Hey everyone,

thank you for your great support on my raiden T-shirt post. In return for your support I have something little special for you in this week's git weekly update. Format will be a little different from previous posts but I have some things you might be really interested in.

As you probably know, I applied for community manager position some time ago and interviewing process is coming along nicely. As a part of the process I had chance to talk with several people inside Brainbot, but most important conversation for this post is one with Lefteris.

Lefteris is one of the developers working on raiden. Our talk had two purposes. First one was interview for community manager position where we discussed my plans and his vision of what this role inside a team would do and other was him helping me better understand current situation of a project and correct some of my assumptions.

Because some of my assumptions were wrong this needs to be said.

apology to everyone

Since development team included new milestone goals "Red Eyes" and "Ithaca" I wrongly assumed that "Ithaca" is previous "minor release" goal and that "Red Eyes" is "MVP" goal.

It was not my intention to wrongly inform anyone in the community, it is just that without help from developer team I came up with wrong conclusions.

In our talk Lefteris explained to me what is the intention behind each of the milestones and their order in release schedule. I will inform you of correct intentions and ordering in sections below.

Sorry once again.

disclaimer

Lefteris helped me better understand the project, but I am still writing these posts as just a dude from the community who has a bit more interest in the project.

Text in this post was not checked by anyone in the Brainbot and because of that it can still contain information that is not correct and can't be classified as an official work of Brainbot. My intention is not to wrongly inform the community but it still can happen.

my talk with Lefteris

I can't say everything we discussed during our talk, but I wanted to make a dedicated section in this post where I will group everything I can say and some of my personal opinions. Topics we discussed will be ordered from less to more techy ones. My mistakes will come at the end :P.

First of all I want to say that Lefteris is an awesome guy. It was really surprising that someone with so much knowledge and programming skill can be so down to earth. He is working on a project tirelessly and his daily schedule is packed. Nevertheless, he spared one hour to help me with my posts. Please, refrain yourself from spamming poor guy with questions, he really has a lot on his plate at the moment.

We discussed communication between raiden team and community. Inside Brainbot they are fully aware that current state of communication is not even close to something satisfiable. We talked briefly about our ideas what is important to communicate to the community. We agreed that my weekly github updates are great, but they look at the progress from very narrow standpoint. What I mean by that is that when you look at the project's progress in terms of programming tickets that were done in the last week you are missing out on a bigger picture of a project's progress. Some ideas that were flying around in our conversation were posts on medium about trade-offs they made when choosing certain tech, difficulties they are facing at the moment, goals of certain development periods and what you might be the most excited about are comparisons between raiden and other projects that are targeting scaling.

We addressed this Asia tour they are doing and how there are no official coverage of each meet up held. He said that they depend on organizers when it comes to VODs but we agreed that there is great interest inside community for content like this.

I mentioned how part of the community sees developers as sort of opinion makers in this tech field and how content where developers discuss some interesting topics might be a great content.

He mentioned their difficulties in finding more developers. Biggest issue is that minimum of six months have to pass before any good developer can start really contributing to the project and that six months in crypto space is huge amount of time (three months before developer leaves his current company and three months for onboarding on raiden). He said that they are growing slowly so it is not all that bad.

We discussed easter eggs behind milestone goal names. He told me what they are but I won't spoil the fun of Mathias'es egg hunt :).

He explained to me how they plan to change release strategy. So, there will be no more huge releases with tones of new features. Instead, they plan to do smaller releases more often.

He told me that my milestone ordering is wrong. Their plan is to do Red Eyes first and then Ithaca. He explained goals of each milestone to me, but details about that in sections below.

And last topic we discussed and I can recollect of is ultimate goal for the project. I will use his quote here:

We want to create a product anyone can develop on, no matter the programming language and use case. Ultimate goal is that any grandma can take her phone out and start using raiden for micro-transactions within 15 minutes without understanding anything that is going on under the hood.

Red Eyes

As I already said, I was wrong. Red Eyes milestone goal and release is planned to happen before Ithaca.

Red Eyes is actually release that was "promised" during the token auction but was delayed by the refactoring.

Refactoring is almost done and we can expect more code to be added to the repositories in upcoming couple of weeks.

Main focus of "Red Eyes" are raiden client, refactored smart contracts and recoverability of raiden client. Pathfinding and monitoring services are not in focus in this milestone goal. You can see that pathfinding and monitoring have 0 issues inside "Red Eyes" goal, so it makes sense.

So, it is not that they still haven't decided what issues to put in "Red Eyes" goal for pathfinding and monitoring (this is what I said before I knew better). Reason why there are no issues is because these services are not in focus for this release.

Biggest task in Red Eyes is integration of smart contracts. To be completely honest, notes I took from our call about what exactly this means are very confusing (you dun goofed BOR4) and I don't want to miss inform you any more so let's just leave it like this for now. I will try to find out what exactly this means and will let you know in future posts.

Ithaca

Ithaca is release planned for after the Red Eyes.

It is still not completely planned out and it is subject to changes. What they do know is that it will include pathfinding and monitoring.

Big task that this will include is implementation of Matrix protocol. They had some difficulties with it's implementation but there is research undergoing and they are pretty confident it will work.

Plan is that pathfinding will be free at the beginning. They will manage that by running pathfinding services themselves. It will not stay free for too long because we can see that there is new milestone goal called Croesus inside pathfinding.

Croesus will introduce fees for pathfinding and maybe some other features but that is still far in the future so they don't have exact plan.

general github progress

I decided to skip per repository coverage of this week's progress to keep post short enough for reading. Instead, I will do several sentences about this week's progress in general.

Now that we know ordering of milestone goals, progress makes more sense. Progress is visible in all the repositories but lots of things are happening behind the scenes.

We can expect an explosion of new features and refactored code to come in upcoming couple of weeks.

Direction they are headed is completing "Red Eyes" goal and doing that release as soon as possible. In the meantime significant work is being done on completing "Ithaca" as well.

conclusion

Team is ready to open themselves to the community, and they are finding best possible ways to do that. My talk with Lefteris opened my red eyes and he helped me get on the track with my understanding of the project's progress.

Red Eyes and refactoring is worked on and it does not seem that far from happening. With that release we can say that raiden will reach a stage where it is in working condition, but it is still far far away of polished product. Team has work after that more or less planned out but there is still possibility for some changes.

Community is waking up as well, which brings a great big smile to my face. Keep up the great atmosphere!

If you have any questions, just ask. As you might have noticed I am allergic to question marks so I try to answer everything best I can.

Thank you for reading!