Last Week In Red: 30-Sep-2018

Happy Tuesday everyone!

@lucindamichele here. I’d like to thank everyone who responded on-list and off to our questions about yourselves. It is a big help for us, because our goal is to make Red as responsive to your needs as possible. While our due date has passed, you can still send your responses to myself or Gregg privately, and I can append them to our sheets. Our set of questions is appended at the end of this
update.

Usernames in this update are all Github usernames.

Last week in Red saw contributions from across the spectrum from our heavy hitters. In the midst of gearing up for Ethereum’s Devcon 4 in Prague at the end of October, a diverse number of elements are getting worked on. @qxtie has added Trezor hardware support to the Red Wallet, in addition to the LedgerX hardware, a goodly chunk of work (see: here) as well as the ability to set up a batch of payments. There is also new support provided for homebrew APIs for fetching balances, for those who DIY. This is still work in progress, but we’ll write it up in detail when it’s ready. There has also been a lot of work done to add bitcoin support to the wallet, but bitcoin is messy, and we're still looking at whether it's worth including.

In Red specifically, a number of modifications have been made to work around MacOS issues, and extra attention paid to the GC/recycle facility, with fixes and tests from @dockimbel, @PeterWAWood, and @qxtie.

As for new issues, some GUI aberrations have been observed, related to the appearance of checkboxes and buttons. While not blue-screen-of-death critical, they have been flagged as bugs and will be addressed.Cross platform GUIs are hard, which is why so few do them.

In the community, some great discussion has been transpiring around the issue of Red’s mission: is it, or should it be, for “everyone” as our public-facing documentation states? And many folks have stated that while they generally don’t pay for software themselves, they WOULD be willing to shell out for a comprehensive book volume (chat is here) on the subject of Red.

Join the discussion at https://gitter.im/red/red. Also, more cool demos from @toomasv, who built a protototype interactive GUI editor, and demoed it building a little live-code app.

If you will be at Ethereum DevCon 4, or in the general area of Prague during the first week of November, hit up @GreggIrwin or @dockimbel; they will be hosting a small, informal RedCon after the main Ethereum event. We’d love for you to be there.


Those community questions, again:

1) Do you consider yourself a programmer?
2) Do you consider yourself a software engineer?
3) Do you solve business problems with software?
4) What kind of problems do you solve?
5) What other languages have you used?
6) What is your favorite language, and why?
7) Is "progammer" or "developer" in your job title?
8) Do you think Red should be for "everyone" (e.g., like Visual Basic)?
9) Do you want to use Red for real work, or just fun?
10) What software do you pay for?

Keep the Red light burning,

@lucindamichele