August SAFE Network Summary
Looks like the summer is officially over here in Ayr as we release the round up of August. After the excitement of the Decentralized Web Summit in July, August has been full of planning, development updates and meet ups.
(You can check out each of our weekly updates here: Aug 2nd, Aug 9th, Aug 16th, Aug 23rd, Aug 30th.)
We recently released the SAFE Network Fundamentals. These statements summarise the vision and goals for the SAFE Network and it’s been valuable to get feedback from the community about each of the points. We’re currently adding a little more context to explain each one which you should be able to see on safenetwork.tech during the course of the next week.
August also saw another edition of the London SAFE Network Meetup thanks to the hard work of Oscar and the team as Cryptonomy. The audience was treated to presentations from both Dug Campbell on the Network overview as well as deeper dive into PARSEC with Pierre Chevalier, co-creator of the PARSEC Consensus Protocol. You can watch both of these presentations on our YouTube channel now. The London meetup will now run monthly so please do come along to the next one if you’re in London on 26th September. Alternatively, if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic, please do get involved in the meetup in Chicago on 15th September if it’s anywhere near you. And of course, as ever, if you would like to host a SAFE Network meet up in a community near you please contact us for more information now.
And speaking of the overall mission, the SAFE Network has always focused on providing an alternative to the risks of centralised server systems. This month, our criticisms of the existing system were alas proved correct once again as we saw maintenance carried out by Digital Ocean resulting in excess churn to the Alpha 2 nodes that they host. This was specifically an issue for the Alpha Network (with hosted nodes) as opposed to one that would be experienced by the Network in the wild. There was no way to accurately assess the impact of these number of nodes having gone down on the alpha network — after all, the whole point of the Network is that no-one (including us!) can ever view the data that has been uploaded. So we took the decision to reset the Alpha 2 Network. So if you missed the announcements on the Forum and you’re now wondering why you’re being asked to go through the invite process again, this is the reason why. If you need a little extra help, please read how to get back onto the Network on the Forum.
Jon Haggblad recently joined the Routing team as a Rust Engineer and is getting to grips with the Network and has even merged his first PR already. The MaidSafe team is once again growing and we have five open positions across different teams. We are looking for a Rust Engineer with experience in networks and a Rust Engineer focused on routing (both remote), as well as Marketing Strategist, Software Test Engineer and DevOps Engineer to join the Ayr based team. If you would like more information — or think you could be the person we are looking for — email careers@maidsafe.net.
Finally the code in our Electron quickstart app tutorial 25 has recently been updated so it can be used with the latest safe-node-app package.
As we move into September and some exciting times for the SAFE Network please do let us know your thoughts on the forums and social media. As ever, if you’d like to get updates as soon as they’re posted please subscribe and turn on notifications on our YouTube channel and join us every Thursday night on the Forum for the weekly Dev Update.
