2018-03-15 Engineering Meeting

[larry]

2018-03-15 Engineering Meeting

Date/Time: 2018-03-15 @ 13:00 UTC / 09:00 EDT / 21:00 HKT
Length: 45 minutes
Meeting link: https://zoom.us/j/416493133

Agenda

Collections

Requested by: @ShankarGanesh_PJ
Background information: App developers want to make apps that can interact with data from other apps. We call this “collections” Aaron and Larry spent some time brainstorming an implementation for these: Support for Collections with Simple Gaia Authentication
Desired outcome: Does this make sense? What’s our priority non this?

Sponsored Names

Background information:

Website technology

Requested by: @larry
Background information: There is some concern that instead of simplify the website, we are adding more new technology in a way that will make it harder to maintain and not consistent with our goals as an organization: See discussion here: https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack.org/pull/533#pullrequestreview-103999235
Desired outcome: Do these changes make sense? How should we make decisions about this?

Migrating to Blockstack.org

Requested by: @Chase W
Background information: There’s a desire to make browser.blockstack.org the default onboarding app and move the App Store to blockstack.org. We should discuss if the pieces should live on separate subdomains or all under the domain blockstack.org

Blockstack.org Roadmap

Put together a short PDF presentation explaining how we could house both account management and the app store under the blockstack.org domain name (rather than using subdomains) so that the site could essentially function like a Blockstack app. Using Prismic as a headless CMS for both our blog and our pages, the marketing site could be nicely automated so that we don’t have to touch the repo for changes. Download File (6).pdf (2.1 MB) I’ve also been thinking about how we can organize this code…

Desired outcome: agree on a path forward for where we’re hosting Blockstack tools

Notes:

Collections

1. This touches a lot of stuff — blockstack.js, gaia, blockstack-browser — there’s a question about engineering bandwidth here
2. In order to figure out the priority here we need to research how important this is to devs, and what else would get pushed in order to focus on this (mobile support? new on-boarding flow?)

Sponsored Names (Subdomains)

Aaron: app developers are thinking about using these for billing

1. Jeff is going to look into why app developers want hand out subdomains
2. We need to communicate with the rest of the team that the current sponsored name functionality only will support one root name in the browser
3. Jude: if app devs want to use this for a billing system, he can think about how a better way to implement this

Note: it would be great for us to add support for instantaneous name resolution (possible with subdomains — Aaron can work on this at some point on the tail end of this sprint or start of next one)

Website technology

Chase:

1. Start to document unspoken requirements (@Larry) - discussion started here: https://github.com/blockstack/blockstack.org/issues/535
2. minimize trusted 3rd parties
3. censorship resistance
4. others
5. Start a conversation about which technology to use

Migrating to Blockstack.org

Requires a larger conversation

[ShankarGanesh_PJ]

Heads-up: Question for today’s Engg meeting, how to collaborate among Blockstack app developers for building powerful app. Example say I want to use Afia for storing all personal health Data on Blockstack and then build Organ Donor & immutable organ receiver’s waiting list on top of it (instead of again re-creating similar app + some additional regional specific features).