The First Iguana Release

Intro

Iguana GUI, as one of Supernet projects, has been in development for more than six months. I’m (boogieman), the product manager and project coordinator of the Development team. In this blog, named Iguana Updates, I want to describe the process, what obstacles we face as a team, and how we deal with them. As it is a personal blog, it will express a more personal view.

WTF is blockchain? WTF is Iguana?

When I joined the team, my basic financial knowledge was of little help to understand the concepts behind Iguana technology. During the first days, I devoted a lot of time to researching Iguana and other Supernet technologies. And I must admit, it was not very easy, I lacked some knowledge of crypto terminology and widely used technologies in the market. I spent enough time to get a clear understanding, and documented the first set of requirements to kick off the project. During this process, I also created Feature Narrative documents for the team. I will be uploading it on the Iguana wiki page very soon. This effort got us all working on the same page, and accelerated the onboarding of new team members.

First mistakes

Unfortunately, the group of devs who was in charge for the GUI chose another technology that made it almost impossible to fully implement the strategic vision of Supernet and core developer (jl777). After making sure that the existing code could not be reused, we decided to start from scratch. And you know what, it wasn’t so bad. I inherited the basic Iguana App feature narrative, raw wireframes, some mockups. Most importantly, I knew which way NOT to go.

The team

"Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence win championships." - Michael Jordan

By now, the team has been 100% rotated. Some guys, who just were not skilled enough to keep up with the fast and constantly changing working environment, unfortunately, left us. And it took me much time and efforts to compile a strong team. Now we are a team of six. We’ll need more team members when we start porting the GUI to different platforms and making adaptations, along with carefully nurturing Iguana features.

Together, we discovered major blockers and successfully eliminated them. Since mid-September, we’ve focused on building the app features.

To meet the deadline, which was bound to KOMODO ICO start date, the team performed a fantastic job. We eliminated some planned secondary functionality for version 0.1 and delivered the basic wallet on time and working. Since then, we’ve been doing even a greater job and making progress, which you can see in our daily commits to the the repo.

The new team is adamant and enthusiastic about this project. We share the same vision and see the final goal clearly. We are friendly and supportive of each other. We are not just delivering another piece of software for cryptocurrencies market. We want it to be the best one.

What we have now?

The purpose of the Iguana App is to provide an average user with a perfectly-crafted, secure, and reliable tool that delivers the benefits of using cryptocurrencies and new economic developments.

Though the app will have some functions for advanced users like developers, our primary target audience is the average non-expert. That’s why we pay so much attention to the UX and UI aspects of the project. We’ve already been receiving compliments on it from the community and colleagues. Later on, I’ll tell you how we went about creating a better UX solution.

The Dashboard

Initially, our goal was to make the GUI compatible only with Iguana. Later, we realized that first, we needed to provide a basic altcoin wallet. Now, basic functions like sending/receiving are implemented. The app is functioning. Because one still has to install daemons and tweak the server configuration, we still haven’t met all of the requirements to serve non-expert users.

What is next?

I’m very excited about the recent Supernet project – KOMODO and its ICO (ending November 13th 20th). Together with a KOMODO representative, we agreed on that date as our next deadline for a release.

After the decision to make the 0.1 version just altcoins daemons compatible, we fully stopped any activity on Iguana compatibility. Just after the release we switched back, and now we have it coded and being debugged.
Trying to meet the deadline we made create wallet\login flow a bit clumsy, by next release we polish it to allow both Iguana and Non-Iguana wallets.

We have a short-term plan and are working on a full product roadmap. Right now, I have about two dozen future features documented or sketched. So, for the next few months, we are going to add new essential wallet features and port them to all possible platforms so users can have native clients.

Now, the development process has become more clear, predictable and faster. We don’t experience heavy blockers any longer, and can totally focus on coding.

Regarding finances, we want to provide our stakeholders, investors, or anyone with transparent charts of our development velocity and progress.

Conclusion

Even though it was exciting for me, we’ve had some tough times during the last four or five months. I gained a lot of knowledge, and I upgraded my professional skills.

During the process, we faced different issues and solved them by finding interesting and unique solutions while having a great time. That is one of the reasons I started the Iguana Updates blog so that I could share the details with you. I see exciting times ahead, and I want to share them with others.

If you are interested in Iguana project or cryptocurrency technologies, you are welcome to join on this blog or our public channels in slack our public channels in slack.