Hello all!

Zee here! Quick update on the work that Zinc has been doing in June!

One of Zinc’s core values is to leverage technology for personal and group autonomy. This means instead of building software to lock people in we build software for interoperability, portability, and remixability.

With that in mind, I’d like to introduce our two core development initiatives: Convene and Compensated. 

Convene provides private and secure Video Workspaces for people and organizations, while  Compensated allows small teams to accept payments from multiple payment processors without having to maintain multiple computational branches, thus mitigating vendor lock-in.

Convene June 2020 Update

In June, we moved all of our Zinc meetings and pair-programming sessions to Convene. This gave us a better idea of the cost-structures, operational pain-points, usability, and security rough edges which helped Colombene, Vivek and Maxwell flush out our 1.0 milestone for Convene. (We’ve affectionately code-named 1.0 Andromeda, because as Vivek puts it: “it’s close, but yet so far”. 

In July, we resolved the following issues for Convene:

• Operator Provisions an Always-On Virtual Workspace on AWS
• Contributor Discovers our Target Personas and Their Motivations
• Always On Convene Workspaces Restart in a Nightly Maintenance Window

We also moved the following issues forward:

• Attendees see Convene Branding in Video Workspaces
• Potential Client Requests an Always-On, Small Video Workspace

If you want to host a Convene workspace on your own infrastructure; individuals are free (both as-in speech and as-in beer) to do so.  If you’re an organization, drop an email to [email protected] and we’ll work with you to find a pricing structure that meets your needs.

If you need some help figuring out how to get started, you may consider looking to the patch which added our convene-test instance.

Compensated June 2020 Update

While Compensated is useful enough for internal (and, ostensibly, external) projects, its core value proposition is making it easy for small teams to accept payments for their software or services from a variety of payment providers.  This value proposition relies pretty strongly on high-quality documentation and developer-centric tooling. 

In June, we focused on building compensated-spec, which provides a set of fixtures for Apple In-App Purchase and Stripe events. We’re exploring using Cucumber to communicate which Apple In-App Purchase events we support, with real code examples. 

We resolved one issue in June, by streamlining contributor setup so that new contributors don’t feel obligated to test against all supported Ruby versions before contributing.

We also moved the following tickets forward:

• Client Developer Rejects Unsigned Incoming Stripe Webhook Events
• Client Developer Uses Packaged Fixtures when Integrating Compensated
• Client Developer Creates Products and Prices in Stripe

Help Wanted!

Another of our core tenants is asking for help. At present, there are a few tickets that we’re struggling to figure out how to resolve. In particular, we’re not as adept at iOS bug-fixing as we wish we were; and with iOS 14 coming down the pipe; there’s a non-trivial chance that we won’t be able to get all the Moment Park apps working for iOS 14.

If you’re interested in helping out, would you be willing to pull down the Moment Park repos and attempt to build them for iOS 14 in xCode?

We also have a number of Github Issues labeled with Help Wanted across our suite of products and services which (theoretically) are a great place to get started as a new contributor! 

That’s all for this month! If you’re interested in contributing to a Zinc project, reach out to [email protected]; or peruse our list of active issues! If you get stuck, be sure to check out our guide to contributing or reach out on Discord or Twitter!

None are free until all are free.

Zee + Zinc