JTime 12th September 2018

Main points are highlighted at the end.

J [21:03]
Hi there everyone and welcome to the inaugural edition of “J Time”.
I know many of you have been asking:

J [21:03]
Is this dude just a sockpuppet account for @sidhujag or @doublesharp

_“Can *I* be a sockpuppet for @sidhujag or @doublesharp”?_

_”What the heck does J actually do at BCF/Syscoin other than hang around trolling Slack?”_
The answers to this are:
* No
* For a hefty fee
* And “It’s complicated” but I’ll try to explain
I am an employee of Blockchain Foundry, starting earlier this year. (For historical purposes, after the BMD 1.2 release and *right* at the beginning of the BMD 3.0 upgrade, as in “we didn’t even have a repo or branch for it”).

J [21:04]
Right now it’s kind of tough to say what my exact title would be as I think we are still figuring that one out. That, and I’m not much for specific titles anyway because I think corporate titles are a dog and pony show sham put on by the bourgeoisie but aaaaaaaanyway…
I’d say out of the current staff of BCF, I probably straddle the line between the development arm and the strategic arm of BCF the most — hence the nature of most of my responses here.

J [21:04]
I’ve been listed on proposals/RFPs as a whole bunch of different titles depending on the nature of things,
but to make things easiest for you guys to reference, I think either “Principal Software Engineer”, “Director of Technology” or “Leader, Janitorial Services” kind of encapsulates a little of what I’ve been doing in the last while.
Regardless of title, I have a unique insight into (and am comfortable speaking for) both the some of the workings of BCF the company,
and BCF in the context of its development team (which I currently lead/manage) and its processes (same thing here).

J [21:05]
Except for Jag, who is a rampaging wildebeest that cannot be tamed by any being, human or otherwise (edited)
As covered back when I announced this chat on Sunday/Monday, there are a couple of question sets I *won’t* be able to discuss with you, for hopefully obv reasons:
Private BCF business initiatives or otherwise secret info

Contract details that BCF has with clients

Stuff I legitimately have no idea about (although in those cases I will probably catalogue them and go back to get answers)

Anything else that would violate insider trading guidelines in North America and Europe
I’d also like to steer away from “tech support” questions re: BMD or otherwise as there’s already a #help channel for that.
Things I *do* aim to discuss today:

J [21:06]
Blockmarket 3.0 (remember that saga??!) — the untold story

J [21:06]
A bit about the freshly released Blockmarket 3.1 (.3)
Blockmarket 3.2

J [21:06]
Open sourcing in the context of BMD (bonus! My feelings on open sourcing projects in general)

J [21:06]
Open sourcing in the context of the indexer projects (thanks to @beardedmage for this one)

J [21:06]
A bit more on the whole BMW brouhaha we had here last week, likely resulting in at least one person tearing their clothes in despair (oh wait, they have a temporary ban…my bad :wink: )
Current development priorities like Pangolin, etc.

J [21:07]
Aaand obviously I will address as many of your questions around all of the above as I can.
Before we get started I wanted to say three things:
First:
Thank all of you for your patience in bearing with all of us here at BCF. I am aware the communication paradigm here between BCF and you all has been…well, rocky, to say the least.
For that I apologize on behalf of the company. This Q&A / shedding light period is intended to help that a bit from someone who carries some of the “insider knowledge” from both the business and dev perspectives and will speak to that.
Second:

J [21:07]
I want to mention that my team at BCF admires both @sebastian1234 and @keyare heavily — you guys honestly have *no idea* how much and how tirelessly they work as advocates for this community inside the BCF walls.

J [21:08]
Third
Speaking of my team… I’m nothing without the incredibly talented technologists that work alongside me here.
There are three in particular who do not tend to get a lot of attention (as they’re quieter gentlemen) but they deserve so much of it. All three of them work in varying capacities on the development group.

J [21:08]
@q is one of a couple of “right hand men” I have on my team, and by “right hand” I mean “handsomer, younger, stronger, and better”. He is an architectural ace, great developer, and amazing human being. He has been a cornerstone of the development group from well before my time here and for good reason. Also supremely good looking, which is the main criteria one should be measuring when evaluating the quality of technical resources.

J [21:09]
Rather than tell you about the superlative @Shahn here is an excerpt from an E-mail I sent to Dan many moons ago:

J [21:09]
— -
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2018 21:13:45 -0700
Subject: Shahn
From: J
To: Dan W

Did I mention how much I love this guy?

Cause I love this dude with the heat of 1000 blazing suns! What a guy.

-J
— -
J [21:09]
In addition to being an incredibly, incredibly talented coder, Shahn also moonlights as a Scrum lead / standup runner / dev-team product owner in conjunction with me. He’s one of the cultural touchstones/centers of the dev team and very involved with me on visioning and planning.
Don’t avatar shame me!!!

J [21:09]
And finally the always incredible @cortesa,

J [21:09]
the Spanish Megaman of software development. Point him at a topic, he goes to learn it and absorb it as a part of him almost instantaneously. For any problem, no matter how improbable cortesa will not only doggedly discover a solution but have a bunch of sketched sequence diagrams and suggestions for future improvements. It doesn’t matter what I pass over the fence to him, it gets done, done well, done professionally and done pragmatically. (edited)
These guys are the bedrock of BCF’s dev team, and particularly BMD (along with people like @doublesharp, who already get a lot of recognition).
Thanks again — in a more public show of admiration — to you three. It is because you are on it that I am proud to be a part of this team and this company.
Now, thanks to all of you for allowing me to indulge in that very lengthy preamble

J [21:11]
Let’s talk about BMD 3!!

J [21:11]
show of hands, who remembers the saga of Blockmarket 3.0’s delayed release?

