The State of Sia, December 2022
We’re back with the State of Sia, a monthly installment looking at development and team updates for The Sia Foundation.
We hope you’ve been well since our last update. The penultimate month of 2022 was filled with progress as we worked on major initiatives and welcomed new team members. You’ll hear about both shortly!
The first of these updates released last month and was received quite well in the community. We were incredibly pleased to see that. We want to better communicate the progress we make, and it seems like this update is shaping up to be a great first step towards that goal.
We could also print out the code and send it to you, but we’ll stick with this method for now.
Development
renterd
renterd will be our new stand-alone renter.
Significant progress continues on the new renterd. A meeting of the minds for the three developers involved resulted in an architectural overhaul of the app. renterd will now consist of three components: worker, bus, and autopilot (names could change). Here's the PR, and here’s the tl;dr:
bus is the source of the truth for the stuff, worker does the stuff, and autopilot makes all the stuff happen easily. “Stuff” in this case of course being the litany of contract formations, blockchain checking, downloads, and other work that any particular instance of Sia used for renting must do.
This architecture allows renterd to scale horizontally (important for third party use), and will let our devs work mostly independently as they each tackle a component.
renterd also saw continued work on its UI, primarily related to the new autopilot system, and designing it into the host and contracts features.
Some specific bits added to autopilot this month included:
- an initial autopilot loop
- a contractor
- a host scanner
- host filtering and scoring
- migrated the backend (object store, contract store and hostdb) over to a SQL database
- currently working on object repairs in the autopilot
- building a test suite for integration tests
For worker, contributions were made to host metrics.
hostd
hostd is the app you’ll be using to rent out your excess storage space to the Sia network.
- Refactored the financial manager
- Fixed accounting issues related to ephemeral accounts
- Refactored the MDM executor
- Added financial tracking to all income sources for RHP2 and RHP3
- Migrated financial store and contract metadata store to SQLite from BadgerDB. Tested a wallet store with SQLite.
- Added integration tests for financials
- Additional consistency tests for siad renters
skyrecover
skyrecover is a set of utilities to recover lost skyd data.
walletd
walletd will be the place to store your Siacoins.
We worked on making the jape API checker more robust. These checks prevent a common developer error where more than one HTTP response is sent.
This PR added the bitcoin coin selection and the single random draw selection algorithm to the walletd rewrite. We’re now working on simulating past transactions to see which algorithm is more efficient in terms of minimizing fees.
web
We refactored styling across the Sia design system and apps, migrating all code to Tailwind, a popular CSS framework. Tailwind’s widespread use amongst developers will make future contributions to Sia’s UI code easier. We also updated the website to be more optimized for mobile layouts (and other minor updates to content).
Team Updates
Chris joined the team in November! To say this is a great pick up for the Foundation is an understatement. Coming from Skynet Labs, Chris has been working on Sia for longer than anyone except for Sia’s co-founders Luke and David. He brings intimate knowledge of the codebase and wonderful new ideas to the team.
Here’s what Luke had to say about Chris joining the Sia Foundation.
We have another exciting addition to announce: Chris has joined the Foundation! Chris really needs no introduction; he discovered Sia in the early days of the project, and has been making enormously valuable contributions ever since, spanning nearly the entire codebase. Needless to say, I’m very pleased to have him aboard to lend his experience and passion to
renterd, Utreexo, and beyond. Welcome! :)- Luke Champine, President and Core Developer of The Sia Foundation
This is our last new hire for 2022. With three recent pick ups to add to an already excellent team, the Sia Foundation is well-positioned to rocket into 2023.
Other Foundation Happenings
Advent of Code
Advent of Code returns for 2022! AoC is a daily code challenge that can test your skills in fun and interesting ways. Join our private leaderboard using code 30280-c51e2e3e. Anyone who completes at least seven days will receive a prize (to be determined) from the Foundation!
Quarterly update
We’re working on our latest Quarterly Update, which you’ll see posted via our socials on January 1, 2023. Be sure to check out our previous updates over on our website.
These updates are an important part of the transparency that we promote here, giving our community insight into our highlighted work, financials, and future plans.
Grants Program
The Grants Program is finding its stride, allowing for community members to get funds for their Sia-related project. We recently published our first Grants Program update, detailing the first two grants that we’ve approved. This will be a new monthly post that you can check over at blog.sia.tech to find out the latest grant happenings.
We’re absolutely thrilled to be seeing new proposals dropping into the forum. If you think you’ve got a great idea to benefit the Sia ecosystem, submit your proposal over at forum.sia.tech.
That’s all folks
Thanks for another great month! As we move toward the end of the year, we’re thankful for such a wonderful community. 2023 will see great things for the Sia Foundation, but we’re not through with 2022 yet. See you next time.
Steve
steve#4381 on Discord
