Radar 43

[chadwhitacre]

What are you working on this week and why?

last week

[chadwhitacre]

Roadmap (what?)

Short Term

Embarrassments:

• can't edit teams (Team Basics)
• not using immutable ids (use id as primary key instead of username gratipay.com#835)
• widgets are broken (Radar 31 #389 (comment))
• escrow imprecision (Radar 31 #389 (comment))
• no payroll! bring back take-what-you-want gratipay.com#3433
• Team and ~user pages are the same Differentiate participants and projects gratipay.com#3852

Long Term

Color code:

• red—external forces that we're under
• yellow—administration
• green—product development
• orange—marketing
• blue—capitalization

[chadwhitacre]

[rohitpaulk]

I'm considering working on gratipay/gratipay.com#3870. Do you think it's 'ready to start' @whit537?

[chadwhitacre]

@rohitpaulk Yikes! Okay ... does that help you in particular? Looks like it mostly helps Europeans, ya?

[rohitpaulk]

does that help you in particular?

Nope, it doesn't. We're relying 100% on PayPal and that seems dangerous to me - good to maintain other options, right?

Looks like it mostly helps Europeans, ya?

They're only US and Europe as of now, yes.

[chadwhitacre]

We're relying 100% on PayPal and that seems dangerous to me - good to maintain other options, right?

@rohitpaulk Yeah, definitely. If that's the motivation, another good option to pursue could be Dwolla (gratipay/gratipay.com#726): they're US-only, but we've already cleared their compliance department.

[rohitpaulk]

Aha, well yh might make sense to do that first :)

[chadwhitacre]

@rohitpaulk Whichever, I'm happy to get the ball rolling on gratipay/gratipay.com#3870.

[techtonik]

I mostly work from Windows nowadays, so my roadblock for everything is #480. Maybe I will get some hours to do something about it.

[Changaco]

Dropping by to wish a happy Republic Day to @rohitpaulk :-) (I know about it because the French president is attending this year.)

[chadwhitacre]

lol

@Changaco Why be so coy? Just ask @rohitpaulk to work on Liberapay with you, already! Sheesh! 😜

[chadwhitacre]

And a felicitous Lotus 1-2-3 Day to everyone! :-)

[Changaco]

I have no intention to do that, I'll stop posting here since I'm annoying you.

[chadwhitacre]

I'll stop posting here since I'm annoying you.

I'm pretty far from annoyed. Gratipay is in a good spot, we've got a lot of interesting stuff to work on, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it again for the first time in years. If @rohitpaulk or anyone else wants to work on Liberapay with you, that's no skin off my back. The worst-case scenario is that Liberapay manages to significantly overshadow Gratipay, in which case you may find me joining you as well. ;-)

Best of luck with the launch! :-)

!m @Changaco

[chadwhitacre]

Inbox 3(!), GitHub 1, L2 Support 0, Vendors, etc. 0.

[Changaco]

My bad for jumping to conclusions, I should have said "if I'm annoying you".

[chadwhitacre]

:-)

[chadwhitacre]

Nice-looking js MVC library: http://mithril.js.org/. Seems the best fit I've seen yet with the sort of scope for a library that we've gotten comfortable with in aspen and postgres.py.

[chadwhitacre]

Okay! With gratipay/gratipay.com#3826 completed, we've just landed the Balanced Shutdown milestone!

!m * 💃

Quite a ride since this all started ... I'd say we were pretty spot on, actually:

[W]e will have to change Gratipay in some yet-to-be-fully-understood fashion in order to survive the transition away from Balanced, and it will be hard.

😳

Seems like we could combine this news with an announcement about our new accounting system once we get through our meeting with the CPA on Thursday (#350).

[chadwhitacre]

Okay!

[chadwhitacre]

Inbox 2(!), GitHub 1, L2 Support 0, Vendors, etc. 0.

[rohitpaulk]

Dropping by to wish a happy Republic Day to @rohitpaulk

Thanks, @Changaco :)

[chadwhitacre]

Interesting development, Uphold (gratipay/gratipay.com#3870).

[chadwhitacre]

We're relying 100% on PayPal and that seems dangerous to me - good to maintain other options, right?

@rohitpaulk I think that in the long run, the best way to reduce our risk of depending too heavily on other processors is to build our own AML program (#119), so that we can participate more directly in the global financial system. I guess my view has been that PayPal is "good enough" until we can get AML done and reapproach Transpay (#417) and/or banks (e.g., Citizens). Do you think the risks with PayPal are great enough that we need an alternative sooner than we'll be able to get AML done?