J [21:11]
*Just kidding*, don’t show your hands, I know it’s everyone here and that it’s likely painful just dredging it up.

peekay [21:11]
Why did it take you guys so long to realize that BMW wasn’t capable of generating the proper revenue invisioned in the past? It seems amateurish to not have thought things through. What guarantees do you have that Pangolin won’t hit a similar roadblock? What is plan B if/when Chrome blocks your extension? (edited)

J [21:11]
Thank you peekay, this allows me to not talk about hurtful memories for a bit
_”Why did it take you guys so long to realize that BMW wasn’t capable of generating the proper revenue invisioned in the past? “_

I would say this is more an evolution of the analytic approach that I and others bring to the company. It’s not necessarily that BMW can’t bring that projected revenue to the company
(because if it was that, we wouldn’t even be planning on doing it ever, and the project would be shelved permanently)
_”It seems amateurish to not have thought things through.”_

This is a fair comment, and I’ll address this one a bit later — please remind me if I do not. I have no intentions of avoiding it

J [21:13]
_”What guarantees do you have that Pangolin won’t hit a similar roadblock?”_

Pangolin is a bit of a different beast than BMW with less of a development footprint and effort

J [21:14]
_”What is plan B if/when Chrome blocks your extension”_

This is being actively discussed internally at the moment. Ask me about this one in a week or two re: mitigation strategies. I’m not going to ditch on you re: it because it’s a *supremely* valid topic that I and others (@doublesharp, notably) have raised. (edited)

peekay [21:15]
Awesome. Thanks man.
Good luck

J [21:16]
The last thing we want to do is devote a bunch of dev time and find out the medium we would deliver it on cancels our ability to deliver it
*That*, to me would be just as amateurish
So with that welcome break from my having Vietnam flashbacks about BMD3
Back to BMD3
As you can tell, I share your pain about BMD3
So did the dev team
But through this we can let the healing commence
So why was this thing delayed?
The first is legal and compliance. This reason was shared with this channel at the time we encountered it, I believe

J [21:19]
Despite the channels sentiment and suspicions at the time, we were not attempting to snow everyone over. Literally the meeting we had that immediately preceded Slack being told was “lawyers say there are compliance things we need to be dealing with”
“what, why?”
etc. etc.

which was some of the cost of doing business. I won’t get into those discussions here other than assure you it was something we weren’t thrilled about finding out about, but we also want to be a professional company that operates above board.
Now, clearly that’s not the *only* reason this sucker ended up a bit behind

J [21:19]
It’s what occurred development-wise *during* legal and compliance that delayed BMD further from the release date we thought we were going to have.

keyare [21:19]
J-time could stand for Jag too just FYI. @sidhujag

J [21:19]
The first of these was the introduction of assets
As you know, assets were a completely new domain concept in Syscoin 3. The tough part about introducing a new domain concept into the platform (and this goes for most software development, platforms, or products) is that you don’t often know if you’re missing something in the design until someone starts to use what you’ve built.
This is what happened with assets — as it got built into BMD, Jag and I started discussing tweaks to the functionality and design. You have no idea how much @sidhujag labored to make assets the best and most complete realization (at the time) that it could be

J [21:21]
BMD then became somewhat of a “test bed” for how assets would be used in a “consuming product” scenario

J [21:21]
^
But I’m your sock so it’s okay
So we were attempting to manage a traditional risk in software dev life cycle management that was amplified exponentially

J [21:22]
It was more important to get assets right than it was to rush out a release and potentially compromise the integrity of our software.
As a result of this, asset specifications changed a number of times until we felt more comfortable with what we were doing. UI-wise and behavior-wise Jag and I both definitely feel that there’s still more we could do there (see the discussion in general re: offers and assets, for instance), but it was sufficient for BM3/SYS3.
Another issue contributing to delays on the BMD end, which gets into “how the sausage is made”…

due to the current setup of the codebases, a small change to the core’s methods or properties (even a method name change or a change in the number of arguments) requires an exponentially longer time to map in the UI (BMD) codebase.

J [21:23]
The seasoned software developers among you will say that seems like a weird thing. Shouldn’t it only take a couple of minutes?

J [21:23]
*I agree*.
Without getting into the technical weeds of things right at this second, that’s long been a thorn in the dev team’s side that we’re getting much closer to finally plucking out. More on this one later in our chat. (edited)
That being said, when we finally wrestled the assets thing down to the ground, we were confronted with our next dragon to slay:

J [21:24]
Deployment of the app for testing. (Note: I didn’t say actually testing, I said deployment. :slightly_smiling_face: )
Those of you who have seen the diagram for how BMD currently works know that BMD spawns up a number of different processes on start.
However (and now I will put a lot of you to sleep) it turns out that you require a particular combination of sqlite and node in order to even get the indexer and database to even *run* on Windows machines once the whole thing is compiled as a final release package.
This isn’t caught in development, because apparently rules for Electron (the framework we use to package BMD) in development are vastly different than the ones it uses for release. There are many known bugs with sqlite in a variety of node instances, none of them with actual solutions.

J [21:25]
*We* solved it mostly by a sequence of trial, error, and different approaches to spawning sub-processes in electron — eventually one of them worked. :smiley:
This process involved Q, Shahn, myself, and another developer (who I’ll talk about more in a subsequent Q&A, he’s a rugged Tarzan of a human being who actually spent half of his BMD3 time coding with a *broken hand*)
hacking small tweaks into 3 projects at the same time, making a temporary build, then firing off to some of the Windows-based devs to figure out if this actually ran…repeat x1000. Trust me, we threw a miniature party when we had that one solved.
And *then*…
Quality assurance.
So…little known(?) fact is that BMD *1.2* had a lot of bugs.
some cosmetic, some breaking, all of them largely going undetected because certain areas of the system didn’t have a lot of usage.
Now, BMD 1.2 was before my time (and in fact most of the dev team’s time) at BCF, so I want to be *super clear* here: (edited)
this statement is not to throw anyone involved with BMD 1.2 under the bus (and I’ll be saying that again later on in our chat today).

