Hello ICON, Insight here to give updates to our delegation program application. Last month we released a progress update along with an additional delegation uses summary. Since then we have been executing on our core projects including infrastructure automation and node monitoring where we have a few exciting updates to report. We also have been working with our fellow program to expose new developers to the ICON network where we currently have 4 developers working on ICON related projects. Here is a brief list of our recent accomplishments and wins since last month.
One of our fellows, Haitham Ghalwash, built a custom prometheus exporter that collects block production statistics from across the network, stores them in a high performance time series database, and aggregates the metrics into a single dashboard for viewing historical behavior on a node by node basis. These dashboards are meant to compliment the existing monitor dashboard by displaying node performance metrics over time for analysis of historical behavior. Alarms will now be setup in response to metrics crossing over a prescribed threshold and can be hooked to SMS messages, telegram channels, and others means of alerting node operators of adverse conditions arising. Action response plans can be then be built in correspondence to various alarms in the event of network failures.
Another fellow, Kirill Masychev, built a continuous integration pipeline for testing DApps. For those unfamiliar with continuous integration, it is a process developers use to automatically run tests each time changes are made to the code. When testing distributed applications, these tests can be time consuming to do and require off chain infrastructure to test against. To prove out the CI testing pattern, our fellow created a continuous integration pipeline for the Daedric price oracle that combines these testing elements into an automated code pipeline. The pattern is now going to be generalized to be applicable to testing any DApp.
Perhaps our biggest win this past month was the development and releasing of our own custom code templating tool called nukikata, a fork of the most popular code templating tool in the world called cookiecutter. We made major changes in how the tool works by introducing a plugins system for custom actions along with conditionals and loops in the configuration format. Suffice it to say this is like cookiecutter on steriods. What this means for ICON is that we now have the perfect tool to build custom code starting templates for virtually anything. For instance, we plan on building a DApp template where the user is able to choose what CI testing tools they want to use or a series of 5 minute start-to-finish DApp tutorials. The possibilities are endless. There are over 4 thousand open source cookiecutters available today with many more nukikata's on the way to make smart contract development as fast and easy as possible.
And last, we recently submitted a grant proposal for performing analytics on the blockchain to uncover chain adoption statistics. During the last session, we had several Insight engineers work on components for a high performance data analytics tool suite that will be used in this proposal. With these components in place, we are now looking for additional funding through the grant program to bring on a fellow to work full time on building out the process for ICON. This will include extraction of metrics such as monthly active wallets and other types of user behavior from the blockchain to gain insights into chain adoption that can assist the community in how to best allocate resources to increase transactions. Check out our proposal and please leave any feedback on what type of analytics would be most helpful to the ecosystem.
For updates on our overarching contributions to the ecosystem, please checkout some of our updates from the past.