Posted by Joey Krug on Augur Reddit. :
can update from the backend perspective of things. I posted an update a few weeks back here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Augur/comments/3tk233/augur_development_process/cx76oc0I just updated the TODO list on the backend with the things that have been completed since the time of the post (you can view it in the link above). I've almost gotten "implement backstop one where everyone reports on a market/event" done and then I'm going to start on "implement forking." At that point, the core protocol will be more or less completely implemented on the backend sans various polishing and bug fixes.
So then I plan to refactor the code and remove various artifacts not necessary due to the old consensus algorithms and make it overall a bit tighter, cleaner, and simpler as well as write a test suite for the new consensus algorithm to test all the backstops (everyone reporting on an event and forking). Then after that, it'll be time for security audits!
The last blog post I made was on scaling things, and scalability is going quite nicely implementation wise. There probably won't be a technical blog post from me for a while since I'm focused on implementing things at the moment. However, Ryan has been making a flow diagram of the entire system from start to finish (including all the edge cases / backstops), which I think would be something useful to post once it's finished. So that'll probably be our next post (the diagram following the creation through resolution of any given market on Augur and what that all entails in fairly plain English).
As for the front-end / graphical-user-interface I try not to give predictions or dates about it because they tend to be quite wrong (it's very hard to estimate software release dates when you're developing the software, and nigh impossible when you're estimating software built by someone else). Although I don't mind giving estimates about my software
, I estimate we'll have the first backstop implemented by the end of this week sometime and implementing forking will probably take another week or two. So I suppose the backend will be pretty much feature complete, although an ugly codebase, by Christmas! Although this doesn't really mean anything besides warm fuzzy feelings from both my and your perspectives since we can't actually see all this cool stuff yet!
For the front end, we've hired someone who used to work on InTrade's UI, and our UI will be migrating over to a more traditional (although sleek, simple, and beautiful) InTrade style UI (although a large part of this UI is already built, and there is an announcement (good news) surrounding this that should probably be made into a blog post or posted on Reddit). I honestly would not bet on it (the front end / UI beta) being done by Christmas. That said, the new UI is probably an order of magnitude better from a design (and implementation) standpoint, so we have that to look forward to, even though I see no way how it could possibly not be late at this point. I'd like to finish up this first backstop in the backend, then next week I'll write up a post on that announcement and add in some variant of the above and wrap it all up for an email update for people who don't check random reddit comment threads (presumably, most people
).