J [21:27]
It’s a massive achievement if you consider the constraints that it was constructed under.
However on actually giving the revised 3.0 system a more thorough QA treatment (all of the devs, most of the internal staff)

J [21:28]
it was apparent we had a large number of different defects that required fixing on both the BMD end and even some small things in the Syscoin protocol itself.
Again, success to me, success to the team, and success to BCF isn’t hitting an arbitrary release date with a piece of trash that barely works.

J [21:28]
This creates a bit of a dance because the promises this company made to you were important to all of us,
regardless of which ones of us had been around to make them at the time
And because then we have heroes like @sebastien1234 who deal with everyone’s anger when releases slip, when he has nothing to do with that and would move heaven and earth to help you all out if possible.
In one of the dumber oversights that I’ve had in my career
(and just today I managed to misread a period as a comma and totally confuse the poor developer who received my pull request feedback, so this is saying something),
I didn’t even factor the possibility/risk that maybe we’d need to validate that for *this* release that we’d need to validate that all the old BMD 1.2 functions actually worked as expected, since with this release there would likely be more eyes/users of the project.
Once we actually pulled everything into a more thorough “QA” process, it became quite apparent we had a lot to button up.
We would have a daily routine where @keyare would literally break the system in some way 2 minutes after receiving the build, we’d go back, fix, give him a new one, and now it took him 5 minutes to break. Repeat until we weren’t actually exploding at all
And buttoning up some stuff meant exposing that maybe *other* things weren’t working as expected.
And even post-release (*cough*aliases*cough*) we still had a number of issues.
Now, it’s possible that this story should have been told to you earlier,

J [21:33]
and some of you are likely thinking “Why am I hearing about this *now*?!?”
So I’ll give you my perspective:
BCF had made many promises about BMD’s release date and we were quite under the gun (that promise was obviously given the situation fairly ambitious, to say the least).
given the default knee-jerk reactions that I often observed when issues were exposed (read: “let me tell you how *I* would run your company/dev team/marriage” ;)),
it would have simply resulted in a lot of time spent managing conversations and expectations that none of us (dev team, executive, etc.) were in a position to have without compromising the promises we had made even further.

J [21:34]
Now, believe it or not — and I’m aware that many of you don’t, and I think you have valid reasons for not -
we/I do consider the promises we make to be important.
I run the dev team according to “The Alliance” principles by Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn. First half of the book is excellent)
https://www.amazon.ca/Alliance-Managing-Talent-Networked-Age/dp/1625275773
and that team takes the commitments we make to each other, to our users, and to our community seriously. (edited)
Without our integrity we do not have anything.
This is also one of the reasons why — since then — when you guys and girls have been asking for specific dates (aside from the ins and outs of potential insider trading issues)
that we’re (I’m) shy to do that kind of thing — lots of unknowns crop up in dev. I find it’s generally better to have a range.
So with that death march behind us,
we started discussing parts of 3.1, which you now have in your hands
The one screen to rule them all aliases approach == not a great one
And in fact we were in the middle of what should have been a simple fix and dealing with the fact that screen (you know the one if you’re a longer time user :wink: )
makes limited sense to a human being (including dumping you on an “advanced” screen by default, the complete opposite of pretty much every other software system out there)
So Andres, Shahn, Q and myself had a chat and said “screw this, let’s split all this apart for the sake of our sanity first, and hopefully to also benefit the users”

J [21:39]
To be clear, BMD from an UX experience (and I’ve alluded to this a number of times) is not entirely where we want it to be as a dev team either. But that will take time (and in fact I’m going to come back to this!)
Most other things that we threw into 3.1 were either:

J [21:40]
features requested by you through here
features requested by keyare and sebastein as people who represent the average user and don’t think it’s acceptable to have to tell people to run a 17 step process in the command line to transfer data
features that the dev team wanted because as users of the system *we* were annoyed

J [21:41]
3.2 — coming up — is a bit different
So, that diagram…I’m gonna go pull it up. Give me about one min to share it here
1_MD4lexVIp4n68QuURlE7Hw.png

So I created this (incredibly horrid looking chart) not originally for public consumption :smiley:
(I found out it was on a medium post at one point)
because I needed to make sense of the 19 different dependencies that technically go into Blockmarket.
Blockmarket’s projects use something called “submodules” in git

J [21:44]
Which are great for 9990000 IQ people like the original founders, where they go to sleep on their pillow dreaming of new and exciting algorithms

J [21:44]
But they’re also a maintenance nightmare for the merely highly intelligent (edited)
Now, I’m a big believer in actually providing user value when you make a release, and we are also planning for that.
But this release is also intended to *remove* most of these dependencies, because to Blockmarket they are architecturally unnecessary.

J [21:45]
A ha! And now I can tie this back to my earlier comment about how it *used to* take a long time to react to core changes.
A lot of the approaches taken with BMD were the best decisions for the time.
For example, the list _xxx_ methods in the core that @doublesharp added

J [21:46]
did not exist until right before the 3.0 release
This allows for us to be able to make everything a little bit simpler, our development process a little bit faster. I want to be releasing on a far more regular basis than we do. This is part of the architectural anchoring that will get us there.
Now, I’ve been talking straight for 46 minutes
Which I really appreciate
(and I will try to keep some extra time available as a result)
So I’d like to field some of your questions about this *or* about other stuff before venturing into open source discussions

J [21:49]
_(silence…perhaps I’m about to be flayed alive…)_
(Update: I’ll be here till 2:30 PM PST now)

victoratila [21:50]
So_”It seems amateurish to not have thought things through.”_

This is a fair comment, and I’ll address this one a bit later — please remind me if I do not. I have no intentions of avoiding it

J [21:50]
Ha!
Awesome.

victoratila [21:50]
:)

Stukov [21:50]
Peer Mountain partnership was announced to be directy related to blockmarket product. Is that still going on ? (edited)

