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Ended LRP - JSKitty

PIVX Labs

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Staff member
Code:
Name: LRP - JSKitty
Term: 3 Cycles
Cycle Amount: 15,000
Total Amount: 45,000
Author: JSKitty
Receiver: JSKitty
Address: DFiH7DpxYahn5Y6p91oYwRDUqCsS9PaVGu
Created: 05-06-2024
Status: Active
Vote Hash: 2e9196542a65d0e84ef116f485e48e40cd93b7a90a39d850536c75979f92b809



Hello curious PIVian or Labsian!

I'm JSKitty
😺
- Full-time Project Lead of the PIVX Labs team, and collaborator at PIVX Core.
Who is this? Click to get up-to-date on my last proposal.



This is my eighth proposal, in the form of an LRP (Labs Recurring Proposal) to renew my perpetual position in continuing to push PIVX to the next level.

I am the Project Lead of PIVX Labs, as well as a full-time developer for MyPIVXWallet.org, PIVCards and now PIVX Rewards - I manage the networking of Labs, assist in marketing efforts with both the PIVX Core marketing team and the growing Labs independent marketing team, as well as cultivating the Community Development sector of PIVX to assist small aspiring leaders or developers to build their PIVX projects to their full potential.




Incoming changes, big changes!
This proposal will be a little different, much shorter and primarily with an update on my position at PIVX Labs and the roles I undertake - if you're interested mostly in tangible developments and such, scroll past this section, it is more informational rather than report-driven.

Last month I had a spinal injury which took me out of work for a full cycle, I am still recovering and likely will be for a few months to get to my original state, the injury originates from my extremely excessive hours spent at Labs, without "jabs" intended, I probably spend the most hours working at PIVX, in which I need to drop now - this leads to my position at Labs, where it's been and where it's heading!

I am no longer able to continue my current pace of work at PIVX Labs, which has primarily been around these two, very difficult, full-time roles:


- Lead Developer of five (and counting!) Labs Projects: all of which need guidance to their development paths, require maintenance, require thorough review processes, tens of thousands of lines of code, all of which I am the primary responsible team member of, as I make the final design and architecture decisions of all said projects. The single project that I do not personally direct, only support, is PIVX.Poker.
- Project Manager: This role is all about the team, constant leadership with a dash of micro-management. It is a role difficult to explain and difficult to "show for", however, one way I can explain it: if there is nobody to give proper guidance to the direction of Labs, the purpose and goals of each individual project under Labs, and clear goal-based, data-backed team management - then nothing would get done, the reason Labs is generally incredibly fast at development, is I (with due respect and consideration) breathe behind everyone's necks to ensure what needs to be done, gets done, to proper standards and to the goals we set out to achieve in a realistic time scope.

Typically, prior to this event, my time was split around 60/40, with 60% of my time going in to Development, and 40% going in to Management, this indeed allowed me to solely make an incredible amount of progress on the projects I focused on, but slightly neglected the projects that I did not work on. For example, I am the sole developer of PIVX.Promo, no other Labs developer participated in it's development, but during the month of building it... MyPIVXWallet and PIVCards fell behind.

Thus, I am now pivoting my role, purely, to Project Manager, relinquishing my role as Lead Developer for the foreseeable future, I will be writing much less code for Labs, and instead focusing that energy in to giving the team a constant helping hand, giving them the resources they need, spreading people's skills and time to the correct places, and ensuring all "departments" (Development, Design, Marketing) are in perfect synchronicity to meet goals on-time.

As above displays, I am reducing my Budget Payment to compensate for my reduction in Time and Role undertaking at PIVX Labs.

With that out of the way, and being in a bit of pain just writing this already, I will keep this proposal's reporting short. Here's to a healthy last two quarters of 2024! 🙏 💜





What have I done in these last cycles?
The first two cycles were a complete fireworks display, with TWO new Labs Projects released, major upgrades to MyPIVXWallet, and some incredibly powerful Community Growth tools deployed, Labs become an even larger circular ecosystem thanks to the work done in said cycles.

