Aragon Team Update: March 2018

Written reviews of what the team members have been up to

Published in

Aragon

12 min readApr 2, 2018

Team members will produce a write-up of the most important things they have worked on since last Community Meeting, the problems they have found and what they plan to do in the next weeks (that can be a bit blurry, and that’s fine). These write-ups will be published as a blog post for the community to review on Monday before Friday’s meeting.

Community Meeting 10

Community Meeting 10 will take place on Wednesday April 4th at 6PM CEST / 11AM EDT, the upcoming livestream can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YalW7zFWRMg and a recording of the meeting at https://www.youtube.com/c/AragonProject. And feel free to post any questions you might have for the team in the Community Meeting 10 AMA thread!

Aragon Community Meeting 09 Write-Ups of February 2018

Alexa — Operations Assistant

Accounting and Ops

Planning Q2 Offsite
Multi-Sig Transparency reporting
Assisting with Luis with legal
Making payments to service providers, travel arrangements for the team, paying conference sponsorships, and lots of small details like that
Financial Reporting March 2018
Payroll

Q3 Planning: Logistics for lots of Events/Meetups/Conferences
Helping to make sure Payroll gets automated

Bingen — Solidity Engineer

Aragon Apps

Implemented Beta templates tests running on Docker image.
Adapt Beta templates and Finance to new Vault.

aragonOS

Addressed several minor issues reported by the WHG audit.

Hiring

Helped reviewing candidates for Solidity and DevOps. Finally found the DevOps one.

Events

Attended ScalingNow! in BCN.
Attended A Barcelona Ethereum Meetup.

Aragon Labs

Continue the work with Liquid Democracy specs and start building it on top of aragonOS.

aragonOS / Aragon Apps

Help fixing issues reported by the auditors.

Events

Attend the first post-Architect Aragon offsite.

Brett — EVM/Solidity/*

Aragon Dapp (@aragon/aragon)

We launched!!!
Connected all the apps to aragon.js
Added better notification support, although this has been disabled for now

Aragon Apps (@aragon/aragon-apps)

Connected each app to @aragon/aragon and aragon.js

Implemented background scripts for each app
Connected the app frontends to their aragon.js caches

Small tweaks and fixes as found during initial testing for 0.5

AragonOS (@aragon/aragonOS)

Helped with addressing initial WHG audit comments that were prioritized before next round of audits

Aragon UI (@aragon/aragon-ui)

Small helpers HOCs for integrating @aragon/aragon with @aragon/aragon-apps

Aragon.js (@aragon/aragon.js)

Tweaks and fixes for connecting to the wrapper and apps

Aragon Dev Cli (@aragon/aragon-dev-cli)

Fixes for a few solidity parsing bugs for generating the artifact.json from a smart contract

aragonOS

Continue addressing WHG audit comments that were non-prioritized
Communicate and help with second round of smart contract audits
Begin work towards a 4.0!

Aragon Apps

Additional features to the background scripts, e.g. notifications support and block caching

Aragon Dapp

Fix bugs and add more error resilience
Implement upcoming features

Chris — Product Manager

Complete Onboarding

Attended onboarding week in Madrid, to work with Jorge and Luis
Provide feedback on and input to Team Handbook
Provide input for team interview blog post
Complete initial 1-on-1 conversations with team members

Draft Product Management Process

Draft overall product management process flow diagram
Share diagram with team for input

Initiate regular 1on1 Conversations w/Dev and Design Team Members

Jorge
Bingen
Brett
Jouni
Oliver
Pierre

Support 0.5 Release

Develop, track and maintain release-specific issue lists
Run agenda for check-in calls

Develop 0.5 Feedback Collection Process

Determine how to collect feedback from internal and external channels
Determine how to process feedback for input into dev process

Refine Product Development Process

Update with team feedback
Begin adding implementation specific detail

Begin Supporting Nest

Review proposals as requested
Begin thinking about relationship between Nest development and internal development processes

Continue Regular 1on1 Conversations with Dev and Design Teams

John — Community Lead

Eurotrip with Aragon team

Q2 travel planning

Team offsite
Asia trip
Cryptoconomy Summit in Florida
EthBuenosAires?

