Hello ICON, Insight here to update the community with our progress as we kicked off a new year focusing on growing the ICON network. The last quarter was extremely busy for us as we built infrastructure automation tools to automate the setup of P-Rep nodes, held ICON events, and began a new Fellow session with 7 engineers working on ICON projects. While Insight is mainly focused on providing value from a technical perspective, we are executing a broad strategy to grow the ICON ecosystem as a whole. Here are some of the highlights.
Last year, Insight had over 1,000 talented engineers graduate from our program at any one of our 7 locations across the US and Canada. The greatest asset that we bring to ICON is our Fellows who are able to make meaningful technical contributions to the network. Last year we had 4 Fellows work on ICON projects with a combined 20 years experience between them focussing on monitoring, DoS protection, and security hardening. This year is shaping out to more than quadruple that number with 7 Fellows working on ICON projects during our first session alone.
To make sure our development is aligned with the best interests of the community we had an open suggestion period for Fellow projects, compiled all the topics into a database, and then had the foundation rank the projects for what they saw as most needed for the network. Our Fellows are now working on these high ranked projects focusing primarily on network security, host intrusion detection systems, monitoring and alerting, DoS protections, highly available P-Rep node deployments, and continuous integration testing tooling. We couldn't be more excited about our Fellows’ work as we have a strong batch of engineers hacking on ICON to develop solutions that the whole community will benefit from.
We work entirely on open source projects and as such, we are now keeping our workspace completely public where we post tutorials, document the technologies we use, keep track of publications, and manage our projects. Check it out as we continually make updates going forward. We use a tool called Notion that we are encouraging other teams to start using for collaboration. We also made a public space for P-Reps that we are hoping can serve as an additional area for teams to collaborate keeping track of documentation, development issues, and initiatives more openly alongside the existing icon.community.
Being involved with the community is an important part of being a P-Rep and growing the ICON ecosystem. Last year we held an Infrastructure panel for SF Blockchain week where we had a panel of speakers discuss aspects of blockchain governance and how they relate to ICON. This year we have already hosted two ICON events for Insight Fellows where we discussed working on the network and a node deployment workshop where Fellows got nodes running on testnet. We also hosted over 10 infrastructure calls and plan to continue them on a monthly basis to coordinate efforts with the community for running advanced network topologies. And last we are making ourselves available for office hours to help new node operators get on the network with our one-click node deployment tool.
Our initial focus with ICON has been to build rock solid infrastructure that deploys via automation contributing tools that can be shared by other P-Rep teams to make the network more secure and reliable. Our initial design worked well for internal development but we soon realized that we needed something cleaner, more approachable to share our infrastructure with others. We also want to be able to quickly shift focus to supporting DApp development activities and needed a solid strategy in place before growing the codebase past 25k lines of code.
We have hence redesigned our deployment model that you can adopt in whole or in part, integrating with your existing network setup in a piecemeal fashion. We also worked out a zero downtime node rollover strategy that will allow you to reuse the same IP address when upgrading / downgrading your node from a single script / command. We hope that node operators can gain confidence in making changes to the network using these tools without worrying about missing a term and associated rewards, thereby increasing the cadence at which we can improve the network.
What’s important to note in how we build infrastructure is that we have many different consumers / goals for development. For sub P-Reps and people without node operation experience, we make solutions that are very easy to manage and deploy while for main P-Reps, the people we spend the majority of time developing features for, we need flexible tools that can integrate with their existing setups. Juggling both of these objectives is a challenge and we are confident going forward we'll be able to meet both deliverables with our new design.