Engineering Update - Week 3, March 2016

Earlier, we told you about the (a) move towards mutable storage which will make profile updates faster and (b) updates to blockstack-server to use SQLite which will improve the performance of DB operations and simplify the codebase, along with a few other updates. Here are the highlights from last week:

  1. GPG Integration: Many users of Blockstack list their PGP keys in their profiles. Until recently we didn’t have native support for generating and managing PGP keys in our CLI. That changed last week! Thanks @jude for pushing this update. You can see the commits here (they are not merged with master yet). Also, the GPG key integration code will be published as a separate package in the blockstack-gpg repo.

  2. Listing all names/namespaces: We updated the blockstack-resolver last week to add support for listing all registered names in all namespaces. You can also configure a cron job to periodically refresh the listing. Thanks to @larry for testing out this feature and for reporting bugs. Larry also deployed his own resolver and this is what the namespaces endpoint looks like:

  3. Article on .id namespace: @ryan wrote a new article explaining the names and profiles registered in the .id namespace on Blockstack. This is a great introduction to how identity on the blockchain works and what gets registered in the .id namespace. You can read the article here.

There has also been a lot of other work on general bug fixes and improvements and you should see our Github for more details. Thanks to @Jzarecta, @cyanoboy and @larrysalibra for reporting a bunch of issues last week. The best way to help right now is to try out the CLI if you haven’t already and give us feedback!

– Muneeb

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