Hey everyone,

first of all, don't forget it is Mother's day today. Secondly, I got an announcement to make regarding my weekly posts. Lefteris (one of the Raiden developers) offered to assist me to bring you the best content possible by extending his help even further and /u/Mat7ias to improve on format. None of that will impact my content specifically, but all the facts I bring you will be double checked from now on. I have several topics I want to discuss with you, so let's start.

Yet another EDCON presentation recap

In my last post I shared my views about the presentation, but I feel I failed to do a proper recap of all the new changes we got from the presentation and I want to go deeper on a few things. The list of all the new changes plus important things we already knew but are worth repeating according to me are:

1. The development team grew and it is counting 14 developers now

2. The development community shows increasing interest in the project and more developers are joining to help the progress

3. Two milestones were introduced to the public: Red Eyes and Ithaca

4. Crude estimations for reaching both of these milestones were revealed: Red Eyes is expected to be reached sometime this summer (European summer) and Ithaca is expected by the end of the year

5. Both Red Eyes and Ithaca will be released on the main net

6. Development goals for both of the milestones

7. Some of the development goals are already done and will be added to the master branch in the near future

8. (one big thing I forgot to mention last week!) Brainbot revealed that they are actively collaborating with researches and scholars in order to find new ways to optimize the project even further

9. Brainbot acknowledged existence of competition, but they believe they can outperform them

10. They are working with the fastest/most reliable/freshest tech there currently is, but they are ready to jump on anything new that will improve Raiden

This is my top 10 list and if you feel anything needs to be added feel free to leave a comment.

Two more conference participation announcements

During this past week, Raiden team announced they are going to participate in two more conferences in near future. /u/Mat7ias already created two very nice posts announcing this, but I feel it is worth repeating. So, first conference Raiden will participate in is coming as fast as next week.

On May 18th a conference called L2 Summit will be held in Boston. The conference is organized by MIT Media Lab and Fidelity Labs. As for Fidelity Labs I’ve read they’re using blockchain technology and human-centered design to create products and services that improve people’s financial lives which exciting. But also MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is the most prestigious IT college in the world. Second thing worth mentioning is that conference has second layer blockchain protocols in the focus. Raiden is second layer blockchain protocol, so Raiden should feel at home at this conference. There probably won't be live stream from the conferences, but VODs will be available later.

I terms of what to expect from Raiden side at the conference I wouldn't expect anything new. They are going there to participate in a panel and hackaton. Only two weeks will have passed since the last presentation and it is unreasonable to expect anything big happened in that short of a time frame. Nevertheless, there will be many experts on Layer Two protocols which will be attending so I feel participating in this conference is great call by the Raiden team.

The second participation announcement we received this week is for the ‘Off The Chain’ workshop in Berlin which will be held on the 30th of June. This is yet another conference which has Layer Two protocols in focus. Looking at the list of speakers you will see some respectable names are coming to present. I don't really know what to expect from the presentation on this conference, it’s too early to say.

All in all, we can see that Brainbot is trying to promote Raiden by participating in conferences. It’s clear they are not only participating in conferences which have the popular names, they’re also very focused on those which focus on Second Layer technology, regardless of their popularity. If you ask me I support that decision.

Need for collaboration with researchers and scholars

I just wanted to say a few sentences about why is there need for active collaboration with researchers and scholars.

State channels as a technology is very young. People actively working in this tech field see that there is significant room for improvements, but those methods for improving haven't been discovered yet. That’s why the Brainbot team needs researchers to help them figure out how to better utilize potential technology currently has.

It is a long process and discovering the potential of new technology is not easy. That’s why active collaboration is essential for development and that’s why I think it’s great that Brainbot decided to enter this path of collaboration.

Some of the problems scholars are tackling are: routing, availability, blockchain congestion and so on.

Linear and parallel development

A short explanation of linear and parallel development is needed to fully understand what is currently going on inside Raiden development.

So, let's say you have two features that need to be done on a project. We’ll call them feature A and feature B.

If output of feature A is needed so you can develop feature B, you first need to finish feature A before you can start working on feature B. This is called linear development.

If feature B does not depend on feature A, you can develop them in parallel and this is where the name comes from.

This is exactly what is going on in Raiden's development. Many features in the Raiden client repository are linear to each other. So, to remove any waste of time and working hours, the team is actively working on some of the Ithaca features before linear phase of development is done. Once they reach the phase where the features will be parallel to each other, they will put more focus in Raiden client repository.

None of this is unexpected and it was taken into account when announcements for reaching Red Eyes and Ithaca were given, so no worries.

Red Eyes

Situation is same as last week; features currently being worked on are the big ones. That’s why changes to the code are not that regular, but when they come they make a splash. ^(Just as a note, github labels them “Issues” but in the case of development they’re more alike to proposed additions of development.)

A big addition landed in contracts this week and it closed 4 open issues inside the milestone. Another big one inside contracts repository is currently waiting for review and approval.

Similar situation is inside Raiden client repository as well. One big merged and several other big ones waiting for review and approval.

The Libs repository is a little different. Here the developers add shared code between the repositories. Many smaller changes were added supporting big ones inside remaining repositories.

All in all, development is coming along nicely, team is constantly working (even today on Sunday) and I feel soon they will sort all the really big ones.

Conclusion

Here you are folks. This week post was more about activities around the project than the code itself. The features being worked on are very complex and changes depend on each other (linear development), but the team is handling it very nicely. Lefteris and Mattias help with post and your support means a lot and if you have any questions just leave a comment. Enjoy your week my friends!

Cheers!