TL;DR:
Additional delegation will enable us to immediately hire experienced engineers and developers from the Insight network to focus specifically on ICON tasks. Many of our alumni focus on software and smart contract development, DevOps, or blockchain engineering; their varied backgrounds enable us to match each project to a specialized industry expert(s).
With the resources provided to top ranked main P-Reps, we can afford to onboard new contributors and dedicate them to specific high-priority ICON tasks on a project-by-project basis. For example, we would like to expand our existing open-source in-house "Unified Blockchain" ETL pipeline (extract, transform, load) with ICON network and governance data features navigable through a public dashboard. You can check out our project wish list here, and contribute your own ideas here.
We'll choose a variety of tasks, ranging from infrastructure tooling, to dApps, to developer kits that will attract new developers and projects that will ultimately increase both use and breadth of ICON adoption. These projects will be executed under the guidance of our lead infrastructure developer Rob Cannon (@robcio) to make sure that all contributions are aligned with the ecosystem's needs, delivered as well-documented production-grade code, and ready for broader open-source deployment and contributions.
Up until now, our primary contributions to the ICON ecosystem have been related to infrastructure but we are excited to begin to shift focus into areas that will empower DApp development. We have many ideas on how we can make contributions to dApps, whether it is on the protocol layer or ways in which we can make on-boarding into ICON SDKs easier. To source the specific areas of concentration, we will be going through a process of canvassing the community for top needs along with taking requests directly from the foundation.
One of the areas we believe will have the greatest impact is building open source dApp reference implementations. Reference implementations are critical in on-boarding new developers as they are typically the first things people examine when trying to understand how to use ICON's SDK. Since we can't know what the next killer DApp is going to be, the best way we can encourage the development of new dApps is to reduce the learning curve of new developers for expressing new ideas. Our experience with node operation automation will be directly translatable to these efforts as we intend on making everything in the dApp development process as automated and configurable as possible including setting up continuous integration pipelines for testing SCOREs on multiple different networks on fully automated infrastructure. We are excited to collaborate with other teams as we endeavor to make production ready dApps on ICON as simple to develop as possible.
As the projects are executed, we will be releasing bi-weekly project updates that we hope form a continual feedback process to make sure our projects stay aligned with the goals of the community and foundation. We also will invite select members of the community and foundation to have access to our task management system so that they can give specific items that they would like to see worked on.
With increased delegation, we can commit more time to our long term efforts of building network automation and monitoring tools. Development of these tools is very labor intensive but has massive long term rewards. For the network automation tooling, we plan on supporting multiple different node configurations on each major provider. Development of each of these clouds incurs costs as each deployment is fed through a continuous integration pipeline that spins up live infrastructure and syncs nodes on testnet before running integration tests. We are also committed to running the status page in both a development and production environment and continually pushing updates based on the foundation's request. Last we will be building the full network monitoring solution, again maintaining multiple environments, allowing network operators running our monitoring tooling to view the health of their node and get in depth statistics on the status of the entire network.
Our current efforts we consider to be are major long term projects that are critical for operating a network at ICON's current and foreseeable growth. With more delegation, we can allocate more time and resources to their development again, per the guidance of the community / foundation to optimize priorities.