Hey everyone!

​

Welcome to Weekly Update 42. There’s been lots of exciting information and presentations coming out in the Ethereum space within recent weeks so I highly recommend checking out event videos that’ve been coming out lately! For the update this week will be covering a couple new developer contributors and the usual Github development for Raiden. Let’s begin!

​

New contributors to Raiden

Last week on Github we saw three new contributors have their code changes accepted to the Raiden codebase. Two of the new contributors are the latest additions to Raiden’s development team while the last one is a young developer from the dev community who’s very enthusiastic about Raiden’s technology.

Yoichi Hirai, an influential blockchain developer, who previously worked for the Ethereum Foundation as a formal verification engineer, joined Raiden’s development team on 15th of November. The second new team member is Karl Bartel; a software developer with more than 15 years of experience. Both Yoichi and Karl spent their first days getting familiar with Raiden’s code and sorting out smaller issues along the way.

Giulio, a creator of a javascript library for easier interaction with a Raiden node called Raidenjs, noticed a minor bug in the Raiden API while he was working on his library. He opened a pull request containing a fix which was successfully reviewed and merged.

The list of contributors to Raiden client repository now counts 63 names which are a great representation of the open source philosophy in action.

​

Raiden v0.17.0 - “Zigzag Street”

Zigzag Street is the codename for the latest Raiden weekly testnet release. It has no new features but introduces a number of bug fixes which make the Raiden client more robust and reliable.

With the changes introduced in Zigzag Street, the Raiden client will properly handle even more edge cases which have a common goal to make the Raiden protocol able to function normally even in more stressful environments.

If you’re working with Raiden, please follow the instructions and make sure you close and settle any open channels before upgrading to the new version.

​

Development progress

The development team continued their investigation into discovering unexpected/unwanted behaviours of the Raiden client on Ethereum’s mainnet. Within the last week, they’ve fixed most of the issues discovered, but a few still remain open and are actively being resolved.

Significant progress was made into integrating the new CI (Continuous Integration) tool called CircleCI, which should make the development process much more efficient and independent of current CI tool, Travis. Later in the week the development team continued with an in-depth manual testing and as a result, a couple of more issues that need investigating were discovered.

As always, the priorities and goals for this following week are set at the beginning of the week. With more experienced developers on board, I am sure development team will get to the bottom of any issue they find.

Conclusion

To conclude Weekly Update 42, we’ve seen some very exciting additions to the raiden development team and also open source interest, which is equally exciting! As always, special thanks to the community for the support on this update and everyone who helps contribute. Leave a comment and me or /u/mat7ias will respond to help with whatever we can.

Cheers!