MaidSafe Dev Update - January 18, 2018

hell yeah :slight_smile:

Something that could be manageable and widely accepted by the community is even a much more granular set of mini-roadmaps, for example:

  • Data Chains proposal #3 (current one?) finishes initial tests by 2/20/18
  • Decision on Data Chains Poposal #3
  • If fails, then draft of Data Chains proposal #4 by 3/20/18
  • If accepted, then Data Chains initial Implementation test aimed to be ready 4/15/18
  • Soak tests of Data Chains aims to finish by 5/05/18
  • Alpha 3 tentative release date, given all parts above are successful: 6/13/18 (hypothetical!!)
  • …I’d reckon that’s about the furthest that could be planned for. Just like a person walking, I’d guess that you could only plan for the immediate next step ahead…

I just used lots of buzzwords and random things so MaidSafe can know what I am asking for, and if anyone else would be happy to see things like this, that really give a clear vision of exactly what is going on in the near future, then support this post with a “Like” :slight_smile: This “minimap” should be highlighted somewhere.

Even though it will be filled in with goals instead of anything that you can set a solar-watch to, I think everybody who has their savings in this project would prefer it over what is available now :slight_smile: :heart: And I totally agree with @solardude that humans tend to procrastinate if there are absolutely no deadlines or outside pressures at all.

And nobody will be mad if you don’t meet the date deadline; in fact, I’d suppose that everyone would respect u guys more for giving the date estimates, than none at all. What say you, community?

  • Will
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I would like to see the project adopt a public timeline position some place between what it is now (very vague or non-existent) and Tesla-like (very aggressive, probably not achievable, but close). No one seems to fault Elon Musk for overly optimistic roadmaps which consistently fall short of reality. MaidSafe could borrow just a tad of that boldness, just a tad.

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I would absolutely love this. :grinning:

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Question: why is MAidsafe trying to hire a customer support person?

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It would be nice to know whether we will see beta in the next 1-2 years or whether that will take another 10 years…

I understand coding and timelines don’t really work well together. But a pointer on what to expect would be nice.

I try to read the dev update every week but I get lost in the technical stuff. I think routing is about datachains? Maybe good to also explain what is being worked on with regards to next alpha and what is finished…)

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What exactly is the distinction between a groupie and a diehard fan? Sounds like rectangles and squares—at best—to me. There are many non-technical supporters here, who (like me) don’t have a dev background, but are passionate about how the SAFEnetwork can revolutionize the intersection of tech, commerce, and society.

I tend to lead with something like: Maidsafe is building the only autonomous network capable of decentralizing the internet. Unlike a blockchain-based product, the SAFEnetwork runs on datachains, which are more eco-friendly, built to scale, faster, free of transaction fees and provide superior privacy and security.

From there it’s just a matter of diving into what aspects of the SAFEnetwork inspire you most or might best pique the listener’s interest. The list of key messaging points @dugcampbell shared earlier this month provides helpful direction on what attributes to push:

All of that being said, I generally agree with you on the point of transparency.

The Maidsafe team is operating under unique constraints. It would be much easier to provide good visibility into timing if they were merely iterating on a blockchain concept rather than creating something wholly distinct. However, optics are key. Whatever else can be done to provide the public with greater insight into time horizons will be a net win, I think. Consider how many times a Falcon rocket failed to land properly. Some people moaned about missing the timeline, but on the whole it’s as they say: those that mind don’t matter, and those that matter don’t mind. Much like SpaceX, I think erring to the side of greater transparency will provide greater returns in the end.

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It is hard to talk about this issues without being accussed of fud spreading. However facts are against Maidsafe and how they have managed what they have promised to deliver.

Everything can be engineered but if you spend 100 years to finish meanwhile others finish earlier (even if the scope of their work is not so deep as yours) then you only have been delivering promises to those who support you. Very worring from the users perspective.

What I would like to see is Maidsafe:

  • Reconsidering give reasonable timescales even if they are loong ahead in time (and doing whatever necessary to acomplish it).
  • Clarifying about the remaining parts of the project (no more surprises as Disjoint groups or Data chains for instance, those were out of the menu and suddenly appear even without being noticed in the previous roadmaps).
  • Being much more agressive about human resources allocation (if you need more money ask for more money, time is more expensive than money).
  • Much better documentation about the technology developed (for devs, marketers, investors etc.).

