Engineering and Product Constraints

I think @puniaviision has focused his post on the chanlleges to product and our external partners, there is absolutely and effort to look at growing engineering resource:

  • Coop members (@tgreco @emault @afromac and @allan.g ) are rapidly coming up to speed on many of the (none solidity) aspects of the FLI products.
  • @dylan is onboarding more coop contributors to support different areas of the coops Engineering activities.
  • we have approached third party groups to manage the full process of coding a verification of some desired features within the Set protocol.
  • Set labs are advertising to recruit https://twitter.com/jobsincrypto/status/1381426848366747648?s=20
  • I think we are discussing more engineering bounties / grants to target specific activities.
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Oh awesome! This is great, thanks for the detailed response @overanalyser :slight_smile:

@overanalyser @puniaviision , I’ve been looking to get involved with some dev work in addition to the FLI experts. I think a quick way we could offload some work from the dev team is to transition the FLI parameter updates to me and/or @tgreco if he’s up for it.

That would streamline and speed up FLI maintenance and clear up at least one or two tasks for the current dev team.

That would require accessing the Index Coop multi-sig to do the parameter update transactions, which we don’t have the infra to delegate right now.

Outside of the FLI, you may find it useful to participate in the Engineering Working Group calls!

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yea! I think this post by Punia is the opening salvo of starting to get the entire Coop hive-mind on the necessary effort to expand our building (eng. & pm) abilities.

and much more can/needs to be done.

Some rough/quick questions bouncing around my brain:

  • How can we leverage Gitcoin?
  • How can we start sharing more, publicly about what is being built?
  • What high-leverage engineering bounties can we put together? How do we spread the word about those bounties to various engineering communities?
  • What resources can we look to for inspiration/guidance? Working in Public (book), Stripe’s Documentation, Yearn’s gitbook, Yearn’s Project Board , Chainlink docs, leaders at Web2 open source companies, etc…
  • How do we help Web2 engineers learn Solidity? This tweet points to some resources
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@puniaviision Thank for bringing these issues to the community in a very detailed and thoughtful post. I’ve been thinking it over the past few days along with @overanalyser’s INDEX.labs post.

I am going to ask some pointed questions and make some tough comments so I want to first acknowledge that I completely understand, emphathize, and agree with you that Index Coop is currently constrained by its Engineering resources.

I want to be a part of solving these product constraints and have a lot of questions and thoughts for clarification on your post that I would love to further discuss in the Product Working Group meeting tomorrow.

1. How can we transfer product operational responsibilities from Engineering to other teams and contributors?

I understand why this is the case for product like the Stable Yield Index (SYI) or Instrinsic Productivity for DPI as these require engineering/development effort.

It is very unclear to me why the Synthetix Debt Mirror (SMI) or sectoral indices like mine and Kiba’s proposal for a Data Economy Index (DATA) are constrained by Engineering resources.

  • Why do we need Engineering resources to launch a sectoral index like DATA or Category Winners (CWI)?**

  • Is rebalancing of the TokenSets the only Engineering resource constraint for launching and maintaining DATA and CWI? What are the other Engineering constraints for sectoral indices like DPI?**

  • @dylan Could methodologists and the Product Working Group takeover many of these responsibilities from Set Engineering or the Engineering Working Group?

2. Concerns about the Index Methodologist Program and the Product Launch Moratorium:

As an Index Coop contributor, INDEX investor, and aspiring methodologist, this is both incredibly disappointing and frustrating. With only a single external methodologist and an undefined moratorium on new product launches, it is abundantly clear to me that the Index Methodologist Program is not working as intended.

As an aspiring external methodologist, I am extremely concerned that I will not be able to participate in the Methodologist Program by building, launching, and maintaining new sectoral indices like the Data Economy Index (DATA) with the Index Cooperative.

To be clear - I am not criticizing you, Set Protocol, DeFi Pulse, or anybody else at the Index Coop. We have a fantastic community and I want to be a part of the solution so we can start launching new products again as quickly as possible.

I look forward to continuing the conversation to find a solution in the PWG meeting!

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I can’t stress this enough, 18 months is shortsighted and completely misses the problem it is supposed to solve. The number one thing that drew me to this community was the long-term thinking and only using 18 months to find the best methodologists in the world is mind-boggling.

