Espresso Team Update: Halfway Through Our First Milestone!
We’ve been working hard on the Datastore and Drive App for the last four weeks and since our first sprint just ended a couple days ago, we thought it would be a good time to post our first Espresso Team update! For some of you who are not familiar with our projects, you can learn more about us and the Aragon Nest program here. So without further ado, here is what we have been up to during the month of August.
What’s New?
Several settings in the Datastore can be modified to customize its behavior, such as the choice of storage provider, the provider’s server information, the encryption algorithms, etc. But up until now, those settings were hardcoded and not actually saved anywhere. It was therefore a priority for the team to store them in the smart contract so users could benefit from them. With this new component in place, it was possible to add this new configuration section to the Drive App.
We also spent a significant amount of time on a new code architecture for the app. The goal of this refactoring was to reduce the build time between each code iteration so we can improve our development productivity. Basically, what we did was to divide the Drive App into two repositories:
- One for the smart contracts, Aragon tools and devchain interactions
- One for the react components and UI logic, based on a lightweight web server
The former repo is the standard Aragon app that gets deployed in production and the latter is a simple library that contains all the dev tools necessary to build the components. With the help of react-storybook, we can view and modify each component in real-time separately or in groups. And the built-in live-reload add a pleasant touch to the development experience. It is then used as a simple npm dependency in the main app.
We are still evaluating the impacts of the refactoring but so far the results are promising. A blog post about this new architecture is coming soon.
The team also worked on a number of other tasks:
- A new component for displaying Ethereum addresses
- Support for deleting files
- Support for removing permissions
- Pin files automatically when uploaded into the IPFS server
- Add a few interfaces for the StorageProvider, RpcProvider, RpcProviderContract
- Set up new Github organization
- Contribution guidelines
- IPFS development server
- Set up continuous integration
Transparency Summary
Our team greatly values transparency. We think it is a fundamental necessity for building trust within the community. So each month, along with the team update, we will also publish a summary of our expenses.
For August 2018, we spent 25 ETH on salaries.
In the coming months, we will also set up a transparency page in the like of the Aragon Transparency Framework where you will be able to see each transaction with a description of its intended purpose.
What’s Next?
For the next sprint, the team will focus on an upgraded permission system. This new system will support groups for common permissions and a much better looking user interface. We will also start integrating the ACL into the Datastore and improve our test coverage.
