Synereo Roadmap

Dear friends, I bring you a fresh update of the Synereo alpha development. It was prepared by Ed Eykholt.

Synereo Alpha Development Update 2016-10-04

The development team is working very hard toward an Alpha release that includes a reliable multi-node feature, Amp integration via Omni Layer (on testnet), and other items. These areas are progressing along nicely, although we didn’t make the previously stated goal of achieving this by September 30th. At this time, I’m not going to personally offer a prediction when these features will be production-ready. This is an Alpha after all, with the main purpose of gathering feedback on requirements and user experience.

Here’s some additional detail:
With the tipping with testnet AMPs feature, we started several weeks ago by first adopting the BitcoinJ library and learning how that works. In a development branch of the code, we verified wallet creation and transfer of testnet BTCs from the UI. Then we updated to the OmniJ library and learned how it worked. We encountered a bug in OmniJ, and the Omni team quickly addressed it last week. Since then, a few successful testnet AMP transactions were made, as well as improving the design for working with private keys. We expect this area to proceed smoothly. Next steps include displaying various testnet AMP and BTC balances in the UI (e.g. spendable versus estimated). We’ll also show BTC balances on hover over since a small amount of BTC will be required for any Omni Layer transaction. Later, we'll update the component interaction approach to use the same agent model as posting does.

With the multiple-node integration, these features worked a few years ago but regressed over that time because development attention was on implementing other issues, and some bugs in the new areas and bug fixes (including SOC-91) introduced regressions with multi-node features. This past week, we've updated to Scala 2.11.8 (which fixes an issue we were having with reflection in the Scala 2.10.6 code). That Scala upgrade unblocked our upgrade from Java 1.7 to 1.8, and from Mongo 2.4 to 3.4, so we also implemented those updates. With these changes, we have incorporated 2+ years of Scala, Java, and Mongo code stability. Friday, we also verified simple multi-node scenarios, with one “headed” node (i.e., with a user interface) being able to log into a “headless” node. Next steps are to add more nodes to our test configuration, and verify functionality with new user, login, introduction, post, and query scenarios. Our development team is now more confident than ever about verifying these multi-node features and addressing any remaining open issues. We’ll involve the community in some of the multi-node testing.

(We have a healthy list of product backlog items for post-Alpha, including node discovery, node reputation, improved encryption, various social features, and of course a more complete attention economy.)

We are getting the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy ready.

An independent node, when offered to the public, needs to be labeled/branded so the user knows it isn’t offered by Synereo Ltd. Independent Node Operators might have different code, service levels, and privacy ethics, for example. There will be some UI updates for this type of customization.

We intend to eventually offer a node on https://alpha.synereo.com, which will be a way for a casual user to access the network with some assurances of service levels, etc.

Today a few of us had a debate about when to engage the community for testing of features such as those for multiple-node integration listed above. My inclination is to wait until fulltime members of the Synereo team have tested and passed the basic functionality; otherwise, the various community members may unnecessarily trip over the same bugs. Others on the team want to engage the community ASAP in this type of testing.

Either way, we all do appreciate your help testing. I’ll keep you posted as soon as these major features pass internal tests. In the meantime, I’d appreciate community members to test the Docker installation process, referenced here https://www.synereo.com/alpha, and to join the docker-testing Slack channel. See also the Wiki pages as they evolve for dockernode https://github.com/synereo/dockernode/wiki and other Docs https://github.com/synereo/docs/wiki. You can today test in standalone node mode and the user experience for new user registration, login, introductions, posting, query, and tagging.

We are starting to get interest for several of the jobs posted at https://www.synereo.com/jobs. Feel free to share this link with others who are qualified and interested in Synereo.

You can see that the dev team is very busy. Kudos to them.

My personal breakthrough this week was setting up a standalone node from the docker image.

If you are intrigued by the development of Alpha or by Synereo as a concept at whole, I invite you to join the SynereoTeam Slack channels. Welcome!

Synereo Alpha Development Update 2016-10-04

Synereo Alpha Development Update 2016-10-04

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