Aragon Core 0.5 launch

Testing
Start user guide
Review announcement draft

Community stats

TBD

Next month

Q2 team offsite
Asia trip
Assist with Building DAOs initiative
Finish Aragon Interactive Demo Series planning document, write formal announcement once ready
Release Aragon Community Guide v1.0 for peer review
Keep wiki and community stats updated and be available to help out in community channels

Jorge — Tech Lead

Finally launched Aragon v0.5! 🚀🦅

Release notes: https://github.com/aragon/aragon/releases/tag/0.5.0
So proud the work the entire team has done to get us here 💞
Launch was flawless from the communications and community side and technically no big issues have been raised. So congrats everyone on an amazingly uneventful launch!

Helped onboard Chris Remus, Aragon’s product manager

Chris joined us in Madrid the first week of March, for a productive week of organizing the product pipeline and assess our current processes.
Chris already helped a lot coordinating and organizing the last mile of the v0.5 launch, and he will be the owner of the next development cycles.

Tech

New Vault with support for arbitrary token standards was developed and integrated as part of the release. With this new Vault, Aragon organizations are able to own ERC777 and ERC721 NFTs in an easy way.
We deployed the first instance of apm-serve a bridge to APM in the web2 at aragonpm.com
Worked on the server infrastructure to support Aragon v0.5. Even though it is fully decentralized and trustless thanks to IPFS and the APM, having some support nodes is helpful. Anyway all state is computed trustlessly on every client, no node-mongo stack. We have also hired a devops to help us take our server infrastructure to the next level.
Jordi Baylina and the team at DappNode deployed the first Aragon Package ManagerRegistry in the Ethereum mainnet, making it the first mainnet live Aragon DAO.

Standards

ERC900 has been merged!: http://eips.ethereum.org/EIPS/eip-900

Events

Attended and presented at EthCC in Paris, which was an incredible conference. So good to catch up with friends and fellow buidlers. Presentation video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik1VlTgD53w
Spoke at Madrid Blockchain for Good rocks, Google Crypto Meetup (private)
Helped organize Aragon’s presence in an upcoming tour around Asia with other Ethereum projects in Europe. Tour will happen April 15th-May 6th, more details will follow!

Audits and bug bounty

We have been working on improving aragonOS and aragon-apps based on WHG feedback. Our fixes will be now reviewed by them again and a final report will be produced.
Details of the second audit are almost finalized, audit will have already begun by the time these words are being read!
A live bug bounty will begin soon encouraging people to break Aragon’s first mainnet DAO.

Deploy Aragon’s own DAO to the mainnet and start doing payroll with it
Help with Aragon Network whitepaper v2 and continue Network prototyping
Help District0x and Status prototype their future Aragon mainnet deployments
Start Aragon Core live bug bounty in the mainnet
Coordinate audit #2 and finalize audit #1
Offsite #2 and Asian Tour with other European projects!

Jouni — Design Lead

Aragon / Aragon Apps

Finished onboarding flow for 0.5
designed an empty state for home screen post-registration, animated an ETH tx svg for it
Started design for App Center
Added designs for different notifications (pending, complete, failed)
Designed a new home screen for seeing status of past actions
Added username creation/update to settings

Comms

Designed several blog post headers (will add these on github if people want to use them elsewhere)
Designed an Aragon video intro motion graphic

Aragon / Aragon Apps

continue work on the App Center
continue work on the Payroll app
start work on DAO switcher design
explore the concept of personal DAO
conduct user testing and interviews with early adopters of 0.5 for UX feedback
implement design updates based on 0.5 user feedback
improve voting app design

Comms

Support blog posts, events etc. with illustrations

Design

Start working with @bpierre on a design system for Aragon

Luis — Project Lead

Strategy

Plan on more teams working on Aragon this year
Bought aragon.org!
Decisions on Nest

