No Charles, I'm not involved with BitShares software development.
I agree with you that a stronger review process than is currently in place now would be an important addition at some point (assuming the team uses an in-house peer review process of some sort now), but it's not clear to me the time is right for it.
A person with the skills to do the work you suggest probably won't come cheap, and it would certainly slow down momentum. It also may be difficult to insert such a person into the culture of the team.
I think we need to be very careful about mucking around with the internal process of BitShares software development. We want to be informed about status and progress and being inquisitive about it is certainly a good thing, but we also need to recognize we're not involved closely enough to make decisions that could dramatically change how the dev team functions.
We should trust those in a better position to make such calls. It's not blind trust, the dev team and their leaders have demonstrated excellent progress and generally good decisions. And as shareholders we are provided a much higher degree of access to the team, far more than all other crypto projects I know of.
Good ideas are being raised in this thread. All I'm saying is that our suggestions should be tempered by our limited, outside perspective. I'm guessing but I suspect the majority of the stakeholders do not have much if any experience in the software field.
Being on the inside and then on the outside, I suppose I have a different perspective. So far 4 million dollars has been spent and there isn't a stable client nor a clear development roadmap and testing process. I don't believe the current team is using a methodology like scrum nor have I seen any clear documentation on core pieces of technology like the consensus algorithm, titan, how the crypto is implemented, etc. Furthermore, there seems to be a family of projects all leveraging the same codebase, but I'm unclear on the relationships between them and also how this impacts developer resources.
To me rich documentation is incredibly important to all open source projects. For example, look at api.jquery.com or zeromq
http://zeromq.org/intro:read-the-manual, which I consider to be very well run projects off of a pretty minimal budget. Second, there has to be a framework for how outside developers can understand the project, its goals, and how to participate. Bitcoin has BIPs that yield a great degree of controversy, yet they still have a system for proposing and specifying new features and functionality. I'm not aware of anything like this from the bitshares team.
In the long term I agree the above would be great but In order to attract the great minds you are suggesting you need money/adoption/notoriety
The project raised over 4 million throughout its history and I was able to get Koblitz and Merkle to join ethereum prior to even a fraction of that funding. I think that good projects are able to attract great minds if the ideas are accessible and there is an emphasis placed upon collaboration. Vitalik established a wonderfully collaborative environment for people to join Ethereum, do you feel the same has been done for the developers behind bitshares?
It funny when you think about it. You have to push ahead at almost reckless speed in order to get to the point of attracting the above minds,go to slow and you become irrelevant before your ideas hit the market. The entire time trying to hang on and not make to many mistakes along the way.I don't think it has to be one coin/token/asset to rule them all but I do think their are limited spots available.
I think devshares are going to be a important part of the above process. A real playground/proving ground for devs and user's. I don't think its the complete answer but a piece of it that may help us avoid the biggest of mistakes.
What are your thoughts on devshares and how they may fit in?
It seems to be a payment mechanism for work and that's great to explore. The bigger issue is if the development team is inclusive or exclusive. Bitcoin is terribly closed to the outside world and many with great ideas from Amir Taaki to the Btcd project have been excluded from the conversation for whatever reason is floating in the core developer's head.
I think it's worth spending some time examining successful open source projects like the linux project (800 developers from 100 countries) to firefox. What have they done to attract talent and new ideas? How do they manage the community? How do they deal with different philosophies and goals? A little bit of time in reflection can yield great results.
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