This problem got even worse after the Set team decided to pull out all the possible engineering resources from the coop (as set by the Engineering WG Q2 OKR’s) before that 18 month period even ended.

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Following up on my post. I spoke with @dylan and @puniaviision about the post and my comment on Discord.

Here are @dylan’s comments from our Discord thread:

and…

@dylan @richard @puniaviision I would happily help kick off the expert groups and to start the process of responsibly transitioning ownership of product/index rebalances to the community.

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the Set team decided to pull out all the possible engineering resources from the coop

That is not at all an accurate description of the situation. Improvements to Index Coop products & operations continue to make up the vast majority of Set Labs’ internal engineering roadmap

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I made sure to include the word possible to acknowledge that. Removing every resource at this point is still unfeasible.

Thank you for clarifying.

I used the Ethereum Docs and CryptoZombies to get my head around the concepts and figure out what questions to ask. This helped me to write my first contract.

We’re also working on documentation for our repos that will make onboarding a bit easier.

EWG has had discussions on related content creation

I think Richard has a bounty out for a couple important ones on the bounty spreadsheet

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One of the ways we might address this problem is establishing a partnership with Raid Guild to work on new products. If we were able to get work into their pipeline we would have the confidence they are in progress and being handled as proper projects with Index Coop serving as the client.

Raid Guild is a DAO of crypto OGs and have a network with many of the roles we need support with.

Although they are also experiencing more demand than supply right now they are focused on expanding internal resources and working on ways to prioritize product work. Like staking to get projects moved up in queue.

I am currently an Apprentice with Raid Guild and getting up to speed with the CDWG at Index Coop. My passion is product development process and would be willing to push this along if it is an option we would like to explore.

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hi @puniaviision

Thank you taking the time to write the post and for shedding some light on the engineering work load. Reading over the post, something I am failing to grasp here is timeline and specific tasks being worked on.

I understand there is work being done documenting a lot of the rebalancing process to enable new contributors via PWG to help out. This is great, but it was presented in the comments.

I struggle to comprehend based on current Engineering capacity how many hours we spend on occurring tasks. For example, what is engineering resource utilisation for occurring tasks like maintenance - DPI rebalancing is x days per month and not expanding the functionality of on a product that was brought to market knowing it required ongoing development.

For example, what specific engineering tasks relating to FLI are being worked on ?
Is TokenSets integrating functionality like flash loans, something not available on Compound but is on other protocols not integrated into TokenSets.

What I am trying to communicate, is I understand the pitched narrative, but knowing Set Labs was working on products in private (cough FLI) without sharing them with Index Coop - I want deeper insight into what specific things are being worked on.

Naturally, this is a huge blind spot for Index Coop and the DAO community is reliant on external Set Labs communications for updates.

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Would it be okay to dig into this question a little bit?

At a thematic level, the smart contract engineering team [AFAIK] right now is concerned with infrastructure level upgrades to the FLI suite, documentation to be able to onboard the community, and any quick wins around automation.

Struggling to understand the underlying question/concern. Having our SC team regularly report their hours for the things they are working on would be significant additional overhead. Wondering if there are other things we could do here to build up trust.

Who is head of the Engineering Working Group for the Coop? Index Coop Org Chart

Pretty confident @dylan leads the EWG, but I’ll let him confirm.

If you haven’t voted on IIP-49 yet, take 1 minute to cast your vote here :point_right: Snapshot

IIP-49: DPI MetaGoverance Vote Delegation to Multisig will free up hours each week of Set engineering resources to focus on improvements that impact Coop produts.

Deadline: ~4 hours from now (11:00 am PT / 6:00 pm UTC)
INDEX needed: ~6,000 INDEX to reach quorum
Current Status: 100% FOR

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@anon10525910 Is there a easy reference to know what number of INDEX to reach quorum is? Did this reach quorum?

I voted YES on this a few days ago and in hindsight should have done more campaigning to get it to pass.

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Also voted Yes. :slight_smile:

Thanks for raising this here @anon10525910.

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the short answer is no :slightly_frowning_face: I manually calculate 5% of circulating supply and track progress for each vote. IIP-49 did surpass quorum.

Fwiw, there is a card in Engineering’s Trello board related to making quorum/progress against it more visible.

It is not in the current sprint, though I am noticing that the # of requests for this visibility is increasing

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