insight and support.

Accomplishments

  • The first email with high level details on Sapling changes for t-addrs was sent to third-parties
  • Working on the Sapling Readiness Framework document which integrators can follow to verify their implementation is Sapling compatible.

Documentation Team
This team works on improving the accessibility of zcashd and Zcash overall by creating and moderating documentation. Follow along with team discussions in the Community Chat #documentation channel. Check out the official Zcash documentation.

Accomplishments

  • Ran test of an emergency banner for the website
  • Added glossary
  • Worked on testing guide for devs
  • Updated Zcashd readme
  • Updated Sapling info portal with countdown & upgrade user FAQ
  • Paramgen page update

Goals

  • A bunch of minor clarifications resolving user support tickets
  • Refactor Payment API doc and begin to update for changes in Sapling
  • Begin to remove github wiki pages that now live in RTD
  • Make docs.z.cash a thing (pointing to RTD)

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.

Sprint summary in last week’s update.

Community & Communication

We published more from the Perspectives video series.

In case you missed the release announcement, version 2.0.0 of Zcash is out. This is the first Sapling-compatible release so it’s important that network nodes update to at least this version by the time Sapling activates at block height 419200 (Oct. 28th 2018).

Just before the 2.0.0 release, we published a post about the completion of the Sapling MPC. The parameters generated from this process are included in 2.0.0. If you update through the Debian package repository, you will be prompted to download the new parameters.

And finally, there are many new Zcash meetups popping up! Get in touch with the Zcash Foundation if you’d like to start one in your city: Zcash Meetups 🦓

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