Constellation Update – Company All-Hands, Engineering, Product & TC Disrupt
Our team just got back from a two-day all hands meeting at our headquarters in San Francisco, and we wanted to share some of the highlights from our time together.
Over the course of the week we established a more organized, efficient and a cross collaboration framework which will be reflected in the output from our Marketing, Product and Engineering teams. It was a two day deep dive that allowed us all to come closer together and collectively refine the mission and values of Constellation. The overall outcome was concrete three year plan which will be reflected and communicated in our upcoming whitepaper.
Each department head presented their roadmap for the coming months. Our COO Ben Jorgensen kicked things off with an inspiring talk on the highlights of the company’s growth thus far, while outlining some of our future goals (such as increasing our community visibility with Meetups), among many others. Zac Russell (CMO), touched upon all of our marketing initiatives thus far, and highlighted some new deliverables that we’re cooking up.
Brion Hickey and Gio Valdenegro laid out the roadmap from the product side of things, sharing what we can expect as V2 of Orion gets rolled out in the coming months. Altif Brown (CCO) shared all of the incredible growth we’ve had throughout all of our communities, while Ben Diggles, our VP of Business Development, closed out Thursday by outlining all of our exciting partnership opportunities (stay tuned for more info on these!)
Wyatt wrapped up our time together by giving a mind expanding talk on Friday—hashing out the granular technical aspects underlying the grand vision of Constellation to our entire team—who was able to ask questions and gain further clarity on the scope of what we’re building.
Engineering Update
Our Schema was updated. We are now using a generic Edge type, similar to the model in popular graph processing libraries like Pregel or GraphX.
We’re migrating to more granular edges for building up bundle partitions to eliminate some redundancies. This is based off the schema GraphX uses for Pregel programs. It presents everything as an edge, including transactions as an edge between two addresses, and distinguishes checkpoint edges (introduction of new data to the graph) from validation edges (re-verification and merging of separate partitions).
The team is now working off of dev branch to stage changes properly before merging to master. They’ve also merged the download updates and fixes in preparation of dev testing, and are working on setting up separate testing environments in Kube.
A number of additions were made to our wiki, and have much more comprehensive arch diagrams in the works.
Product Update
Breakdown of recent site and Orion updates:
Added front end validation to the transaction approval process which lets transactions run more smoothly and reduces risks that a user inadvertently stakes more than DAG than intended.
We added the ability to link Medium accounts to your Orion profile, which will let you participate in bounty rewards related to marketing.
Updated transaction processing screens so that they auto-refresh to show transaction updates.
Fixed some issues that arose after Metamask released updates.
Small changes to copy and UI.
TechCrunch Disrupt Sponsorship
We have a couple of amazing new additions to our TechCrunch Disrupt panel. Erika Perez, Global Leader of IBM Blockchain Strategy & Ecosystem, and Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, CMO of Mozilla will be joining the panel alongside previously announced Jacob Mullins, Partner at Shasta Ventures, and our very own COO Ben Jorgensen. See you on September 7th at 1.30pm PST.
Jascha believes in two key principles: Find opportunities where no one else is looking; And, never fail the same way twice. It’s a methodology centered around Agile marketing practices and marketing technology. Coupled with a B.A. in Psychology from Whittier College, it’s one that’s served him well professionally and personally. Prior to joining Mozilla, Jascha most recently served as CMO for BitTorrent, CMO for Mindjet, senior vice president of marketing and customer success at Involver and he previously headed Global Marketing for Webtrends.
Erika is responsible for developing and expanding IBM’s Blockchain ecosystem across all industries to accelerate enterprise adoption of Blockchain. Working with a broad spectrum of Startups, ISV’s, GSI’s, and industry partners, Erika leads a business development team focused on building Blockchain networks based on the IBM Blockchain Platform. Key to Erika’s charter is to develop and pivot on the business models and commercial vehicles to monetize Blockchain Networks. Prior to her role in Blockchain, Erika led IBM’s Global charter for FinTech partnering with both Startups and Incumbent firms. During her tenure at IBM, Erika has had multiple sales and leadership roles including her responsibility over clients such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and PayPal.
Our TC Disrupt ticket giveaway remains open through the 27th, so if you haven’t already done so, fill out your details on Orion for a chance to win one of five GA tickets to the event.
We’re extremely excited to interact with our community on site and look forward to seeing you all there!