The Blockstack open source development team has been working on a way to improve our development processes. This year, we started doing project-wide 2-week sprints, as opposed to sprints for each of the projects.
At the beginning of each two week period, we decide what we want to get accomplished and define user stories. Then, we create tasks from these stories, estimate difficulties, and assign people to complete them.
Yesterday, we celebrated our first project-wide 2-week sprint and prepared for our second one.
If you’d like to participate in this sprint and work towards the next release, feel free to jump into one of the issues and comment and ask how you can help. We’d love to have you.
For the current sprint (Feb 13 - 23), we’re working on three user stories:
As a user, I’d like to login to apps
As a user, I’d like to search
As a user, I’d like to deploy a Blockstack node
Our focus is on making the above three things as easy as possible for the user.
Background on story #1: We want to nail down the exact authentication mechanism for logging into apps. Our auth mechanism is completely decentralized and introduces several complexities that are not there for centralized solutions. We want to not only make it easy for developers to work with the auth libraries & process but we want Blockstack users to have a great user experience when logging into apps with their identity. Hiding all the complexity and building a system that developers love to use is the key focus here.
Background on story #2: Our old search system is showing signs of age and it needs a better integration with the new Atlas network (for fetching zonefiles). Also, there is room for optimizing the frequency of search index refreshing so that user data can get indexed more quickly. The current upgrade of the search system focuses on these two tasks.
Background on story #3: We want people to run their Blockstack Core nodes and not trust any public node or nodes run by other companies. Currently, Blockstack Core takes a while to bootup. We’ve made several improvements on the initial bootup time and reduced it by a lot in earlier releases but if you’re processing all transactions from the beginning the current time needed to boot a new node is still in the order of a few days. We’re working on a fast-sync mechanism where users can get a copy of the current state signed by Blockstack developers and quickly start using Blockstack Core while a background process independently verifies the state by processing all transactions locally.
You can track the progress for story #1here and story #2 and story #3here, respectively.
