It’s time for another update! It’s happened quite a bit after ÐΞVcon-0, our internal developer conference. The conference itself was a great time to bring all the developers together and really get to know each other, dispel a batch of information (consecutive presentations for 5 days!) and chat about many ideas. The communications team will publish each of the presentations as soon as Ian can polish them.
In the time since the last update, a lot has happened, including, finally, the launch of the Ethereum ÐΞV website, ethdev.com. Although relatively simple as now, there are big plans to extend this to a developer portal where you can explore the bug bounty program, view and ultimately follow tutorials, search for documentation, find the latest binaries for each platform. and see the progress of the builds.
As usual, I have been mainly between Switzerland, the UK and Berlin during this time. Now that ÐΞV-Berlin is established in the center, we have a great collaborative space where volunteers can work, collaborate, network and socialize together with our more formal employees. Lately, I’ve been working on finalizing the formal Ethereum specification, the Yellow Book, and updating it with the latest protocol changes to get security auditing going. Together we have been putting the finishing touches on the seventh and likely last proof-of-concept code, delayed in large part due to the desire to make it the final PoC release for protocol changes. I’ve also been doing some nice core refactoring and documentation, specifically removing two I’ve disliked for a long time, the State::create and State::call methods and making the State class nicer for creating custom states useful when developing. contracts. You can expect to see the fruits of this labor in Milestone II of Mix, the official IDE for Ethereum.
Continuous Recruitment
In that regard, I’m pleased to announce that we’ve hired Arkadiy Paronyan, a talented developer from Russia who will be working with Yann on Mix IDE. He is off to a great start in his first week helping early on with the second milestone. I am also very happy to announce that we have hired Gustav Simonsson. As a Go-experienced Erlang expert with considerable network programming and security review experience, he will initially work with Jutta on the Go codebase security audit before joining the Go team.
We also have two other recruits: Dimitri Khoklov and Jason Colby. I first met Jason in the fateful week last January, when early Ethereum supporters gathered for a week before the North American Bitcoin conference, where Vitalik gave the first public talk on Ethereum. Jason, who moved to Berlin from his New Hampshire home, works primarily with Aeron and Christian to help run the center and take care of various parts of administration that need to be done. Dimitri, who works from Tver in Russia, is helping develop our unit tests with Christoph, with the ultimate goal of achieving full code coverage.
We have several more recruits I’d love to mention, but can’t announce yet. Look at this space… (:
Ongoing projects
I’m happy to say that after a busy weekend, Marek, Caktux, Nick and Sven managed to get the Build Bot, our CI system, to build cleanly on all three platforms again. A special shout out to Marek, who fought tirelessly with CMake and MSVC to tailor the Windows platform to his will. Well done to all who participated.
Christian continues to advance the Solidity project, with help now from Lefteris, who is focused on parsing and packaging the NatSpec documentation. The last feature to be added allows the creation of new contracts in a beautiful way with the new keyword. Alex and Sven are starting work on the project to introduce network well-forming into the p2p subsystem using the salient parts of the proven Kademlia DHT design. We should start to see some of these things in the codebase before the end of the year.
I’m also pleased to announce that the first successful message was sent between Go and C++ clients in our hybrid messaging/hash table system, codenamed Whisper. Although only in an early proof-of-concept stage, the API is reasonably robust and fixed, making it largely ready for application prototyping.
new projects
Marian is the lucky person who has been given the task of developing what will be our amazing web-based C&C platform. This will provide a public website whose back-end connects to a group of nodes around the world and displays real-time information on the state of the network, including chain length and a chain fork early warning system. . Although anyone can access it, we will of course have a dedicated monitor at all times for this page in the center.
Sven, Jutta and Heiko have also started a very interesting and important project: the Ethereum stress testing project. Designed to study and test the network in a variety of harsh real-life situations prior to launch, they will build an infrastructure that allows the configuration of many (10, 100, even 1000) nodes, each individually remotely controllable and capable of simulate circumstances such as ISP attacks, network breaches, rogue customers, arrival and departure of large amounts of hash power, and measure attributes such as block and transaction propagation times and patterns, uncle rates, and fork lengths. A project to consider.
conclusions
Next time I write this, I hope to have released PoC-7 and be on my way to alpha release (not to mention having the Yellow Book). I hope Jeff does an update on the Go side soon enough. Until then, watch out for the PoC-7 release and mine some Ether testnet!
