The Host Release of HoloFuel

Leadership & Org Update 20

• Starting With Gratitude
• The State of Testing and Release
• What’s Next

Starting with Gratitude

Thank you so much to all the Pre-Release testers who are giving us amazing feedback on the Host Release of HoloFuel. It has been incredible to experience the positivity and commitment of this group of people. Each tester is going through a series of different tests with us and being very patient when we ask them to go slow so that we can measure and validate the activity at each stage.

Thanks to all of you — this is the beginning of a long future together.

HoloFuel pre-release testing

In the last Dev Pulse we announced that HoloFuel (with Test Fuel) was finally released to Core Community testers, a small group of HoloPort owners dedicated to rigorously testing updates and reporting their experiences. This process went quite well and so we’ve now opened HoloFuel up to Pre-Release testers to get more general data on performance and issues. So far, both of these tests have gone well — the owners of 40 community HoloPorts and 11 team HoloPorts have been running tests consisting of creating a nickname, sending an initial transaction, pairing with transaction buddies, and committing transactions with each other simultaneously. Overall performance has remained high, thanks in part to many Holochain improvements, along with sharding kicking in after the 20th participant. Transactions typically complete in a few seconds.

This stage, with Pre-Release testers, is intended to enable feedback processes at a manageable level in advance of the wider release. In usability testing, the ‘80/20 rule’ is a useful guideline: you’ll usually discover most of the issues with a small number of testers. So we’re confident that after this pre-release stage we’ll have discovered most of the issues that could cause pain for HoloPort owners everywhere. Below are some details about the test experience:

• We are seeing many, many successful tests. Over 50 nodes have joined the test so far and 40 of those are community testers.
• At 20 nodes we began sharding and that has been successful in the field so far.
• Fifty-one testers have completed the first transaction test successfully. There are still a few challenges from time to time when people are first registered on the network before they can begin the test and we are learning about how to best deal with those so we can make it easier for everyone in the future.
• Testers are now doing Buddy Tests where they each send multiple transactions to each other simultaneously. Seventeen testers have completed that as of yesterday.
• We discovered one issue that has had a few of the transaction tests fail or slow to a crawl. Since then we have dug deep into it with some of the testers and have implemented a fix. That will be tested and deployed as a Hot-Fix into the current Pre-Release testing environment. Essentially it was a small UI bug, so we are able to update with no major impact to the testing environment.

We’ve already gathered a lot of insight into the usability of HoloFuel. And we have incorporated plenty of this feedback into bug reports that are already in development, many of which have been accepted and already being tested.

What’s Next

Development and testing at Holo are filled with momentum. The very next update we will be releasing will go again to our Pre-Release testers. It will be a series of enhancements all based on the feedback we’ve received this past week or so. These enhancements are what is needed for the wider release of HoloFuel (using Test Fuel) to all HoloPort owners, which is imminent. So in order, this is what’s scheduled:

1. HoloFuel Enhancements to Pre-Release Testers
2. HoloFuel & HP Admin to all Hosts
3. HPOS Upgrade (An update to the HoloPort OS to prepare for the hosting release)
4. Initial Hosted hApps Release to Pre-Release Testers (Alpha/Beta Testers from Indiegogo will test this.)
5. Initial Hosted hApps Release to all Hosts

The Hosted hApps Release is the update that makes HoloFuel available to web users. This will be the first demonstration of distributed, human-centric, crypto-based applications that can be accessed by the general public using nothing but a web browser — no special full-node software, no browser plugins, no hardware or smartphone wallets. In other words, Holo hosting is coming.