These are bold words that nobody wants to hear but all these things together have become in a lack of transparency about where we are and where we are going. It’s Maidsafe’s job to show a clean house for developers, investors and customers. Not everything is wrong of course, but at this point we need Maidsafe being part of the solution, not part of the problem. Be brave Maidsafe, address the problems, you always have do it.

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I think there are some valid points in the posts above. From obseravtion of dev updates during Q4 last year, the progress and achivements has accelerated and moving forward. I agree with the posts above that it would be very beneficial for the followers to know more about what is about to come and what remains until each step is achieved. I would like to have some goals for every quarter and if something appears that changes so the goals cant be meet, there would just need some comments and change of time frame.

In my head, for example datachains, my vision is that it will be accomplished during 1Q this year or worst case 2Q this year. But I find it quite hard to grasp if it is fair assumptions. In my head, alpha 3 possibly can be achieved 1Q-2Q and alpha 4 4Q this year or begining of 2019. If there is some way to set overview goals quarterly and a little more info to remaining problems to be solved and how the progress compared with the goals are progressing, that would be very good and relieve some worries I have when I daily think of Maidsafe and the Safe network. :slight_smile:

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Not meaning to be pedantic (sorry!), but the SAFENetwork uses close group consensus, which has been tested in the wild and is the current system providing alpha 2.

Data chains is the support act for close group consensus. It allows groups to reform when they are disrupted through excessive churn (large net split, network failure, etc).

I say this because I don’t think the maidsafe team have explained this very well. I think people assume a working network is further away from being proven as a result. In reality, the core tech to store and mutate data with distributed consensus is already in place and has been for some time.

Ofc, it has been shown that we need data chains, as high churn can disrupt the network to greatly. However, much of the hard stuff has been proved.

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Right Data Chains is more of an afterthought that will help give ledger abilities, network restarts, and much more. Not to deflate it’s enormous value but the consensus mechanisms and the network mostly has been thoroughly tested.

Even not having vaults from home now (this holds some back it seems), I remember testing with them awhile back and it wasn’t the vaults that had issues it was mainly lack of resource proofs, ranking mechanisms, routing if I remember correctly. All of which now are really getting hashed out quite nicely.

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Yes they were newish. But such is the nature of research & development. You know what needs to be done then you research it and start developing it. As you might imagine the research is not always complete (just ask medical research) and you realise that in order to do what you want you need additional or alternative components to achieve the goal. With consensus, aging and node relocation the team realised that to achieve short&long term security and data republish that Disjoint groups and Data Chains would be needed to achieve that in the simplest form possible.

So coming back to timescales these sort of things can alter timescales dramatically. In the past as you would know when the team gave out timescales they were passively and aggressively told by a few how they felt about times not being met.

Ever been in a kitchen of a restaurant. Adding more chefs only helps until you reach a certain point then adding more chefs only slows down things. This is true for many types of projects and the cooks illustration is used for most of them because its obvious.

Well programming and development is the same. The more people you add the more relationships/conversations that need to occur. When deciding on the correct course of action it is easier to work with a small group than 30 or 50 programmers who all have a variation on what should be done. And even though you have a manager to keep things in order you still have to consider the points brought up. When you have a small group all the points can still be considered easier and dismissed in seconds rather than hearing from 50 people on that point.

Too many cooks spoil the broth.

Also it takes time to hire quality people and there are only so many available at any one time.

It is a misconception that just adding people can help and while I am not suggesting you implied that, it still needs to be said for others. The team is reportedly adding as many people as they need as fast as they can and in a timely manner. New people take time to become useful and new people reduce the efficiency of at least one other team member till the new person is useful.

So lets see if adding timelines help to reduce your 100 year target. No, but it might make people watching more comfortable, till that is a timeline is missed or another sub-module is added. History is a good teacher on that one. Then also you have some here who are waiting and waiting for the project to finish so their MAID/SAFEcoin goes to the moon and makes them super rich. What do you think these will do with timelines?

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I define a groupie as a mostly non-technical, interested party that asks questions out of interest, learns a little, and then with this new nugget, he/she goes out and shares said nugget, then said groupie’s friend show up on the forum and ask some questions, starts conversations about how excited he/she is and dream out loud about the project therefore creating a vibe that turns into synergies that propel the project forward.