J [21:51]
So_”It seems amateurish to not have thought things through.”_

When I joined the company, the focus of many of the group was very divided between
a) software development (which obviously the founders of SYS are quite familiar with)
b) the demands of running a company
When you are a freshly minted C level who also is a developer who is passionate about developing, it is a bit of an adjustment to go from being in the code every day to running the show.
(I’m getting to the answer)
In the midst of all of the rush of “we have investment”, “we have a company”, there was also “we have HR things to deal with” and “we have X setup to account for”,
*and* the promise of BMD3 at the same time as everyone is figuring out their new world.
Not a lot of time to actually look at the analytics provided by the chain.
*Also*, there was always — and I don’t think this was communicated as well as it could’ve been — a need for Pangolin to predate BMW as long as I’ve been here
Pangolin is a key pieceof BMW. And — at least from the time I’ve been here, which was end of Q1 of this year — always had been. It’s actually in some of the private design sheets.
Where one sees BMW but also the Pangolin plugin for payment
So without Pangolin, there simply isn’t BMW. Now phrasing things in such a way that it implies BMW is shelved indefinitely is a mistake.

J [21:55]
That’s our mistake. I own that one.

beardedmage [21:55]
my understanding is that Pangolin does more than BMW things, its like a gateway to interacting with any sys-based web product?
i understand the initial context for it might have been BMW, but is it true it has many use cases beyond just BMW? (edited)

J [21:56]
That is the intent, yes. It is potentially a gateway to interacting with more than just SYS as well, but we’re building it right now with SYS in mind, because that’s the protocol we believe in the most.

doublesharp [21:57]
There are also some implementations in BMD that were made based on what was available at the time that can be improved upon now

J [21:57]
@doublesharp I see you typing, but if your question is what I think it is you need to unplug the router and plug it in again

beardedmage [21:58]
awesome thanks for confirming that @J :thumbsup:

doublesharp [21:58]
And cross platform development is more complicated than many people realize

J [21:58]
“Peer Mountain partnership was announced to be directy related to blockmarket product. Is that still going on ?”

@Stukov to my knowledge, yes but don’t take this as a hard confirmation. I’ve tabled this for a followup answer to you. (edited)

James [21:59]
What happened to the “cardano like” roadmap map that was being developed?

J [21:59]
(and for those who doubt my memory for these things… @Tribe Tiribi has been waiting for one of the fixes in BMD 3.1 ever since BMD 3.0. I pinged him yesterday. :slightly_smiling_face: )

J [22:00]
@James OH MAN. That is still coming.

Stukov [22:00]
Thank you for response. My question came in regard of the delaied for the moment BMW.

beardedmage [22:00]
what’s the internal attitude towards the community building more things vs BCF having to build it all? If the community started up some meaningful projects is there any chance BCF might lend some dev power to them once vetted internally or somesuch?

Sandy [22:00]
English Forward is doing a marketplace right ? Will that be something like an english forward branded BM style product that can be accessed without downloading BMD?

J [22:01]
It’s annoying to all of us at BCF to not have something clearly referenceable both for us, for the dev team as a goalpost, and for all of you. We’ve been swamped with a lot of other stuff ATM but clearly this is an issue we need to address, at least in terms of overall priorites (but I will share more of that later in this chat).
@Sandy I can’t speak to the English Forward stuff in detail at the moment other than that BCF and EF are in the solution design phase including Jag and a Romanian rock god of software leadership who is too shy to be on Slack.

Sandy [22:02]
thanks J. Understood

J [22:02]
@beardedmage

_”what’s the internal attitude towards the community building more things vs BCF having to build it all? “_
Dude I *love* the community building things

doublesharp [22:02]
I think expecting BCF to “build it all” is unrealistic

beardedmage [22:02]
oh i agree ^^ was just curious what the internal sentiment on that was

J [22:03]
When @daltonism showed off his syshub-ish stuff a bunch of the team was like “This is amazing!!”

beardedmage [22:03]
so when i take over building lots of things BCF dont get mad

J [22:03]
Ditto for sysplorer, etc.
The more people doing development against the protocol,
the more we can improve the protocol

beardedmage [22:03]
thats awesome! there are some smart dudes in #community-dev , i think we (the community) needs to take a more active role in that respect

J [22:03]
That to me is one of the main benefits of open source — more exposure to great minds.
Let’s put it this way

beardedmage [22:04]
id rather see BCF focus on making the protocol better/faster myself and mainstream use cases, we in the community can play w the experimental things

J [22:04]
If BMD didn’t try to do stuff with assets, we wouldn’t have known to improve the design.

James [22:04]
So seeing how revenue seems to be the main goal these days and blockmarket not the #1 priority will syscoin ever see any sort of big marketing push like the one that was suppose to come with blockmarket web?? Or is that now up to the community to fund? (edited)

J [22:04]
Imagine now that we would’ve had lots of different products exercising the protocol

beardedmage [22:04]
the ‘revenue may be murky’ things based on @danosphere last AMA

Sandy [22:04]
Agreed. I view BCF involvement as a seal of approval that other outside (including community) participants will rely upon. “Oh, a publicly traded CO is on that protocol, it is probably good for us, too”

doublesharp [22:04]
It’s a pretty unique opportunity to discuss changes to syscoin with jag or make the contribution yourself on github to address any shortcomings or enhancements you want to make

beardedmage [22:04]
yeah i am seeing that already re: some asset related questions I had, which is awesome
try getting that same time with Vitalik :joy:

doublesharp [22:04]
there are some dev tools available now, hopefully more soon, but more development is good

J [22:05]
@James
“So seeing how revenue seems to be the main goal these days and blockmarket not the #1 priority will syscoin ever see any sort of big marketing push like the one that was suppose to come with blockmarket web?? Or is that now up to the community to fund?”

beardedmage [22:05]
yeah i have been reading the c++ code, readme docs, super helpful to have that

J [22:05]
This is a complicated question but it deserves as good an answer I can give you without stepping on marketings toes.

doublesharp [22:05]
readme docs come from a bash script that uses the cli help that is embedded in the c++

beardedmage [22:05]
imo if there was an awesome community BMW the community could market it really effectively

J [22:05]
Tell them who wrote the bash script @doublesharp;)

beardedmage [22:05]
the worst part about all this is just no web-access

J [22:05]
I know you want to

doublesharp [22:05]
me

J [22:06]
So marketing
BCF’s first goal as a company — and the first goal of any competently run organization — should be to make revenue

victoratila [22:06]
J, do you own any $SYS?