Design

Internal

Moving to Switzerland, both Jorge and me!
Taking care of legal stuff for the move

Ops

Started hedging ETH into other cryptos
Multiple meetings in Switzerland
Token buyback

Legal

Catch up on all things legal
Taking on all legal aspects in the project
Help coordinate all our law firms in different jurisdictions
Work on transitioning from the Estonian entity to the Swiss one
Multiple other smaller legal aspects

Communications

Reviewed multiple blog posts
Final reviews on the video
Getting final approval from interviewees

Events

EthCC!

Strategy

Allocate more work time to designing the Aragon Network

Hiring

Continue the search for a Frontend Dev candidate
Continue the search for a Developer Relations candidate

Internal

Finalize move to Switzerland

Communications

Announce first batch of Nest grantees!

Product

Create an Aragon app to test developer experience

Events

Blockchain Summit!

Luke — Research Lead

Aragon Labs

Liquid Democracy Working Group (Ongoing)
Ongoing TCR Working Group (Ongoing)

Other

Research related to Aragon Network
Drafted proposal for Apiary a curation market platform for creation and participation in Aragon DAOs
QA/Testing for Aragon 0.5 release

Aragon Labs

Liquid Democracy and TCR repos
Contributor guides

Research

Continue ongoing research efforts related to Aragon Network Governance
Experiment with Signaling/CarbonFeedback for ANT Holders

Maria — Strategy and Ops Lead

Strategy

Foundation/Company split: worked with Luis on setting up the initial path for the separation of the team from the foundation and the decentralization of the development of the project
Nest: worked on the selection of the first batch of teams and the development of the program
Aragon Proxy: talked to different teams interested in helping us with this projects through Nest

Other

Reviewed drafts related to the network and the ANT signalling proposal
QA/Testing for Aragon 0.5 release

Strategy

Continue working on Nest and Proxy
Continue working on the Foundation/Company split and the decentralization of the development of the project
Work on a project related to Zug
Continue supporting the Aragon Network and Aragon Labs efforts

Events

Participate in the Pillar Unchained Summit in Boston

Oliver — Glue

Launched 0.5 🦅💙

Release notes: https://github.com/aragon/aragon/releases/tag/0.5.0
Amazingly proud of the work the arafam has done, and especially the pure willpower the entire team had to make this a polished release 💖

Aragon.js

An extreme amount of gas limit tweaks to onboarding
Add RPC messages for interacting with external contracts (aragon/aragon.js#76)
Make sure the cache works in non-browser environments (aragon/aragon.js#72)
Application identifiers (aragon/aragon.js#77)
An Aragon RPC message provider for development purposes (aragon/aragon.js#79)
Refactored to use APM.js (aragon/aragon.js#80)
Changed the way accounts are detected for transaction pathing (aragon/aragon.js#93)
Added RPC messages for a few other things
The accounts a user currently controls (to allow for per-user notifications and per-user UI)
A method to “unwrap” EVM callscripts and describe what each step in the script does in a human way (used in the voting app)
Bug fix for the way errors are transmitted between the wrapper and the apps

Aragon CLI

Renamed the CLI to aragon (the name aragon-dev-cli is now deprecated)
Implemented new grant command together with Jorge, allowing people to grant permissions on APM repositories
Started work on initial polish (aragon/aragon-dev-cli#53 and aragon/aragon-dev-cli#52)
Ironed out some bugs, edge cases and annoying things we learned from launching Aragon 0.5
Better overall feel and performance of CLI
Started work on run command (aragon/aragon-dev-cli#55)
Makes it easier to test your apps locally, which is essential for the developer experience

Radspec

Ironed out some issues we found in relation to the launch of 0.5

Actually implemented string literals
Made sure Web3 provider was configurable

Implemented ternary if statements
Implemented modulo operator
Started work on defining the grammar of Radspec in Nearley to create a more maintainable and well-defined project

