Vortex monthly update #1

GM friends! Welcome to the first of many monthly update articles we are going to release from the Vortex🌪

In this article we want to highlight what we managed to accomplish in a whole month of work on our side and share some things to look forward to in the near future!

Just one month ago we announced Vortex to the world by releasing our first thread to explain what it is we are actually executing and later on releasing our whitepaper which we will soon be moving from the ugly google doc to a more presentable medium.

Since then we managed to hit 877 followers(as of writing this), which is lower than we intended to do in the first month, but we analysed our mistakes and we know what steps need to be taken to make sure we progress exponentially from here on.

Art

To begin the recap, lets talk about the art, since we went from 0 to a lot over this last month!

From initially having only the base models ready last month, we now have almost all facial traits ready and Uber is close to being done with the clothing traits as well! Art is looking super good from our perspective and if you missed the sneak peeks, you can always check them out in the dedicated channel in discord!

Over this next month, we will be looking for trait suggestions from our community and rewarding the better answers we get, stay tuned!

UI/UX

Next up, the UI part of Vortex has had a lot of work put in. From the very early stages of doing market research and figuring out what it is we want the UI to approximately look like, we have a very good picture of how everything looks and we are super happy with how things are going along with the client.

Alongside that, most of the UI work for other parts of the Vortex ecosystem(website, NFT website, art generator, [redacted], etc.) have been worked on and are close to being complete but we do not want to show that off just yet👀

Marketing

From the point of getting attention and building awareness around Vortex, this month was very much experimental. We tested a lot of stuff and we now have a much clearer vision on how we want to proceed with getting the word out!

To be more specific, we started with running the Vortex account as a brand that is building fully in public. We were completely transparent about every aspect of our business, completely honest in answering all questions our community had! And we backed that by doing consistent weekly updates and AMAs in the form of twitter spaces which fully support our building in public approach! Now elevating that with releasing this monthly update👀Our fully transparent approach is something we value dearly and know our community appreciates, these updates and spaces are not going anywhere🤝

Alongside that, we started filling up the whitelist for our mint by rewarding people who have interacted with out content to help push it forward. We do want to assure you, dear reader, that our main(~70%) method of WL allocation will not involve grinding of any kind. It will be unique, interesting and inclusive. More on that will be revealed this coming month!

Also, we have set up our game night tournaments, the first of which will happen this Saturday, November 5 at 8 pm EST, we really hope to see you there👀

The coming month we will reveal a lot more interesting things about the Vortex ecosystem so make sure to stay tuned for that👀

Development

Authentication

• Signs in with multiple social providers and can cross link same email accounts
• Simplified login for both the website and client

Server

• PostgreSQL Database setup
• API connecting the client to the server database

Client

• Functioning electron client
• Authentication flow handled throughout the client

Monorepo

• Elegant scalable monorepo structure for all projects under Vortex Labs

The Vortex monorepo:

We, the developers at Vortex, have invested time and research into setting up a development environment that will allow us to work quickly and efficiently without compromising on code quality. Here is what it needed to manage:

It needed to work well with our current workload and scale properly as the project grows.

The environment also needed to allow for the easy onboarding of new developers to be able to handle future workloads at scale.

It needed to have code separation for specific components to allow specialized developers to work on sections that they’re specialized in without having to work with the clutter of other sections. However, since these components work closely together, developers still need to be aware of the changes happening in every component throughout the entire codebase.

It needed strategic test coverages to be able to test the application against unique scenarios and deliver a universally working product.

It needed to enforce the consistency of the source code throughout the entire codebase to be able to account for many different developers working with their own styles in the same codebase.

After taking these requirements into account, we managed to come up with a development environment that checks all these points. Welcome to the Vortex monorepo. Our component setup allows us to separate the server-side api, database schemas, authentication, front-end client application and design systems into their own environment. However, due to the bleeding-edge technologies that we choose for these components, we still share complete type safety across everything.

To account for our diverse developer team, we’re created our very own completely custom linting package, enforcing consistency across the entire monorepo.

Conclusion

We are happy with our work for the first month of our journey and we cannot wait to continue bringing out vision to life

We want to thank everyone who has stayed with us and we hope to see you in another month on our next update👀