J [22:06]
However we all feel that it is vitally important to support SYS in ways that do not conflict with BCF.
SYS is what brought us here,

diablocrypto [22:06]
So I have been a long time holder of SYS; whose public perception of “delivery” and part of the reason why it got my attention was BMW a “grannie proof” crypto version of ebay. My concern is that it that this is not the main focus of BCF for the meantime and other projects akin to pangolin and other paid projects take precedence; the public marketing perception will struggle to be built up again.

J [22:06]
SYS is what allows me to sit here today and chat with you,
SYS is a protocol we founded and we believe in.
If we do not somewhat support it with our dev efforts we are just showing the world BCF will toss things away when they are no longer shiny.
And that is not the company I will work for
Nor would my team — we came here because we believed in a vision
(And I stayed because I overheard Jag say to a developer “You can probably figure this out by reading the unit tests” :heart: :heart: :heart: :heart: )
Insider talk: I turned to Jag at that moment and said “I might finally be home”
Two different related questions:

@diablocrypto “So I have been a long time holder of SYS; whose public perception of “delivery” and part of the reason why it got my attention was BMW a “grannie proof” crypto version of ebay. My concern is that it that this is not the main focus of BCF for the meantime and other projects akin to pangolin and other paid projects take precedence; the public marketing perception will struggle to be built up again.”

a) Pangolin is coming to enable BMW.
b)Paid projects take some precedence because we need to make money to still be around.
c) While not the “main focus” for BCF I want to assure people it has not died as a focus. I was originally hired to be the architect of BMW as a greenfield project.
So even from a personal perspective I want to see it realized
More importantly though from @Tynaghtina
“I also loved the idea of sys being able to show the possibilities of crypto to non tech savvy people”
So now you’re speaking to my heart
My belief (as shared when I first met the founders)
Is that the barrier to entry to crypto is absolutely ridiculous
The chat medium we are using right now,
is easy to use but IRC predates it by many many years

beardedmage [22:11]
i cant speak for everyone but im certainly working towards a community based BMW @diablocrypto

J [22:11]
But to use IRC often requires a master’s degree
So Slack wins

kicken55 [22:12]
crypto was only using irc in 2014 when i joined up lol, things have changed there even

J [22:12]
My belief is that the first crypto company to be *truly* take off, it needs to be accessible by an average person (and rest assured, BMD is *nowhere near* accessible for, say, my parents) (edited)

beardedmage [22:12]
downloading BMD is the first obstacle :slightly_smiling_face:

kicken55 [22:12]
well late 2013 i guess i got into irc for crypto, hadnt bought anything yet though

J [22:12]
@beardedmage Don’t get me started

beardedmage [22:13]
haha

J [22:13]
Actually one of the development roadmap items (not in 3.2 but for future)
is for BMD to use auto-updating functionality like, you know, 99% of applications today

beardedmage [22:13]
yeah i think the ideal is a lite wallet, web wallet, or mobile wallet tbh tho

J [22:13]
It’s crazy that we have to download a new executable even if the only thing that changes are some UI screens

beardedmage [22:13]
block syncing is :cry:
for normal users i mean
auto updating is a great addition tho :thumbsup:

kicken55 [22:14]
you dont even wanna know how badly i fight that concept for something controlling currency

J [22:14]
See, this is where things like @sebastien1234’s advocacy coe in

beardedmage [22:14]
which concept?

kicken55 [22:14]
auto updating

J [22:14]
He was the one arguing (previously as a lone voice crying in the wilderness) for things like “hey can we have an easier import process”
“But it’s just 10 steps on the command line! That’s simple!”
J: “Uh…Seb is right…the moment we ask a user to exit to the command line when running an ostensibly standalone app we’ve kind of lost the usability battle
This is also a lot of keyare’s current role acting as a product owner of bmd
and our other stuff

beardedmage [22:16]
yeah i totally agree the battle for mainstream crypto will live and die on the basis of ‘ease of use’

J [22:16]
I really lost the answer about marketing there. lol…sorry
Getting back to it
Marketing generally prioritizes BCF over SYS. That doesn’t mean we don’t market sys (obviously we do a bit, because our medium posts from BCF reference SYS updates) but there’s also the wrestling with a clear delineation between what BCF should do and what SYS should do. Full transparency: I’m not sure even we collectively had that figured out when BCF was initially formed

beardedmage [22:18]
looking at the @BlockFoundry twitter and FB it almost feels like the inverse
:slightly_smiling_face:

Zontar [22:18]
ah, that’s right, is there any news on the foundation plan?

beardedmage [22:18]
all about Syscoin there

J [22:18]
It was most definitely an active topic of discussion, particularly because some of us have worked with or in public companies before and don’t want insider trading crap bringing down the company

Sandy [22:18]
this^^^

J [22:19]
However I think given that the only product currently out by BCF runs on Syscoin…well, clearly we’re marketing it even a bit just by the fact it runs on it.
However!
There are a lot of things we could be doing re: even the way BMD presents itself to introduce a user both to crypto *and* to introduce the user to SYS.
I’ll take that one away to talk to the team about. Ideally I think that projects that wouldn’t exist without SYS (particularly BCF ones) should serve to promote it.
2s while I have a small negotiation…
(Okay 3 PM)
(I was kind of aware we would have a *lot* to talk about today since there’s kind of a backlog :wink: )

