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Time for another update! A lot has happened 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, and dispel anxiety a lot Information (back to back presentations for 5 days!) and chat about lots of ideas. The communications team will release each of the presentations as quickly as Ian can polish them well.
In the period since the last update, a lot has happened, including, finally, the release of the Ethereum ÐΞV website, ethdev.com. Although it’s relatively simple as it currently stands, there are great plans to expand this to a developer portal where you’ll be able to browse the bug bounty program, see and eventually follow tutorials, search for documentation, find the latest binaries for each platform and see the progress Made in structures.
As usual, I was mostly moving between Switzerland, the UK and Berlin during this period. Now that ÐΞV-Berlin has settled into the centre, we have a fantastic collaboration space in which volunteers can work, collaborate, network and socialize alongside our more formal staff. Recently, I’ve been working on finalizing the official Ethereum specification, the Yellow Paper, and updating it with the latest protocol changes in order to start a security audit. Together we have finalized the seventh, and possibly final, proof-of-concept code, which has been delayed largely due to the desire to make it the final proof-of-concept (PoC) release for protocol changes. I’ve also done some nice basic refactoring and documentation, specifically removing a couple of things I haven’t liked for a long time, the State::create and State::call methods and making the State class nicer for creating custom states that are useful when developing contracts. You can expect to see the fruits of this labor in Milestone II of Mix, Ethereum’s official IDE.
Continuous recruitment
In this regard, I am happy to announce that we have hired Arkadiy Paronyan, a talented developer originally from Russia who will work with Yann on the Mix IDE. He got off to a great start in his first week as he helped the front end achieve the second milestone. I am also pleased to announce that we have appointed Gustav Simonson. Being an Erlang expert with Go experience with significant experience in network programming and security auditing, he will initially work with Jutta on security auditing of the Go code base before joining the Go team.
We also have two more recruits: Dimitri Khoklov and Jason Colby. I first met Jason the fateful week last January when early Ethereum collaborators gathered for a week before the North American Bitcoin conference where Vitalik gave his first public lecture on Ethereum. Jason, who moved to Berlin from his home in New Hampshire, works mostly alongside Eron and Christian to help take care of the center and take care of the different pieces of administration that need to be done. Dimitri, based out of Tver, Russia, helps flesh out our unit tests with Kristof, with the goal of eventually achieving full code coverage.
We have several other recruits I’d like to mention but can’t announce yet – watch this space… (:
Ongoing projects
I’m happy to say that after a busy weekend, Marek, Caktux, Nick and Sven were able to get Build Bot, our CI system, up and building on all three platforms cleanly again. Special shout out to Marek who fought tirelessly with CMake and MSVC to bend Windows to his will. Well done to all parties involved.
Christian continues to work on the Solidity project, with Lefteris now helping him focus on parsing and packaging NatSpec documentation. The last feature that will be added allows creating new contracts in a beautiful way with new Keyword. Alex and Sven began work on a project to introduce mesh shaping into the p2p subsystem using salient parts of Kademlia’s proven DHT design. We should start seeing some of these things in the code base before the end of the year.
I’m also happy to announce that the first successful message has been sent between Go & C++ clients on our hybrid messaging/hash table system, codenamed Whisper. Although it is in an early proof-of-concept stage, the API is reasonably robust and stable, and is largely ready for prototyping applications.
New projects
Marian is the lucky guy who has been entrusted with developing our amazing web-based C&C suite. This will provide a public website whose back end connects to a group of nodes around the world and displays real-time information on network status including chain length and the blockchain early warning system. Although it can be accessed by anyone, we will of course have a dedicated screen at all times for this page in the centre.
Sven, Jutta and Heiko have also started an interesting and important project: the Ethereum stress testing project. Designed to study and test the network in a range of realistic adverse situations before release, it will build an infrastructure that will allow the setup of many nodes (10, 100, even 1000) each of which can be individually remotely controlled and able to simulate conditions such as SSP attacks. The Internet, network forks, rogue clients, and the arrival and departure of large amounts of hash power measure attributes such as block and transaction propagation times and patterns, uncle rates, and fork lengths. A project to be careful of.
Conclusions
Next time I write this, I hope to have released PoC-7 and be on my way to an alpha release (not to mention a yellow paper release). I expect Jeff to make an update regarding the Go side of things soon enough. Until then, stay tuned for the release of PoC-7 and mine some ether from the testnet!
