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This is a technical update tracker for the Cardano (ADA) project. It aggregates commits within the last 7 days from all branches of Cardano development-related repos using local git mirrors. The same content can also be acquired from GitHub's web interface but doing so presents the following limitations:

  • You won't immediately see the latest commits. GitHub offers a network graph that renders all branch histories but you would need to navigate and hover over each node to see some commit details. Note that this view includes forks – therefore as the number of nodes increases, the graph becomes too noisy to the point that GitHub disables this feature for repos that reach a certain fork count threshold.
  • Lists of commits you may find will be scoped to a single branch. This makes it awkward to track changes from repos with lots of branches. For instance, the Byron codebase input-output-hk/cardano-sl alone has more than 340 branches which might turn active at any moment.

Syncing details can be found in the status page. Newly published repos are added automatically as they become visible on GitHub.

Goals

There is plenty of peer-reviewed research behind Cardano. What's being missed by a lot of people, however, is the enormous engineering work being done to implement these ideas. In the spirit of radical transparency, I wanted to expose more of that activity from the Cardano development groups in order to

  • help the community stay up-to-date with changes to Cardano's codebases that would be otherwise hard to track
  • present with evidence how Cardano is not a scam, vaporware, or “just a whitepaper”
  • and finally, consider Cardano as a standard bearer for good software practices

The cryptocurrency space is awash with projects that optimize for hype and are able to get by with showing little or no code at all. We must understand if code is hidden due to unsatisfactory technical merit or other reasons. If Bitcoin's source code had been kept private then the markets would have been very different today.

Why we are building Cardano: Science and Engineering expounds on principles supposedly adhered to as well by anyone building a piece of the decentralized financial system. However, these are not commonly found in other communities. As for Cardano, investing in a pure functional language, designing and verifying formal specifications, among other things, does seem like a huge price to pay at its onset but this approach pays dividends in output as each component falls into place. Consequently, the team will be able to keep velocity up over the years when other projects would slow down from crippling technical debt. The reality is that crypto moves fast but we cannot just break things.

IOHK together with its partners published a paper challenging the preconceptions about software development methodologies titled Flexible Formality: Practical Experience with Agile Formal Methods.

History

Feedback

Have some ideas or requests? You can reach out to me at [email protected] or message @cardano_updates on Twitter.