Stukov [22:21]
Please tell us something Pangolin progress ? Not asking ETA ’cause I saw your comments about time frames, but still, will you be able to share something about before release, like alphas or screens of it ?

beardedmage [22:21]
is BCF going to start marketing its services more on the social media channels to develop more products that may use SYS? there seems to be a dearth of BCF adverstising what it can do on those channels

J [22:21]
Yes we can. Not today but eventually for sure.

beardedmage [22:21]
just a buncha posts on SYS releases or BMD releases, which are awesome as well
but i would love to see BCF announce a product on SYS that’s driven by the marketing they do to bring in buziness _on that product_

J [22:22]
I just had a meeting regarding further team resourcing for it today in fact (and this is being actively developed, and in this case “developed” means “there is code going into a repository as we speak”)

kicken55 [22:22]
dan gave us a quick screenshot of it few weeks back, dont have a link handy myself though, early days though

beardedmage [22:23]
like the docusign thing that was being kicked around in the AMA, if there was a client to announce around that along with the product itself which they will buy that’d crystlize the BCF vision for me a bit more

J [22:23]
“is BCF going to start marketing its services more on the social media channels to develop more products that may use SYS? there seems to be a dearth of BCF adverstising what it can do on those channels”

That’s a question I’ll pass to our CMO and get back to you. My gut is the answer is yes, but like myself the CMO’s previous background is also being utilized to help strengthen the business in other ways in addition to his focus. Certainly this was one of the things he did mention as part of his own marketing roadmap.

beardedmage [22:23]
awesome thanks for that @J

J [22:23]
Just checking to see if I missed any qs…
coolness
So open sourcing!!

beardedmage [22:24]
indexer!

J [22:24]
So a bunch of you have asked about BMD being open sourced. Let’s talk about this one first

beardedmage [22:24]
oh lol
that too

J [22:24]
(I promise I will get to indexer…LOL…what timing)
So I’m going to skip over business rationales for and against for now and come back to them and talk to you about what I feel you need to open source something as a professional software developer
and as a result potentially crucify myself in the process
a) you need fairly clean, well-written, and maintainable code. This allows a developer to actually understand the functionality and be able to make some alterations and play around without it taking an exhorbitantly long time to make changes. The harder it is to make changes, the less likely the developer is to bother with the source.

J [22:26]
You don’t need it to be perfect BTW — no code is unless it’s all written by machines (and sometimes even then)
@locutus Hope the field exercises went well

Zontar [22:27]
personally I don’t see the need for BMD to be open sourced, if it’s mainly a UI, the abilities it provides are already available to others as well already, they need to understand how the API works, not how BMD works

beardedmage [22:27]
how much code is in BMD btw?

J [22:27]
@beardedmage Too much.

beardedmage [22:27]
is like a few web pages wrapped in electron or something more extensive

J [22:27]
But I’ll get to that

beardedmage [22:27]
aha
hahah

beardedmage [22:27]
the more work has gone into it the more understanding i have for BCF closed sourcing it until they’ve walked out any possible revenue they can build on top of it

J [22:27]
So the other thing I feel you need to open source something is to have a clear suite of unit tests that act as specifications

beardedmage [22:27]
i mean look at other big wallets that are closed like ledger

J [22:28]
…

locutus [22:28]
@J What are you? Some kind of drone? :slightly_smiling_face: I am exhausted. But that was the whole point I guess. :wink:

J [22:28]
Bear with me here, because my next statement could light up a firestorm here but hopefully I’ve won over a tiny bit of trust w/ where I’m going
In my opinion, BMD has neither supremely well-written code (maybe 6 or 7/10, though it is getting there) and has a minimal amount of unit tests. All of the unit tests that *do* exist were introduced after the current dev team was brought on. (edited)
That is BMD only.
Core has an extensive suite of integration tests
(the upcoming syscoin-js also does, btw :slightly_smiling_face: )
So even let’s say that everyone at BCF says “let’s open source this noise”

redrace [22:30]
Man we need to log this somewhere…
Somehow

redrace [22:30]
We can publish a book and sell it on BM

J [22:30]
@redrace At the risk of sounding overly dramatic
This is logged into the hearts and minds of the current development team. Each of those members has responsibilities that map to and overlap mine
So we *all* collectively understand the situation we are in

redrace [22:31]
@J you came in the right time brother! (edited)

J [22:31]
And if I am ever not here,
the development team can operate on its own
(and in fact has, several times, thanks to Shahn,Q, and Andres)
So getting back to open sourcing
Even if everyone at BCF came to the dev team and said “let’s open source this! Who cares!” we would be against it until we could refactor the code enough that people wouldn’t go insane trying to make a PR
Also the fact that BMD is made up of literally 7 different repositories (@beardedmage I am about to talk about the indexer!! :slightly_smiling_face: ) makes PRs hard too.
Who wants to pull down seventeen dependencies and submodule mappings to make a contribution!?! Screw that, man.
Too much to understand

beardedmage [22:33]
yeah agreed

J [22:33]
So the first order of architectural business once we cleared the hurdles of
a) BMD 3
b) going insane with what existed in BMD3

doublesharp [22:34]
at some point you will check in a pointer to the wrong branch for a submodule

J [22:34]
was “Hey, we should be able to massively reduce the amount of dependencies in here and turn this into one *single* repository”
OH MY GOODNESS.
Seriously submodules.
You don’t know pain until you pull down code and you’re like “hey nothing works, why? Let me spend 15 minutes investigating something I shouldn’t have to investigate at all”

redrace [22:35]
This AMA needs to be put out there, next time we should use a different medium

J [22:35]
So the indexer stuff and open-sourcing
Then back to BMD
@redrace No prob

redrace [22:35]
This is important, exciting and fun stuff

J [22:35]
I’m glad to hear it. :slightly_smiling_face:
So I agree that the indexer projects should be open sourced
There’s nothing propietary in them,
and they are small enough that the unit tests we need to have can be added
_syscoin-js_ is the open source replacement for _syscoin-core_

kicken55 [22:36]
define, needs to be out there, you mean as in actively responding to others or just keeping history, cause if history we can copy this

J [22:36]
and _syscoin-core_ is a fork of…well, code that really isn’t that great and doesn’t apply to the knowledge we have

beardedmage [22:36]
syscoin-core is already open source i thought?

