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December 2021 Update
Published on December 10, 2021 by glyph

Solarpunk social hardware with Scuttlebutt


Warm greetings from the PeachCloud team! 

Now that we're back into a steady work rhythm we'll be doing our best to make these newsletter updates a monthly occurrence. Thanks to all our kind peers who have been sustaining PeachCloud on this journey. We just set an internal release date for PeachPub and it is not too far away at all. Let's jump into some updates!

News


Go-SSB

@cblgh has officially started working with the PeachCloud team this month (hooray!). He will primarily be working on improving the Go sbotcli tool, generating FFI bindings for the go-sbot code and implementing missing features where required. Considering that PeachCloud is using go-sbot as the heart of our Scuttlebutt machinery, having @cblgh onboard is a major blessing.

We had a call with @cryptix this week (author of Go-SSB) to gain a better understanding of the available features and how best to invoke them. We are now 100% confident that go-sbot has everything we need to complete PeachPub and the broader PeachCloud system. Although we will not be using FFI as part of the PeachCloud project, we are funding the generation of these bindings as a gift to the wider Scuttlebutt ecosystem.

Rusty Butts

We have decided to use the kuska-ssb library as the base of our interactions with the Go-sbot. To make writing Scuttlebutt clients and applications even easier, we will be developing a high-level API on top of kuska which we hope will be useful for other Rust developers. The beginnings of this higher-level library can be found in the golgi repo.

Scuttlebutt Documentation Sprint

@glyph and @cblgh have been taking part in the Scuttlebutt documentation sprint this week. The sprint has been hosted and facilitated by the magnificent duo of Zenna (@zelf) and Eileen (@bumbleblue), with Eileen's time being funded by the NGI Pointer grant. We have made significant progress in helping to standardise the Scuttlebutt documentation and hopefully make it easier for folx to find the information they need to get started.

SSB doc sprint thread: %onCMGZNPer0lK7SdxCxVA74eda5OEh+DHuFsn1s503c=.sha256

Progress


Our code-related work over the past month has been focused on making PeachCloud leaner and cleaner; fewer dependencies, reduced compiles times, better code organisation and improved documentation. Here's a brief summary of the technical progress we've made over the past month:

 - Route and template organisation has been refactored in peach-web
   - Also implemented a "disable auth" feature for testing purposes
 - Implemented custom errors for peach-lib and peach-oled
 - Upstream contribution to the wpa-ctrl-rs crate
 - Upstream contribution to the kuska-ssb crate
 - New library (vnstat_parse) to parse network traffic data from vnStat 
 - Started writing a high-level Rust SSB client library: golgi

What's Next


During this next month we'll be picking up the pace of work on Go and Rust Scuttlebutt code: ensuring the getSubset queries are working well in go-sbot, contributing to kuska-ssb to enable a wider set of muxrpc calls and building out the golgi library. There will also be continued refactors to improve separation of concerns in the codebase and improve compilation efficiency.

That's all for now. Thanks for reading! We'll have another update for you in approximately one month. If you're keen on finer-grained updates, you can follow our dev-diaries in the Scuttleverse. Until next time, much love from the PeachCloud team!

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