SAFE Network Dev Update - August 9, 2018

There is no time in the safe network.

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Depends how far away you are from the corner and which street the corner is on. My new guess is 2019 (sometime)

A milestone of sorts in the parsec library too, the first pull request outside of maidsafe developers: replace BTreeSet<bool> with a much lighter enum.

"I profiled the integration test before and after and can see a ~20% reduction in the number of instructions "

Nice!

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It is. Just that its a looonnggg corner :joy::joy::joy:

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A few months is a short time to wait for alpha 3, vaults at home with routing only. Am really looking forward to it.

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Thats alpha 4 sorry

.

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I think I got my self mixed up.
But will there will be routing at home for alpha 3?

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Yes that is what alpha 3 is for. Thats the hard one to get right. Vaults at home (alpha 4) is just updating vaults for the new APIs etc.

I say “just” but that requires planning, coding, testing before it can released as alpha 4

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Really is amazing. Routing at home. Huge progress.

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I don’t post on this forum very often but I certainly do a lot of reading. To your point, I’ve also read a couple different times that Alpha 3 was around the corner after the PARSEC announcement. Now I’ve made a decision that I’m invested until the Safe Network releases. Whenever that may be. However, I’m starting to look a little foolish in front of my friends and family. Because I’m constantly giving them the wrong story about Maidsafe. Which is pushing them away from investing in the Safe Network. I feel as though there’s a small communication issue in Maidsafe. Which has forced Viv to post a few times and ‘shoot us straight’ by telling us exactly where Maidsafe stands in development. Now I understand that there have been some major breakthroughs, elaborate weekly posts, networking events/shows, and even this new plan from David to attract new developers to the network. All great things and as an investor I’m very pleased to hear. However, can all the Maidsafe team members please get on the exact same page? If it takes another 3-4 years to get to beta, so be it and just tell us that. But don’t lead us on and get many investors like myself excited just to read Viv’s milestone 2 post saying it could potentially take as long as milestone 1. Which was a couple months. Which then makes us think milestone 3 will also take a couple months. And does that even complete alpha 2 and get us to alpha 3? I don’t think so. So alpha 3 goes from “around the corner” to “hopefully 2019”. If investors have a problem with the truth they won’t invest. But they’ll respect that the team gives them the exact development status and maybe jump in when the time is right. Just a little frustration from the investor side in me. But I’m excited that the project keeps crushing and moving along!

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Let’s pump the breaks on the timeline thing because it’s been 10 weeks since PARSEC which is still technically “around the corner”. Second, although I know nothing more (and perhaps even less) than everyone posting, this project, like many good ones, are not linear and counting backwards through a time frame in a dynamic project doesn’t make sense. If there is no Alpha 3 by Christmas then maybe we should be concerned or asking questions but let’s give it a little time to come to fruition.

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We are and have regular all company meetings on specifically where we are and what is left to be done. There is a huge amount of such meetings and 100% of them have one thing in common, nobody knows the overall time to version 1 / beta etc. We do estimate amounts of work as being more or less than related amounts of work and I think that is healthy. I am not sure where we are not on the same page though from your perspective. I know I am very much an optimist and Viv is stuck with the hard choices and decisions on features versus time etc. and then executing the workload. I will write with more optimism perhaps, but we should all have the same message and hopefully very similar estimates (which in general are relative to other pieces of work).

In any case, communications are paramount and if people see us in MaidSafe as not all on the same page then it would be good to know as that is missing in our meetings and we should rectify it as a matter of urgency. So not debating with you or defending us, but really asking for the reason for saying we are not on the same page. Ofc we do encourage team members to write honestly in the forum and we do not have a company policy to only say x y or z, but encourage the individualism that the team has and we do try and protect that. Maybe that looks like we are on different pages, I am not sure, but I don’t think we are with timescales, at least I certainly hope not.

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I’m thrilled with how fast the progress is being made. Just work at your own pace and have a great time doing it. The kind of work you do, we are lucky it is even being done at all.

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Christmas of which year?

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Sorry bit long winded.

Ah the joys of Captaining a voyage off into the unknown with a bunch of us ugly mugs riding your coat tails along the way.

I don’t like to put words in anyone’s mouth but I understand where the comments come from some about mixed messaging.

But it’s perfectly understandable that it happens when you think about it and isn’t something that needs changing, maybe just more of an understanding needed from our end.

In particular as a community maybe appreciating technically the mountain you’ve climbed/still are climbing which many/most are not fully aware of and why a calming positive voice on the forum like yours is needed and in turn why this can and does drive a small number of followers nuts with the end seemingly always being around the next corner.

For the most part it as you pretty much nailed, originates almost entirely from yourself and your positivity which does naturally lead some down a path of excess expectation wrt timeframes in particular.

Superficially it can appear that there is the odd overly positive comment or hint at the roadmap/timeframes that naturally causes comments like the guys mentioned before.

Kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t type scenario. Not really something to comment on or worry about though, it’s how I think you personally should be and is probably whats needed to get everyone (the community) across the line in the end with you guys.

With respect to the comments about the Company itself I don’t see Maidsafe as having any issues being perceived as not on the same page as each other.

In fact someone made a comment a few days ago about needing a more well known CTO, it was laughable. Viv has crushed his role in the 4 years I’ve followed you guys. Qi, Fraser and now Dug are standouts in pretty much the same way and all the community facing employees are wonderfully consistent in their delivery.

Managing a communities expectations in this project is an impossible task, no one’s perfect but despite the hiccups your not just surviving but thriving so keep it up and forgive the frustration it’s just us being humans :slight_smile:

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We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction.

Bill Gates

I like this quote. It is easy to be blind sided by lack of instant progress, especially in a world where people expect stuff immediately. Some stuff just takes more time, but changes everything.

I remember thinking about how Bitcoin depended on smart phones catching on, so we can spend them with one another. Now nearly everyone has one and the likes of Tesco, Starbucks and others are using payment apps too. For the first time in decades the visa network is being cut out - 10 years ago, this would have been unimaginable.

The point is, sometimes progress feels slow while you watch it every day. Give it a few years, then look back and you see just what has been achieved.

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When you realize SAFE is and has always been a research project that tries to implement several never-done-before things at once you get the right perspective. No-one can even today say if it will succeed in the end, as envisioned, or are there forced compromises.

When the developers give timeframes they are relying on what they know. But as a necessity, the unknowns must be added to that. And this project has suffered from quite a lot of unknowns that they have been forced to learn on-the-fly.

Things would be completely different if they started the project with the goal of utilizing the parsec algorithm in creating the network :wink: Too bad such a thing did not exist.

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Well first of all, thank you for replying to me in much detail. You gave me the information I was looking for when you wrote “I know I am very much an optimist and Viv is stuck with the hard choices and decisions on features vs time etc and then executing the workload”. Which is why you’ve mentioned you felt milestone 2 would be faster than milestone 1 but then Viv notes that it may take longer. This was my reason for saying what I said. Two team members saying different things. But now I see that the team is on the same page. Maybe my personal view is that this optimism hurts more than helps. But maybe Beermenow is right by saying your optimism helps push the team and community forward. Either way, I do agree that this is a very minor thing when you look at the project as a whole. Certainly not worth the CEO’s valuable time. So I’m actually embarrassed I brought this up and I apologize for becoming a distraction.

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is the task list for milestone 2 ready in jira or will there be more to come? Cannot see any new commits yet for this one therefore woundering if still the spec is ongoing?

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Apologies if i’m alone here…

image

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