Status Update

Weekly Development Report

DAEDALUS

Wallet

This week the team worked closely with the networking and wallet back end teams on debugging an issue with network connection interruption during initial Daedalus sync.

Spending password validation rules have been updated so that it is now possible to set a password which consists of only non-Latin characters and numbers.

The team has finished improving how the low disk space warning is handled. The code is in the final review and testing phase.

In the scope of regular maintenance tasks, the team is still working on dependencies updates which should be finished next week. The team has finished another quarterly design implementation review which resulted in a list of visual imperfections and UX/UI flaws which will be resolved in the coming week.

App Platform

This week progress was made on the new wallet app's create dialog; a strategy was developed for porting the Daedalus app UI rather than a full reimplementation; and the implementation of a new concept for running web applications from remote servers was begun. This concept better supports light-client use-cases, simplifies distribution, and limits the attack surface to a web browser process.

WALLET BACKEND

All features scheduled for this release are complete and QA will be completed along with the release process for 2.0.0.

NETWORKING

The team have been working on block download protocol and logic. Additionally, engineers worked on load management aspects of the mini protocols and scheduling which is the best peer to choose without overloading the input interface. Bearer peer selection success criterion sketched out also. The team have been asked to change priorities from the current prototyping and development work to documentation requirements, design, mapping between epics, deliverables, and features.

DEVOPS

This week DevOps worked mainly on longer-term CI improvements and testing automation. Otherwise it was mostly maintenance and release support work this week.

The CI side saw a breakthrough on the Windows cross compilation effort: we're now able to build the Windows wallet backend on Linux. Further work included covering the new Cardano-rewrite codebase and testing integration. The build automation reached initial functionality on Plutus, and continued with developer workflow adaptation and Hydra integration. The new CI infrastructure has now fully replaced our old one, which will positively impact our Windows build cadence. We also worked on distilling the Nix code common between our repositories in the iohk-nix project.

The testing infrastructure effort covered advanced automation of cluster testing, such as update proposals and reaction to node outages. The team also began rewriting of acceptance tests in Haskell, and worked on wallet-tool, which will help us to better automate wallet node testing.

Operationally we were busy with exchange support, cluster migration testing, and also improving configurability of the exchange wallet. We've also some 2.0.0 release support, including contribution to the sync stalling debug effort.

The Goguen activity included QA support, documentation improvements, and the usual maintenance work. On a final note, we also continued our Shelley requirements review involvement and completed the outstanding support portal workflow improvement effort.

CARDANO DECENTRALIZATION

The team has made progress preparing the integration of the ledger and consensus layers. On the consensus side, chain validation and selection is done, and the abstractions for interacting with the ledger are basically ready. The team is anticipating combining code from consensus and ledger in the next few weeks. The code for an independent relay node is almost complete, though some tests are not yet passing. A first implementation of the Genesis rule is now complete, but it still needs to be tested.The team is currently working on DB implementation to persist blocks and the chain.

ANNOUNCEMENTS

IOHK is currently looking for talented people to work with us as a Rust Software Engineer, Haskell Trainer as well as several others. Please see the IOHK Careers page for more details.