That said, as many have mentioned, it is difficult to be a cheerleader for anything that is so vaguely defined. Like - without a clue of when Alpha3 will be released, what is the cheer supposed to sound like when Alpha3 might not be for 5 years. What is Alpha 3? I want to help, but in reality I would have a difficult time spending precious time on a project that I have watched for 4+ years that is still in it’s infancy. I have worked on projects before that have tried to conquer the world in a single swoop. They always fail or after realization of the required resources are readjusted to refocus on a small highly objective goals with incremental success. A public plan would not only garner more support, but it would allow scrutinized collaboration. A tool to define User Requirements and parse down with some prioritization. Something like the House Of Quality comes to mind. That would produce results and inform the public of said plan.

I think the byproduct of that methodology would naturally be momentum both within the Dev Team and the “fans”.

Then again, what do I know, I’m just an old man on the outside looking in.

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I have read SO many excuses of why this project cannot bring some accountability to the table. I know they are working hard, but what are the stated goals. What is so difficult about outlining what the vision is in the entire project, then publishing the User Requirements and then within that scope somewhere is Alpha 3 and it’s requirements. This protects against Scope Creep, AND is easy to understand, AND identifies where the project stands. With that nearly anyone should be able to project with some accuracy timelines. Yes there will be hang ups. Rome was not built in a day, neither will this project.

SolarDude

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We get groupies, but all the main discussions have already happened so we point those people to the threads on this forum and they read and get satisfied.

Happens alot. We have them.

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It was an explanation of what happens and not an excuse for

If you feel that way then please do not destory a explaination of what happens in projects to justify your feelings.

Just express yourself and be done with it.

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It may look like it after a superficial passing glance, but it is definitely not in it’s infancy. Furthermore, 4 years is nothing for what they have accomplished so far. Pick any prestigious university and it would have taken them at least 12 years (or more) to do the same. Compare what they have accomplished to “networking” in MS windows 2k which I think took a few thousand of dev-years. If you haven’t read it, I would encourage you to get a copy of The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks. It’s a fun read. :cowboy_hat_face:

I would agree with neo and say it’s not about accountability, it’s about reality. Look at open source projects like Debian or others. “Q. When will the next version of Debian be ready to ship? A. It will be ready when it is ready.” SAFE needs 100% quality, and the devs need space and time for that to happen. A SAFE network that isn’t safe and secure because it was rushed or the devs were put under too much pressure/stress kind of defeats the purpose doesn’t it?

What you’re looking for has already been written in the forum, whitepapers, and the blog in multiple places. It is an evolutionary process and things change over time as they need to until they converge, so specific documentation may not always be up to the minute up to date. From the perspective of one who has recently read through most, I would say the vision is very consistent. Any one of the MaidSafe youtube videos will give you a basic overview, but if you want a deeper understanding then you just need to read more. The stated goals are simple, but the solutions require a degree of complexity; there is a difference between complexity and complicatedness. It’s a lot harder to build a quality complex system that works compared to a complicated one that is garbage and breaks.

If you are frustrated that the information is not centralized and organized in a way that appeals to the groupie or layperson, then the forum is also a great place for someone to lead a new (marketing? beginners?) thread that collects all the available public information and presents it in a way that might be more appealing to that audience… but at this point I’d say we’ve probably moved off-topic for the dev update. :blush:

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That’s why I am asking for more clarification about this. If there is more R&D remaining before beta release and it’s not in the roadpmap it will be a matter of transparency by Maidsafe to inform the community about it and it can be considered a matter of opacity to don’t do it. They didn’t in the past giving the impression to some community members and more to lurkers from outside that they don’t know exactly what they are doing.

That’s the impression do you want to give people who come new about what you are doing? These things have not been taken into the due consideration and are playing against the project badly. There are a lot of eyeballs looking and these kind of things scare people. For Maidsafe is much easier to give a simple roadmap and when asked to say just we do not know and this is a huge mistake. Transparency about the job done and left is key in this crypto-world full of scammers. Maidsafe is not scam, don’t give reasons to nobody to say that.

I will take the answer of VaCrunch to answer this point:

You talk about how some people felt about times not being met. I talk about how some people felt about times not being known.