J [22:36]
LOL it is

beardedmage [22:36]
i think its outdated anyway, bitcoin moved again lol
they do it like every 9mo they change (edited)

J [22:37]
Well, and getting into technical weeds for a second

beardedmage [22:37]
https://github.com/bitcoinjs/bitcoinjs-lib is the flavor of the quarter i think
GitHub
bitcoinjs/bitcoinjs-lib
A javascript Bitcoin library for node.js and browsers. — bitcoinjs/bitcoinjs-lib

J [22:37]
the bitcoin-core js library has no discoverability,

beardedmage [22:37]
yeah its old (now) i think?

J [22:38]
it also was built to theoretically manage multiple versions simultaneously,

beardedmage [22:38]
yeah they have a weird style of abandoning libs and moving on

J [22:38]
which is a feature that makes no sense in syscoin’s context and looks to have been built because someone thought “isn’t this a neat intellectual exercise” vs “hey I’m solving someone’s problem”

beardedmage [22:38]
^^
Sys should just go its own way
these bitcoin things will always be changing and have diff concerns than sys imo
and sys is DASH based now anyway :slightly_smiling_face:

J [22:39]
I also wanted something easy to edit

sidhujag [22:39]
that one lets you work with sys in terms of signing and stuff

doublesharp [22:39]
That only works if there are contributors to the libraries

beardedmage [22:39]
so like this https://github.com/Dash-Industry-Forum/dash.js/
GitHub
Dash-Industry-Forum/dash.js
A reference client implementation for the playback of MPEG DASH via Javascript and compliant browsers. — Dash-Industry-Forum/dash.js
maybe

johnp [22:39]
Please try and keep on topic

J [22:39]
@beardedmage FOR SURE YES.

kicken55 [22:39]
wont need everything from bitcoin, but lets be honest, alot of the best dev’s are there (edited)

J [22:39]
Meaning “sys should go its own way”, but that’s my editorial stance

johnp [22:40]
Getting into specifics which is not what this is about :slightly_smiling_face:

J [22:40]
Crypto is full of people who fork a project, change some names, add 5 lines of code and found a currency
I — and we — prefer to have pride in our work, and while we build off of good thought that has come before, we cannot be afraid to forge our own paths.

beardedmage [22:40]
sry i get easily excited

J [22:41]
@kicken55 You wouldn’t know that from some of the source :wink:
But I can’t throw stones ATM either
I remember @doublesharp and I spending some time reading over the bitcoin stuff and thinking, “Wow, this runs millions of dollars!” It was very eye opening

doublesharp [22:41]
I think having a syscoin specific libraries that are better than bitcoin is attainable

J [22:41]
But as Romanian Rock God says to me all the time, “You and your pretty functions making no money while this stuff that makes you vomit makes billions…let me know which one wins :wink: “

kicken55 [22:42]
i never said all bitcoin dev’s are great

doublesharp [22:42]
there are various layers — web app code — library code — core blockchain code

J [22:42]
The key is a good balance.

kicken55 [22:42]
nor do i think syscoin will need or take everything they do, but theres definately gonna be quality stuff there that hey why not take from

J [22:42]
Anyway yes syscoin-indexer, indexer-db, and indexer-api should be OSed.
But that’s a discussion we’ll have as a group too to ensure proper licensing and attribution, blah blah blah

J [22:44]
So the last open source topic that I had: BMW :smiley:
And because I don’t want to inadvertently “drop a bomb” on anyone here, I’m going to commit to staying here a while and just working a bit later on my BCF stuff so I can handle qs to that effect
So you guys asked about open sourcing BMW
You also asked about where BMW was because the business statements say that it was being developed (edited)
My answer to these two questions is related (edited)
So since I’ve been part of the company, I’ve sat in on almost every design discussion re: BMW
Including mockups, flows, how the system would theoretically operate. There was — *long ago*, before my time — an intent that the content of BMD would form BMW.
There are several things against that, of course:
BMD doesn’t exactly look slick — we can’t dump that on the web
BMD is kind of bloated for what is ostensibility a marketplace (something Jag, marketing, and I discuss on a daily basis…also kind of related to the whole “why can’t we give assets for offers”, if you read between the lines there…)
And just speaking for me personally there are architectural approaches that would be taken with BMW that are quite different, based on an increased understanding
So BMW is in *that* phase of development.
Pangolin, as I said before, has code actively checked into a repository
it’s in that phase, the building phase
So you probably see where I’m going…even if we *were* going to open source BMW, there is nothing to open source right now. Except designs, mockups, and Redux-ish prototypes (edited)
That is part of the development phase too. Trust me, I read over the statements just like you all do, and for good reason — a false statement can take down the entire company
And there are people who work for this company who believe in us, who believe in the dreams that everyone had here, who do not deserve to be taken down by anyone’s negligence in making a false statement that could easily be preventable! (edited)
Now I’m not going to go and say “BMW is eeeeeeeeasy, just go build it yourself” because that’s not a fair statement to make either
I’ve built marketplaces before (not crypto marketplaces, but two-sided marketplaces nonetheless) and there are a lot of variables involved. And all professional level software development takes time. I can bang out a proto of very minimal functionality in a day or two, but there are many things that go into a professional system (logging, error reporting, and analytics being only three of *many*).
But I will tell this group that as long as I am around at BCF I am an advocate of doing BMW — but I also want to do BMW at a point when devoting that many people to BMW doesn’t put the company at risk if it doesn’t fly
My opinion: Ideally we should be able to do small, professionally built experiments to do market validation and proceed when we have data that says we should go.
Development — *good* development — is not trivial. But my goal here as someone who has had to architect or re-architect stuff before is to make our ecosystem a fun one,
one where you can come up with your own play on what SYS should do for you when you have a free night or two to horse around if you’re a dev, (edited)
and contribute back to the protocol and to the libraries surrounding it.
The more people who understand the protocol the better and safer SYS is
Someone asked the question (which I took down for this talk) “So do you need a massive health insurance policy on Jag?”
One of the big goals I — and we all have — with this ecosystem is to see, foster, and encourage contribution. We’re not here to centralize the protocol so that it’s obfustucated in one or two people’s heads. If Syscoin is not actually a protocol and is actually Jag Sidhu, we are in for trouble down the road.
No matter how awesome he dresses
So one of the goals written into everyone’s BCF Tours of Duty is to be contributing to the protocol, understanding it, and being able to improve upon it. That’s a *start*. That’s only BCF centric. But the main goal of my team (outside of its normal business facing objectives) is to help reduce barriers to entry. That’s what good architecture is and what good development is — helping people solve problems.
That’s why I am here — not necessarily to get rich off of spike in SYS price (but hey, nothing against those who are at all)
but because I want to solve problems and through that help people. That’s why my team is here. If that ever stops being a core value at BCF, you will not need to ask “is J still working with you guys?” because you will *know*.
Whew!!
All right dudes and dudettes, q time again! (edited)

