The Stellar Dev Digest: Issue #2
Hey y’all! It’s about that time of the week again. Welcome to another issue of the Stellar Dev Digest, a weekly recap of all things related to the development of the Stellar Network.
What is Stellar? Stellar is is a platform that connects banks, payments systems, and people. Integrate to move money quickly, reliably, and at almost no cost.
Featured Developer Posts and News from the Week
- SatoshiPay’s Solar wallet released version 0.19.0 — Release Notes
- SureRemit held an AMA on June 14 — Full AMA
- Federation, a simple innovation that makes Stellar Account ID’s more user friendly, was integrated into the Wirex application — YouTube Explainer
- The Protocol Working Group met again this week — Meeting Notes
Application of the Week
The featured application of the week is Astrograph, developed by @nebolsin, @gzigzigzeo, and @charlie-wasp. Congratulations!
Astrograph provides a single endpoint to explore the Stellar network state and history using powerful GraphQL queries, while also allowing developers to add real-time capabilities to the apps faster and with less effort using reliable WebSocket-based subscriptions.
Currently under heavy development, they are looking for developer feedback! If you are building Stellar applications and are familiar with Horizon, the Astrograph team invites you to evaluate Astrograph and see if you can benefit from GraphQL’s flexibility and ease of use. In case you encounter a bug, want to extend Astrograph’s schema with new fields or introduce some specific queries, filters or subscriptions — please let them know by raising an issue on Github.
Interested in promoting your own project, or another exciting project in the ecosystem? If so, please make a submission here.
Stellar Protocol (CAPs) and Ecosystem (SEPs) Updates
Core Advancement Proposals (CAP) and Stellar Ecosystem Proposals (SEP) are a formal way of documenting proposed standards to improve various aspects of the Stellar Network. These function similar to EIPs and BIPs from the Ethereum and Bitcoin communities respectively. CAPs and SEPs represent the culmination of many discussions that often take place on the Stellar Developer Google Group.
This week we saw the introduction of a new SEP and acceptance of a CAP.
SEP-0022 [DRAFT]: this SEP, established as a working draft, introduces the standardization of IPFS support on top of the Stellar Network. This is an exciting step forward for IPFS supporters because such a SEP has been in discussions for a while (years?). The basic idea is supporting IPFS on Stellar would bolster Stellar’s functionality with a minimal overhead compared to writing a stellar-specific data storage and messaging layer. This would be accomplished by:
- Adding a multi-hash field in the transaction memo to accommodate referencing data stored on IPFS in a transaction
- Adding an account operation for requesting communication between two accounts
CAP-0021 [ACCEPTED]: this CAP moves from draft to accepted. It was initially referenced in Stellar Dev Digest Issue #0 when it was first introduced. In short, this CAP “generalizes the timeBounds field in Transaction to support other conditions, including conditions that relax sequence number checking and provide relative timelocks.”
In all, 4 pull requests were merged in the last week.
Updates from Stellar Core
One of the exciting PR’s I teased last week has landed in core just in time for the 11.2.0 first release candidate! TL&DR it is ̶m̶y̶ ̶v̶e̶r̶y̶ ̶o̶w̶n̶ ̶P̶R̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶f̶i̶x̶e̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶r̶e̶e̶ ̶t̶y̶p̶o̶s̶ a new functionality that continuously monitors for quorum intersection. The details and proof are really cool and I recommend checking them out yourself when you have a moment (a rather lengthy moment because it’s some intense graph theory stuff).
Overall, 8 pull requests were merged in the last week.
- Warnings and compile fixes post quorum intersection PR
- Don’t look up http command handler twice
- update preconditions for CatchupRange constructor
- some spelling nits — thanks to ‘Code Spell Checker’
- Remove / from http-command examples in docs
- Do not allow gaps in history
- Trivial: Clean up some warnings
- Min quorum intersection checker
Calls for Participation
Looking to get your hands dirty and not sure where to begin? The Stellar ecosystem is full of open source projects looking for help. The following projects are interested in some help and are very likely willing to offer mentorship in exchange:
Kelp (Go): a free and open-source trading bot for the Stellar universal marketplace
Solar (Typescript): Stellar wallet. Secure and user-friendly
Scala Stellar SDK (Scala): Scala SDK for the Stellar network
Stellar Go Monorepo (Go): Stellar’s public monorepo of go code
Stellar Vanity Wallet Generator (Rust): generate Stellar vanity wallets
Stellar Examples in Js (JavaScript): some simple transaction examples
Equilibre.io (JavaScript): a portfolio manage for the Stellar DEX
State of the Developer Ecosystem
This week we saw some incremental releases — release candidates for both Stellar Core and Horizon and a small point release for the Js SDK.
Upcoming Events and Days of Note
- June 20: Create a Token on the Stellar Network Workshop (NYC)
- June 22–24: Oleg Andreev and Cathie Yun will be speaking at ZCon
- June 23: Stellar Community Fund (SCF) final voting begins
- June 24–26: Lisa Nestor will be speaking at the 2019 Crypto Valley Conference
- Nov 4–5: Stellar Meridian Conference
Jobs
Looking to work on Stellar fulltime?!? Check out the list of job openings below:
- SDF Frontend Engineer (New York) Apply
- SDF Platform Engineer (San Francisco) Apply
- SDF Senior Core Engineer (San Francisco) Apply
- SDF Senior Platform Engineer (San Francisco) Apply
- SDF Senior Core Engineer (San Francisco) Apply
Not Yet Signed Up?
I now have a publication, how cool! While I will still advertise posts on the typical Stellar developer mediums (Reddit, Keybase, Google Group, etc) you can now follow this publication.
Did I Miss Something?
Darn, I knew it! If you found that something from this issue is missing or inaccurate, please open an issue here or message me (r_durst) on Keybase and I will get around to it ASAP. Thanks!
Disclaimer: this is entirely an endeavor of my own, in no way, shape or form endorsed by or a result of my employment with the Stellar Development Foundation.