Your argument here is clearly invalid. You can fix that just creating work teams to avoid all those problems.
Maidsafe have been doing that and it’s continuing doing such thing with the creation of Chenai work team for instance.
My point here is that R&D is high time consuming ergo you need to expand the amount of people working on it to avoid fall in a state of stagnation. That’s the price of R&D. They are doing things right but need to push this even more.

For me these are just excuses to avoid face the problems. If it takes time to hire quality people, it takes time but you don’t avoid the duty and you move on until you accomplish it. I don’t see your point really…

It is a bigger misconception to think to job is gonna be done by itself, again I don’t catch you…

You missed the point for what I mean. If you spend too much time delivering in a competitive market you can find your product it’s no longer demanded. What do you think these will do with timelines?

They would I’m sure if they employed a time traveler.

The reality is that they don’t know of the need for further R&D to get/improve a solution that is not quite good enough until they develop it and find it lacking.

No its quite valid as anyone who has worked on large projects can tell you. Adding more new people in the later stages of a project does not always help. Only if you have a identified need can it help. And AGAIN Maidsafe ARE hiring people to improve the situation as most in the forum know already. Development office in India due to be opened in a month or so.

And obviously you can only split into smaller groups so far. There are limits to how many people you can hire to help the project and how many (sub)teams you can have, You only hire people when you can identify a need for them.

Because you are looking for fault rather than trying to understand the dynamics of a R&D project.

And if you have read even the later dev updates you can see them progressing in this very area. Marketing team being built. Office in India about to be opened. More people being hired in Ayr

Exactly what has happened in the past. Any missed deadline ended up with abuse towards the team by those few. Money causes some to become very anti-sociable.

Anyhow complain all you want and feel free to express your disappointments and call for deadlines. Also expect others to answer you too. But if you are going to pick apart explanations of the reality of a large R&D project then at least do it right. @jlpell gave an excellent response and explained things much better than I have,

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First, as this topic is on the edge AGAIN of being counterproductive, a forum is a poor platform for precise communication, my intention is to ask simple questions and hopefully get objective answers.

to the above quote I ask: "How do you know?

As an engineer I have intimate knowledge about the R&D process. Any project is always measured in milestones within a larger vision.

Perhaps, @jlpell is accurate in the statement below, but one should not have to dig for weeks to find the most basic tool used in Project Management. A well defined project Charter.

I would like to see the following in an easy to understand format.

  • A formal project Charter that includes the User Requirements.
  • Where the User Requirements have objective Performance Specifications
  • Perfomance Specifications that have Acceptance Criteria
    • A road map that easily identifies where the project is within fulfilling the User Requirements- indicating how close the project is to completion
      Those are the foundation of any project, they must exist.
      Without those, all I can see is a mountain of work, but I can’t tell you is the team at the bottom of the mountain, halfway to the top, or planting a flag at the apex.

Those would help me to understand the progress and easily track forward movement toward the finish line.
That way the team can have in infinite amount of Alpha releases, and it won’t matter. Anyone will be able to correlate the User Requirement, with the Acceptance Criteria and know the relative position of the project. Bonus - anyone interested in any particular work bolus can offer help because the work is defined.
When the keyword “roadmap” is searched it should produce an objective result. In this case, a flowchart with the bulleted items would be worth a million words.

SolarDude

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They don’t need to employ any time traveler, just be realistic about what they wanted to release and the solutions they had in place to accomplish their goals when they came to the public arena.
Didn’t they know that they will need a kind of sharding for the network? and a kind of ledger or similar? Come on…Blank paper supports everything, right?

If they had said this, then they would have been transparent with everybody:

  • we gonna release an autonomous and decentralized network without blockchain but we need to R&D first some of the parts before will be functioning in the wild, therefore we gonna spend several years to finnish, stay tunned.

  • Instead of that we had this (2014): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FnOBlJlFpM&feature=fvwrel#t=25m19s
    Later on, the public statements have been always the same: The release is imminent (when really never was) and this is a shame, to put it mildly.

Now, to clean the mess and don’t repite the same mistakes of the past they decide to don’t give any timescales so they can work without that pressure over their shoulders. It’s ok! Now people who want to invest, develop, use the software don’t have any clue what is all this mess about. Socrates style: I know that I know nothing. Excelent public relations campaign! Bravo!

For this reason there are even community members working and helping actively in the development at this point as mav or tfa. Good point mate.

Then why you deny this can help? Your arguments are falling clearly into demagogy…

Same for you…

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