Development Update Apr 2021— MASQ Network

It’s been an exciting last few months for the MASQ community — with market expansion, new branding, more supported token trackers, wallets, and an exceptional MASQ website release!

Now its time to cover the development progress!

MASQ Node Software Codebase Progress

From Project tracking partner Blockspot.io

The development team has been hard at work on the codebase and numerous cards have been successfully resolved within MASQ Node, many focusing on the implementation of UPnP and auto port-forwarding — this is important as it creates a seamless User Experience (UX), to streamline the port-opening procedures on the users’ routers for MASQ Node software to operate.

There are only a few dev cards left to integrate the port-forwarding feature, so the team is anxious to achieve this extremely important internal goal!

Some other notable progress in the software:

• Adjusted gas limits in the code so it’s more flexible for user settings
• Hotfix for recover-wallets mode so users can load existing MASQ wallets to use the software
• Adjustments to code for stability when running on Apple M1 machines (future-proofing)
• Allowing configuration settings to persist in between MASQ Node running

Cloud Pipelines and Software Packaging

Our MASQ Specialist Squad contains very talented developers focusing on CICD — Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery

CICD bridges the gaps between development and operation activities and teams by enforcing automation in building, testing and deployment of applications.

Why is this important?

Since MASQ relies on parallel development in both the Test-Driven-Development on the codebase and on the User-Interface, there needs to be a way for changes to be pushed to a working software package — and then have this package built, tested and released into artefacts or executables.

That’s where this team really shines with their expertise and amazing efforts in combining all the moving parts, and create automated pipelines which compile working installers upon each code change committed to master and software GUI repos.

If reading this has your head spinning, here is the real exciting news:

MASQ Network now has working installers for Windows, Mac and Linux and they will install, run the MASQNode daemon, and GUI all for the user!

(This is a HUGE improvement in our testing versions that required early testers to run terminals and command-line windows with two parts of the software!)

UX/UI Progress

There has been a mountain of work to get the User Experience and User Interface developed — some screengrabs and video demos will be posted soon to show the amazing work of our designer!

All this work is contributing to a further advanced GUI which will be released as a Desktop app based in Electron.

Here is a draft onboarding screen for people to peek at the style!

Draft new-user onboarding screen in MASQ GEMINI

The wireframes for user onboarding to the software are complete and visual designs are being polished. With the help of another very talented Front-End Developer on-board as of this month, work has started on developing all the dashboard areas, sidebar and other visual features in React — React is a flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces.

Our browser-GUI that was initially released has also had the rebrand and will be used for testing in parallel.

A separate and very exciting article will be released further to explain the phased approach for the software (there is an easter egg in this article) which will involve some internal releases leading up to a whitelisted Public Beta.

Quality Assurance Testing

For these interested in the technical side of testing the developer work, here are footnotes from our QA testing group — courtesy of Stew QA Colonel

• Developed, tested and passed GH-370 Automap Router Survey. This was a testing tool designed to communicate with the myriad of different routers using PCP, PMP and IGDP across Windows, Mac and Linux.
• Developed, tested and passed GH-229 Dump Config. A new configuration command has been added, allowing a config-dump when Node is running. This included both sensitive data (password protected) as well as non-sensitive generic data (output if password is provided)
• Developed, tested and passed GH 234 Set Configuration Parameters. This was about implementation of set-configuration (for limited values) which happens when the Node is running
• Continued discussion about Delinquency banning.
• Continued liaising with the GUI to streamline the process for all types of users.
• Developed, tested and passed GH-381 Enable user-friendly responding in CLI for set-password. This was simply making the response better if people try to set a password more than once.
• Developed , tested and passed GH-397 PCP and PMP Router Location. This was implementation of an outside-the-protocol method for finding the local machine’s default gateway, and use it for PCP and PMP.
• Developed, tested and passed GH-243 Consume-Only Mode and — dns-servers. Quite simply — dns-servers is needed only when the Node is used as an exit Node. Nodes with — neighborhood-mode consume-only are never used as exit Nodes; therefore in this mode they should not accept the — dns-servers parameter.
• Developed, tested and passed GH-396 Correct Gas Price Limits. — Removed limits on Gas-price up to 19 digits.
• Continued work on GH-373 and GH-386. Further UPnP work and a rather large generic review of the whole CLI output.

Make sure you follow us on our active social channels for live updates, teasers, and how to get involved in our development!

Telegram https://t.me/MASQ_ai

Discord https://discord.gg/cdUsjBQrgq

Reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/MASQ/