Shelley Testnet: Your weekly rollout rollup. Week 31: W/E 24th January 2020

Week 31: W/E 24th January 2020

Each week, this is where we’ll share a high-level summary of key achievements and what’s been going on in the Shelley Testnet program. Remember, for the very latest technical updates you can follow all the commits and pull requests in our Jormungandr GitHub.

If you are not already part of the conversation, we invite you to the Shelley Testnet & Stake Pool Best Practice Telegram group. There are over 3,700 members, and this is a great resource for anyone interested in the Incentivized Testnet. Thank you to all of our testnet users and special shoutout to our Cardano Ambassadors who continue to help community members get involved!

What’s Up
As part of the new regular release cadence, Jormungandr v.0.8.7 was released on Wednesday. It delivered minor but steady network improvements which should lead to a more stable blockchain network, and some technical debt reductions. Changes include:

  • Fixes in the network implementation to resolve stability issues; activity ongoing
  • More data points in the P2P network statistics
  • Updated dependency components for REST API
  • Reorganized the storage implementation, no changes on the database.

Detailed information can always be found in the release notes within the Jormungandr repo.

You can also find more information in our new Shelley Incentivized Testnet Development Update video series, delivered by Project Manager, Dimitris Poulopoulos. He shares this week’s highlights, released enhancements, addressed issues and fixed bugs:

We are continuing the weekly Shelley Testnet feedback survey to collect all your experiences and thoughts. These are fed back to the teams and adjustments to the code and wallet have been made based on your input. So please do continue to give us your weekly feedback - To participate in this week’s survey, please click here.

Support
Syncing and Connection issues are the majority of new issues now. Many people do get resolutions to their problems but equally many do not. The weekly Jormungandr code releases that provide minor yet regular improvements to network stability should continue to help improve the resolution we can provide to users’ issues.

New Issues - 1209
Resolved Issues - 611
Issue Backlog - 1059

Documentation & Content
Our review is still ongoing on the website content, in terms of a possible minor reordering to improve the navigation and logical structure of topics. We are also assessing any updates that may be needed. Improvements and additions to the stake pool operator documentation are continuing.

DevOps Update
This week, the DevOps team worked on deployed v0.8.7 to cluster, as well as work to refactor the reward-api to be more performant.

Community Content
Please note, these community resources are shared in good faith for you to use at your own discretion. You’ll always find ‘official’ documentation and instructions within IOHK & Cardano channels.

  • Cardanians.io wrote an article on Medium explaining the upcoming OBFT hardfork. As they say, this will be within a controlled protocol update so there is no reason for any action (or concern) from ada holders.
  • Clio.one made a graph visualizing how saturation works.
  • Rick McCracken made a video summarizing some polls he made for the Shelley Incentivized Testnet.

That’s it for now! Thanks,
The Stakepool Testing team