Let's dive in to my responsibilities below.

  • MyPIVXWallet Development
Here are my own contributions to MPW during these cycles:
- Fix Payment Descriptions Regression: This fixes a bug in which Payment Request descriptions would not display.
- Fix SHIELD-related error for non-SHIELD wallets: This PR simply fixes a bug in which non-SHIELD wallets tried to perform a SHIELD function, erroring out the wallet.

- Remove the Refresh button: A simple PR removing the Refresh button from the Dashboard, largely unnecessary due to the move to fully automated synchronisation.
- Fix Governance display of Over-Allocated Proposals: Fixed a bug in which Over-Allocated proposals displayed incorrectly as Funded, now with a more dynamic and well-explained display.
- Implement Oracle in replacement of CoinGecko: The Labs Oracle price API has replaced CoinGecko, due to CoinGecko suffering many limitations and lackluster performance.

Outside of these PRs, I've reviewed a large amount of PRs and handled the Quality Control process to reduce the amount of bugs and issues making their way in to Production releases.





  • PIVCards
Spend PIV at any store, in any country, from any wallet, in total privacy.

PIVCards has primarily had under-the-hood improvements these cycles, the ones I've worked on include:
  • Admin Panel improvements (improved ability to diagnose issues, halt bugged orders, repair bad deliveries, and investigate frontend issues with dynamic hot-links).
  • Card Delivery improvements: roughly half a dozen cards from various global locations received a major delivery upgrade, some cards even come with redemption guides and links now!
  • Fee Split Programme: built and refined over the months, this system is what funds the Labs Community "pool", i.e: the fund that rewards Quality Control, PIVX Promo users, Discord Competition winners, and afford marketing finances.



  • PIVX Rewards
PIVX Rewards had a massive launch, in March, gaining 570 users in three months (570 unique SHIELD addresses!!!) and rewarding many hundreds of PIV to hundreds of members around the world.

The programme encouraged over 200 users to join the PIVX Labs Discord, many of whom will have likely filtered to the PIVX Main Discord and Socials, as well as boosting on-chain SHIELD activity.

Code-wise, PIVX Rewards has not changed a whole deal since launch, the primary work has been around:

  • Security: an incredible amount of security and anti-cheat hardening was done for PIVX Rewards, after various user attempts to exploit the platform for extra PIV, we are now incredibly confident in the platform's ability to fend off bad actors, punish exploitative users, and reward well-intentioned users additionally for their loyalty.
  • New Perks: a bunch of new Perks arrived to the platform, some are seasonal Perks (such as the Bitcoin Pizza Day Perk), some are goal-based Perks like joining the PIVX Discord, etc.
  • Improved Withdrawal process.




  • Other Stuff
There was a massive amount of additional work these few months, all around Labs, including a HUGE amount of marketing planning, platform expansions, etc: however, I am not fit enough to report on all of this at this time, I will have to reluctantly skip most of the "alt-news" of Labs for this cycle. I trust the readers of my proposal understand my condition, it is not easy to sit here writing for hours at a time, that is also why I am dropping the coding tasks, I will likely be much more stable by the end of this proposed cycle length, thus back to full reporting and management capacity.

Thank you for your trust! 🙏





What will I continue to do for the next three cycles?

Continue as Project Manager to push PIVX Labs to it's best.

My "big scope" plan for the next month, is to start bringing all Labs projects closer together in terms of Design, UX, and interoperability. PIVX Labs has a well-proven circular ecosystem, benefiting the community massively, as shown by the incredible growth in MPW userbase growth, PIVCards volume, and PIVX Rewards user counts, our usecase-based ecosystem is working as intended, I want to drive that point home.

Gven the massive scope increase the last three months, Labs now needs to shift some efforts back home in to improving our current set of projects - rather than adding new ones, as such, it's very unlikely any new projects will be joining the Labs fold these next months, I will be focusing on improving the services we presently provide.