APM Serve

Worked on performance improvements together with Pierre (aragon/apm-serve#5)
Streamlined some of the code with a small refactor

Dapp

Small bug fix for app list not loading correctly with Brett (aragon/aragon#161)
Tweaks to signer view to display transaction path correctly for 0.5 (aragon/aragon#175)

Apps

Tweaked the Radspec strings to make them a bit better for 0.5 (although it is still a work in progress — actively looking for community feedback on this one) (aragon/aragon-apps#162)

VOTING

Describe what a vote does if it was created as the result of trying to perform a different action

Writing

Almost finished guide on “Your First Aragon App”, need to implement feedback I’ve gathered from the team
Started work on post entitled “Radspec: Safe & Human Transactions”

Events

Attended EthCC in Paris. It was a great no-shilling event with amazing people. Feeling blessed to be working alongside these inspiring individuals!

Other

Lots and lots of code reviews.
Like lots.
Same goes for most of the dev team and I am super impressed that we managed to review almost every PR while still getting stuff done 👏

Tech

Create a more robust and fluent developer experience overall by continously improving on Aragon CLI
Release “Your First Aragon App” guide
Create a more maintainable and bulletproof reference implementation of Radspec
Start building on the App Center and permissions app with the rest of the team
Continous improvements to performance, bug fixes and tweaks from community feedback
Decrease overall bandwidth requirements (e.g. make bundle size smaller by being more conservative about imports in Aragon.js)

“Soft” things

Help with v2 of the whitepaper
Offsite #2
0.5 launch post-mortem
Help decide on new release cycles / better developer workflow

Pierre — UI & Interaction Developer

Aragon / Aragon Apps

Onboarding screens (including a way to declare the fields needed for a template and the configuration UI).
Added some loading states (menu, home screen).
New home screen.
Add testing features to the settings app for 0.5
Finish and release 0.5! ✨

Aragon / Aragon Apps

Get the notifications system ready for release.
Permissions app.
Provide better error states.

Aragon UI

Move the layout we are using in apps into a component (or a set of components).
Add a focus state accross components.
Improve visual consistency.
Add components as needed.

Design

Start working with @jounih on a design system for Aragon

Tatu — Communications Lead

Aragon Core v0.5 — ”The Architect”

Work on and polish the v0.5 blog post
Lots of testing of the beta for the release
Review and edits of release notes
Review, feedback, upload, publish and create subtitles for Aragon — fight for freedom video
Prepare and publish v0.5 announcements on communication and social media channels
Create and send out v0.5 announcement to monthly email newsletter list
Create, upload and share short teaser trailers for the 0.5 announcement
Update website with links to v0.5 beta
Create the suggestion for release naming convention and present to team

Aragon Feedback Survey

Polishing the first large Aragon feedback survey to go out after v0.5 release.

Events

Participated in Signature Berlin & Berlin Blockchain Hackathon
Participated in EthCC (Ethereum Community Conference)
Join Blockchain Summit Crypto Valley as a Presenting Partner
Help prepare Aragons participation in Ethereum Community Tour Asia
Work on Aragon participating and sponsoring other events

Blog posts

Aragon videos

Review, feedback, upload, publish and create subtitles for Aragon — fight for freedom video
Continue working on getting Aragon videos ready.

Aragon Monthly

Continue to work on securing content and have things progress with Aragon Monthly.

Wiki

Keeping Wiki up to date and adding content

Aragon Monthly

Publish Issue 02 and send out the monthly newsletter, help community and staff contributors in creating and curating content

Blog

Write, review, edit and plan our upcoming blog posts.

Continue working on overall communication strategy

Publish the feedback survey, gather and analyze data from it

Start preparing communications for all the things Aragon

Secure more event participations and sponsorships for Aragon

That’s it for the month of Marc, these Community Meetings and Write-Ups are a monthly thing, so let us know what you think of the recent developments and do join us at the Meeting livestream to ask questions and discuss everything that has been going on!