At Colony, we use the OKR method for setting quarterly goals and keeping our distributed team of 22 in sync and accountable. Below is our quarterly report on Q3 and a look ahead at Q4 2018.
Smell ya later, Q3
We kicked off the second half of 2018 with a simple focus: Aim to have everything ready to go live on Ethereum mainnet. That means a lot of design and development work on an aggressive timeline. What work? Glad you asked…
Like a delicious cake, Colony’s products are varied and complex. Let’s start at the bottom and work our way up those sweet, sweet, layers:
colonyNetwork:
Development has been moving forward at a steady pace, and all the major components of the smart contracts that underpin our whole biz have now been built. ENS support out of the box, a Reputation mining client, and token auctions for the Meta Colony are among the biggest features now ready for prime time. Special shout out to the handful of open-source contributors who jumped in and took on some issues this quarter ❤.
colonyJS:
Fresh out the gates in Q2, we now feel like colonyJS is battle tested and stable (for a v1 release, at least. More on v2 later); a few bugs were discovered and patched, a few new features were added, and now interacting with the Colony Network from any JavaScript application is painless and predictable.
dApp:
There’s a lot going on with this one. UX workflows for colony creation, user profiles, and administration all were finalized and shipped off to #dev for implementation. On the back-end, we’re using OrbitDB to handle all the essential data that needs to be available *and* decentralized, so a lot of our effort this quarter was spent in collaboration with the OrbitDB team. Cross-project collaboration FTW!
purser:
Software wallets, hardware wallets, and Metamask can all now be reliably imported and brought into the same simple predictable interface thanks to the newest addition to the Colony developer toolset. Purser is a standalone library for working with Ethereum wallets, and it’s been open-sourced to help make development a bit easier for anyone working on a dApp, Colony-compatible or otherwise.
tailor:
Scott Street, during his internship last quarter, had a great idea: What if we took what colonyJS does for the colonyNetwork smart contracts, and abstracted it to be a custom-fitting interface for *any* smart contract? The answer is: it would be awesome for dApp developers. Over the course of his internship, he and James worked to turn that hypothetical question into a coded reality. Keep your ear to the ground for the open-sourcing announcement of Tailor, a custom-fitting interaction layer for smart contracts. Tailor is such a good idea, it will become the basis for the next version (2.0) of colonyJS. Way to go, Scott and James!
colonyStarter:
What started out as a quick repo designed to get hackathon participants up and running ASAP with Colony has now turned into a full-blown product of its own: The colonyStarter kit. If you’re looking for some delightfully modular code examples that illustrate how to use colonyJS to interact with the colonyNetwork, look no further! Ryan Christoffersen, after participating in the Colony hackathon this summer, has packed into this monorepo all the pieces necessary to make your very own Colony integration (some assembly required). This is another one to watch; we intend to add additional starter packs to get going with react, uport, and more. Time to #buidl with us!
Build.colony.io/:
The community of folks out there building or looking to build with Colony is growing. We needed a place for our dev community to live, where discussions can take place, issues can be solved, and meetups can be planned. Gitter is still a good place to go if you’ve got a specific question you can’t find the answer to, but in the interest of having some permanent, searchable, threaded discussion, we’ve rolled out a fresh instance of Discourse for anyone out there building with Colony. Come say hai!
New team members!
EthBerlin
Hands-down the most fun we’ve had at a hackathon all year (including our own!). We were proud to support the potent cocktail of software, collaborative art, free yerba mate, and crumpled up paper that was stirred together at ETHBerlin. 12/10 would sponsor again.
We were also happy to see a couple of projects utilize the colonyStarter kit during the hackathon to build out their ideas, and be rewarded in about $5k worth of pre-sale CLNY:
TruffleCon
The Internet’s dream of the 90s was alive in Portland this fall at Trufflecon, where we met a whole lot of fine folks working together to build out the future of Ethereum developer tooling.
It wasn’t all “put a blockchain on it!”, either — no, we got really close to the metal, with presentations about upgrade patterns in smart contract design, security exploits, and formal smart contract verification, to name a few of our favorites.
If you missed it (or can’t find the slides), here’s a crowd-sourced compilation of presentations, which includes the 3 given by Colony team-members.
We’re stoked for next year already! See you in Seattle.
Words
The quarter wouldn’t be complete without some philosophical and/or super-technical waxing:
Parameterized Transaction Reviews
For when a multi-sig is just not granular enough for your transaction review needsblog.colony.io
Strange Loops and Blockchains
In which Hegel and Hofstadter help us set expectations concerning the problem of governance. In his Pulitzer-prize…kronosapiens.github.io
(Re)introducing the colonyStarter
This summer, Colony’s distributed hackathon saw over 50 participants join in from 15 countries over the course of about…blog.colony.io
Q4, SHOW ME WHAT YOU GOT
It’s finals week at Colony dAcademy: We’re pullin’ all nighters to push PRs and ace our unit tests.
The colonyNetwork bug bounty
To be ready for mainnet, we must be absolutely sure that our smart contracts run as the Bagginses did before Bilbo: without ever doing anything unexpected.
We strive for 100% coverage, but to err is human. We could use a few dozen extra brains to sense-check our assumptions and kick in the tires of our Rinkeby deployment.
Help us to secure the colonyNetwork. Sign up to our newsletter for updates and more information about our bug bounty program.
DevCon4
You can bet we’ll be in Prague this year: DevCon4 is shaping up to be the most ambitious crossover event in Ethereum history. We’ll be at our table with swag, in the audience with insightful questions, and on twitter with snarky comments (just kidding; @joincolony is quite a diplomatic persona).
Come say hello to (most of) the team, and follow us for more information about meetups and other event-related announcements!
Moar starter packs
With several hackathons on the horizon, it’s only fitting that we continue to build out our colonyStarter monorepo with additional examples and integrations.
Look out for an updated starter kit package that helps you infuse your React dApp with Colony, and perhaps a uPort integration for good measure.
The long awaited dApp
So much work has been happening behind the scenes preparing our reference client dApp for public release. If you’re just tuning in, we committed last year to a “100% decentralized” solution that never relies on a server or trusted third party, and we intend to make promise.resolve(true) on that commitment.
Thanks to a super-charged OrbitDB, a silky smooth UX, and a whole lotta front-end elbow grease, the Colony dApp will be hitting the proverbial shelves by the end of Q4. Get ready for the first step towards the future of the decentralized firm: Colony Contribute.
Colony makes it easy for people all over the world to build organisations together, online.
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