To be specific, in these next cycles, my points of interest are:
- Guiding the launch of MPW v2.0, with the frontend nearing it's completion, the rest of this work is primarily "Glue-work", slapping the new functionalty on the new frontend, and doing a deep Quality Control polish process, estimated to launch in the next two months, perhaps the end of July - give or take.
- Launching the PIVX Labs Home website: an all-in-one Home for PIVX Labs to introduce users to both PIVX itself, and the Labs Product Ecosystem.
- Improve the way users shop using PIV by supercharging the PIVCards UX: we have the largest range available, purchasable upfront with SHIELD'ed PIV, but it's difficult to see with a single search box, we need categories, Popular Cards lists, regional card grids, and more!
- Work alongside the Design and Marketing teams of Labs and Core to optimise cross-team marketing efforts, improve growth, and capture more users for our ecosystem.
- ... various other Labs projects & MPW improvements that I cannot predict ahead of time: goals change, priorities shift, but work will always happen.



Unlike prior proposals, this proposal will stay unsubmitted for 24h, to allow time for questions and comments with my role change and anything related to my proposal.



... want to add your own ideas for us to build?
Join and let's get it done!



I, and the entire Labs team + community, thank everyone who have supported our work thus far, and allowed us to prove that we can get shit done without too much messing around - we have some fun, it's what keeps us sane and grounded, down-to-earth, but we keep our direction the same: build, and do it right.

Thanks for reviewing my proposal, now's your choice:

Purple Pill (Vote Yes) | Red Pill (Vote No)


- JSKitty
😺
🔧
 
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Are you looking into new developers to take over roles? Obviously is a small amount of people and you need to vet and trust everyone invovles.

The unfunded proposals I know has taken a hit on morale I have heard but this is how dao works and unfortunately the price cannot pay for everything.

I'd like to see recoup proposals for past months but it appears from mirelabba proposal chat this may not be worthwhile doing for some as they haven't continued work without being paid. Which is how I have always said it works. No funding no work, no role. The uncertainty isn't good.

I know you bleed purple jskitty and I hope you recover fast. You have progressed pivx on so much and I hope you continue.
 
Thanks for all the development work you've done in the past JSKitty. Sorry to have learned about your health issues, but glad to hear you are turning a problem into an opportunity and moving into a heavy bias to Project Management.

The PIVX Labs team is incredible. Everyone has my support. I am looking forward to seeing how everyone performs with this change.

Glad you bleed purple JSKitty, but please keep your health as top priority.

Let me know if I can help in any way.
 
@Gerrald
Are you looking into new developers to take over roles?
At the moment I believe Labs can continue all of it's existing projects (both maintenance and progression) without additional devs, we already have at least one to two devs per-project, and most projects were built with a good degree of self-sufficiency to run smoothly even without devs.

Our new lineup and workload spread looks like:
MPW: Duddino and Alessandro Rezzi (two primary devs) - Bread and Meerkat (design and interface implementation).
PIVCards: Luke (development) - Bread, YuurinBee and Meerkat (design and interface implementation).
PIVX Rewards: This will be delegated to Luke (development) and Bread/YuurinBee/Meerkat for design - previously, solely myself maintained this, but it is a very lightweight platform.
Labs Oracle: Luke (development) - Bread and Meerkat (design and interface implementation).

I trust Luke with our proprietary projects, since those cannot have their source shared without years of trust - while our open-source projects like MPW can be easily maintained by Duddino and Rezzi full-time (as well as community contributors and external devs), and Oracle is so light that the most amateur dev could handle it.

On that note, I will keep watch over these two months and see how the team handle the workload, I think if things are prioritised correctly, we can handle everything without any additional team funding.

The unfunded proposals I know has taken a hit on morale
Certainly, just how it goes, people have to eat (and in the recent case of a two of us with injuries, medical bills!).
 
@Eric_Stanek

🙏 The support is appreciated as always.

As long as my team can remain as-is with the people I have, I have everyone I need to fill the gaps I'm leaving, I will be putting all of my energy in to keeping the team in optimal workflows and thus keep Labs on the same path, if not, an even more efficient Labs than before, we'll see how it plays out these next months.
 
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