EthCC 2 : Hudson Jameson

hello welcome everybody hi hi all one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve thirty hi fourteen of you and the Internet nice to see all y'all today my name is Hudson Jameson I'm gonna be talking about the cat herders the cats in this slide are not actually affiliated with the cat herders in any way shape or form but they are my personal cats except for my wife who is not a cat there's some information about me if you're curious I worked at a bank now I work for the etherium Foundation and I've been involved in blockchain for a while okay so the cat herders are a group of independent developers who are coming in to kind of provide the you know the needed order to the chaos surrounding the etherium ecosystem project management and things like that so what we do is we have a group of people and like a telegram Channel and a getter channel and we have meetings where we decide what kind of things need to happen in the ecosystem from a project management perspective a lot of that has to do with the core developer meetings that are popular for you know people to look in on what's happening in ëthe 1.0 and at one point X here's an extensive list of what we want to do we're really really what's the word we're ambitious that's that's a good word thank you because we were not doing all of this yet Lane how long ago did we start two months we started two months ago so in no way in hell we're doing all this yet but this is what we want to do so it's a pretty ambitious list a lot of it has to do with project management project sourcing issue mitigation communication between projects budgeting scoping things that like you know developers come and they're like we want to build on this really really cool aetherium platform and then they make a team and it's all developers and then they all just sit around at a table and they develop all day and then they never manage themselves and they don't manage their budget and they don't manage anything about their team and they're not really social and all of them are just like really really smart but they can't handle themselves so that's what we're here for little blunt but yeah all right so here's what we're currently doing in the first two months so the Constantinople hard fork had a postponement and what we're doing is we are looking at action items from that post-mortem that was created and seeing how we can integrate those into future hard fork release processes we're also responsible for coordinating the Constantinople st. Petersburg Fork that happened last week that was a huge success we contacted a bunch of miners and some exchanges and other stakeholders in the ecosystem to make sure they were all updated so all of us could sleep soundly the night before the hard fork knowing that it would go along okay we have not been able to sleep soundly during other hard Forks unfortunately but this one was was really really well done Prague POW is an initiative that is something that people are looking at because there's a six on the network now which are like specialized hardware miners and they want to replace the hashing algorithm from ET hash to prague pal so prague pal was from an independent developer team and there's a lot of controversy around prague pal so it was decided that we need an audit to see the efficiency gains of prague pal versus Asics if they were to be built on prague pow plus if there is fair like speed between the nvidia and AMD chips it's a really dense topic so i won't go into all of it but basically the cat herders were involved in figuring out the requirements and getting the proposals and trying to raise funds for the teams that want to audit prague pal and then finally aetherium developer portal i'm less involved in that initiative but it's gonna be a really really cool thing where it's like eff hub except very much more developer focused like a good set of documentation for aetherium lane what am i missing about that yeah we kind of hope someday to live on aetherium org and be kind of an official portal that you can go to as a new or experienced aetherium developer and I think that's something we can really make a mark on with our organizational skills so I'll go through each one of these in a little more detail the Constantinople postponement post yeah um the Constantinople postponement post-mortem action items are hosted on github there's about 12 of them and they range from putting you know project management processes in place to reviewing II IPS to like looking at what we can do for further hard Forks so pretty simple stuff this one was like I just said we prepared for the upgrade really well we had a hard fork checklist that we followed which I don't think we've ever made a checklist for a hard fork which sounds like something that should have been done a long time ago so yeah we got that accomplished the product how awed it there's actually two parts of it which is kind of interesting there's the benchmarking part which is like lining up a bunch of GPUs and making sure that AMD and NVIDIA chips perform the same way in prog pal but then there's also the more abstract part of the audit where you're trying to see how long it would take someone to build a prog POW ASIC how much more efficient it would be than a GPU miner and a few other factors like that to figure out exactly if we should put this on our blockchain or not the etherium developer portal here's that here's the details on that the idea is to create a go-to place for developers of all skill levels to develop on aetherium clear documentation with like portion for dabs a portion for earth 2.0 tutorials project examples stuff like that it's I what I was first getting involved in aetherium back in 2015 and 2016 I made the etherium homestead documentation along with a lot of other contributors and that still lives online although it is very outdated but I like this because it really brings me back to that grassroots effort of us creating documentation like from a community based perspective and not just high like a big firm to do it so other tasks we're doing we are like implementing p.m.

tools and resources first within our own group and then suggesting them to other teams and other projects we are preparing processes and roadmaps for the hard fork we have a group of hard fork release managers now two of them are lucky enough to be sitting in the audience today and they are Joe DeLong Joe DeLong and fired no you're actually it's denied Minh too and there's a few other people who have volunteered from the cat herders and we're gonna start a group soon on that probably on getter and telegram and get that going so that's gonna be real exciting we've never really had planned we've never had hard Forks that have been so well planned we've gotten any kind of accolades for it so I want hard Forks that like other crypto communities can say like you guys did a really awesome job instead of why is this delayed for the fifth time VIP management and monitoring we're still in the early processes of that but we definitely want like an EIP editor more AIP editors we want people who can review the IPS this is something the cat herders might fit into but it's gonna take some time and especially rewriting AI p 1e i p1 is the basis of how all other AI PS are written and it's very not clear right now how some VIPs get processed and it's not because the IP one's a bad document necessarily it's just outdated for what we've you know come to develop and all the nuances we have in the etherium ecosystem today and i'll check my time all right so join it on the conversation we have a Gitter channel we have our website we also wow that is a long URL for the getter just look us up on google and go to the website and we have a link to get her on there and then every week we have a newsletter and blog post on the latest on the etherium cat herders thank you very much and I'll have time for a couple questions if anyone has any we have microphones and we'll bring them to you [Applause] anybody have questions it doesn't have to be cat herders related because this is my talk and I don't care oh wait microphone who would you say is working okay it's for the live stream who would you say of the release coordinators is like the most handsome the most handsome release coordinator yeah Wow all right okay so when you're looking at like doing a hard fork looks and like aesthetics are the most important part of a hard fork it's like that alone pretty much makes up most of the processes itself and why we haven't been that good in the past so a free really set the bar high for his time as release manager and we're just gonna have to see where people take it from there last question do you want to do you want a troll question or serious question serious question then troll question okay we'll finish on the troll question good serious question is there was a long list of things that we hope to do very ambitious list of things what are kind of the one or two like more concrete things that come to your mind that we should work on next but one or two more concrete things so the four items listed there are definitely the concrete things to the Prague Powe audit but I mean that's gonna be over eventually or it's gonna be on its way and we need to do weather hopefully hopefully yeah if we can get funding yeah for some reason money's scarce right now I don't know I don't follow the markets or anything but something's weird anyways so yeah the things that we need to focus on are probably the documentation stuff I think that's very understated I don't see good documentation out there or it's in very disparate places so I'd say that's the number one thing to focus on and then on to the troll question from Lane o--'s from Dean you always have a troll question Dean oh you have one there if you have a serious question go ahead oh you're scratching your nose okay go ahead what are your thoughts on Lane disappearing during one of uh theorems most while derided Twitter and reddit yes so one of the more prolific figures in the e wasum team Lane Rettig went on some kind of 10-day retreat during it was a cult 10 day cult retreat during the hard fork to meditate or something I don't understand it I don't sleep or stop thinking so I don't understand but um yeah so we should get on to him for that everyone bug him on Twitter and with that I will end my talk thank you all so much for coming and thank you to the Internet for watching [Applause]