Remember, too, that most of what we need as part of AML overlaps with what we need anyway in order to bring back payroll (identity verification is the biggest piece).

[chadwhitacre]

In which case, Uphold gives us a really good example of what we need to build. :-)

https://uphold.com/en/security-protection/uphold-protecting-you
https://uphold.com/en/security-protection/you-protecting-you
https://uphold.com/en/transparency
https://uphold.com/en/compliance
https://uphold.com/en/help/for-law-enforcers
https://uphold.com/en/legal/membership-agreement

[rohitpaulk]

Do you think the risks with PayPal are great enough that we need an alternative sooner than we'll be able to get AML done?

Yes, I do. PayPal could kill Gratipay, @whit537. Adding Uphold as a payout method is an order of magnitude simpler in our current scenario than getting AML done is, don't you think?

[chadwhitacre]

Adding Uphold as a payout method is an order of magnitude simpler in our current scenario than getting AML done is

Probably three or four, actually. :-P

PayPal could kill Gratipay

We have a ticket for pursuing underwriting with PayPal: #305. I guess what you're saying is that we should have an alternative in place before we push on that. Yes?

[rohitpaulk]

I guess what you're saying is that we should have an alternative in place before we push on that.

I'd want us to have an alternative after too. We're bus factor unity on PayPal - and that isn't good for business. We should have an alternative in place so that we don't end up running around chasing one if and when PayPal decides to split on us. I'd make the same case for PayPal (or any other provider who seems worthy) if Uphold was our only payout method :)

[chadwhitacre]

The limitation with both PayPal and Uphold is that users are non-transferrable. If we add Uphold today and PayPal goes sour tomorrow, we can't transparently move our PayPal users over to Uphold, we have to have everyone sign up all over again. If we hold the PII, on the other hand, we can switch from one bank to another under the hood at will.

[chadwhitacre]

!m @rohitpaulk 💃

[chadwhitacre]

We're pretty close to deciding over on #242 that you're going to be an independent contractor, yes?

[chadwhitacre]

Let's see if we can keep Estonia (#72, #438) off the critical path back to payroll.

[chadwhitacre]

Dropping down into gratipay/gratipay.com#3433 ...

[rohitpaulk]

GitHub UI changes again!

[chadwhitacre]

Continuing the march towards the masses?

[rohitpaulk]

https://github.com/blog/2097-improved-commenting-with-markdown

[aandis]

aka noob friendly.

[mattbk]

That's no way to learn markdown...#damnkids

[chadwhitacre]

I believe the children are our future. 🚼

[techtonik]

GitHub UI changes again!

At least they've added keyboard shortcuts. =)

[chadwhitacre]

@rohitpaulk *cough*payday*cough* :)

[rohitpaulk]

Oh :D On it..

[chadwhitacre]

!m @rohitpaulk :-)

[chadwhitacre]

I just turned on branch protection for finances/master.

[chadwhitacre]

Pretty thrilling to have @rohitpaulk running #485 while I'm working on something else (#390). Yay for concurrency! 💃 💃

[chadwhitacre]

@kzisme @mattbk Is #471 twitter-worthy?

[kzisme]

I believe so! Most tweets that we direct at a specific entity seem to do
very well! Links as well do well.
On Jan 28, 2016 12:53 PM, "Chad Whitacre" [email protected] wrote:

@kzisme https://github.com/kzisme @mattbk https://github.com/mattbk
Is #471 #471
twitter-worthy?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#479 (comment)
.

[chadwhitacre]

I've canceled our Xero account.

[chadwhitacre]

I get the sense that I could spend all year on things besides direct coding. We've got big governance (#72, #242) and other definitional work (#319, #430) hanging out there. Catching up on accounting is going to be a looooong journey. Marketing (#314, #441) is work. How do we feel about me spending less time on coding, @gratipay?

[chadwhitacre]

Anybody else miss the queues? Seems like that oughta be automated if it's something we want, along with kicking off the payday tickets and the monthly finances PR. A job for @gratipay-gremlin! :-)

[rohitpaulk]

How do we feel about me spending less time on coding, @gratipay?

As long as you're available for review, that is fine with me :)

[mattbk]

I miss queues, but I think they're best if automated. I think that queue list should be listed on IG though, if they are not automated.

[chadwhitacre]

"If you really want to protect your network, you really have to know your network."

—NSA TAO director

[chadwhitacre]

Email (what?)