redrace [23:01]
Thanks J your time is massively respected, will catch up tomorrow and give it the attention it deserves and will try to get this recorded in some way!

J [23:01]
Not a problem
I have 15 min or so at the moment to answer qs, and then I will take further ones down from here to answer later (I knew this one would be heavy, as I stated)

locutus [23:01]
@J So….where does J stand for and when will you remove your blanket? :slightly_smiling_face:

keyare [23:02]
I think it shoud all be on a podcast read in Morgan Freeman’s voice. Because J sounds like Morgan Freeman IRL

J [23:02]
LOL
I just turned to my wife and asked “Do you think I sound like Morgan Freeman?”
“No, why?”
“Clearly I should have married keyare”

locutus [23:02]
Ian Wijesinghe?
nah, thats more then 1 year ago

Ryan [23:05]
If you code as fast as you type, We can expect 10 bmw by next year

J [23:05]
LOL I do type fast…it’s why I have tough times pair programming
I advise most devs who want to be more productive to get really good at typing

vileda [23:06]
Are there any plans to self host the distribution of BCF software such as BMD? The average user doesn’t understand github and won’t trust sofware unless it comes from the website of the same name

J [23:07]
@vileda Yes

locutus [23:07]
I don’t think you are Keyare his type

J [23:07]
Being only available through github makes us seem like we’re a product only for devs.

johnp [23:07]
Can you just create a quick resume of the main points in a sort of
1)
2)
etc

J [23:07]
Sure
1) Johnp is cool
2) Johnp is rad
3) Johnp is not my dad

vileda [23:08]
:joy:

J [23:08]
Pretty good rhyme!
Seriously though

kicken55 [23:08]
now all i can think about is the guy in the tank “your not my dad”

J [23:08]
*Product stuff*
1) History of BMD3: we had dev stuff going on that we did want to share, but the time to share it was not right in the middle of the death march. However we should’ve shared it earlier and I hope this provides some more light into the process
2) BMW: we’ve not abandoned the project. It needs Pangolin though and so that is first up.
3) BMD3.1 summary
4) a preview of BMD 3.2 architectural direction, more to come on features later
5) Pangolin: actively developed, code in repos, more team members joining that charge fairly soon (edited)

*Open source stuff*
1) Indexer projects (syscoin-indexer, indexer-api, indexer-database) should be open-sourced; we need a couple of things to be put into play for that to happen
2) Explanation of why (non business related reasons) BMD isn’t currently on the open source spectrum
3) Explanation above for BMW as to why it hasn’t been open sourced (still in design phases)
*Team stuff*
@keyare and @sebastien1234 do a lot of unsung hero work
Dev heroes here include @q, @Shahn, @cortesa
More will be introed or discussed at future Q&As as I get approval
@doublesharp wrote a bash script for syscoin, and is writing another one right now to send Slack daily reminders of this fact

redrace [23:14]
Thanks iin advance for the pre-work @J
Will hope we get a new medium next week (edited)

J [23:14]
Yes, that’s right!! THanks for reminding me

keyare [23:15]
Syscoin-js will replace food and be better than netflix

J [23:15]
So I was asked if this was going to be a regular occurence,

Tynaghtina [23:15]
Nice, thanks for your time @J

doublesharp [23:15]
not anymore, recognition from @J is all I need

Ryan [23:15]
Can you also record this in a weekly youtube video !? Thanks haha no just kidding thanks for this tsunami of information

J [23:16]
and that answer is yes, as long as I am around at BCF we’ll do these. I want to be able to honor the commitment *you* have all made to us by honoring our commitments to you to be open, transparent, and everything else you love about SYS.
Probably weekly or bi-weekly, I’ll figure that out.
Peaceroos for now though!! Much love to all.

kicken55 [23:23]
ok there elon jr

beardedmage [23:25]
:jaglow:
i found this pillow and just had to share lol

locutus [23:28]
I never got his real name though

johnp [23:29]
Man of mystery :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:

Ryan [23:32]
He gave his identity away by announcing his role within bcf
:D

keyare [23:33]
Syscoin Jesus (Pronounced Sis Koin Hey You)
or just Hey You!