The Interledger Community 🌱: Ioana Chiorean

Rafiki Work Week '24

Ioana Chiorean — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 05:22:05 +0000

European summer might sound more of a vacation moment, but for our extended Rafiki team, it was the perfect moment to meet and move forward faster on different sides of this project, as there is always a last hurrah going on before each Interledger Summit. From 26 to 30 August 2024, we regrouped in Cluj-Napoca, the heart of Transylvania, Romania in our partner, Breakpoint IT’s offices. A special shout-out to our hosts for the week. Mulțumim!

We were joined by colleagues from La Cámara de la Gente, the People's Clearing House (PCH) in Mexico, from GateHub in Slovenia, and from the Jordan Payments and Clearing Company (JoPACC) - from Jordan!

It was a full week of work, split into the following subjects: Multi-tenant Rafiki, JoPACC Open Payments integration, Rafiki integration documentation, Interledger platforms, and Rafiki performance improvements. Midweek we took a half-day break and spent some time learning about each other's musical skills as a team-building activity.

Each day we started with a stand-up to check on the progress of each project, what had been accomplished, what was left to do, or if there was any team that needed help or to step up more. Of course, priorities changed a bit during the week, when some Cape Town Summit ‘24 needs had to be handled, but for sure being in the same place helped a lot with everything new that landed on the team’s plate.

JoPACC Open Payments integration

As you may have heard in the Interledger Community call, JoPACC and Interledger are collaborating to integrate Rafiki/Open Payments into the Jordanian banking systems. We've been progressing on this project, developing new payment schemes for recurring payments and Web Monetization payments. Additionally, we’ve made further advancements on the OTP (One-Time Passcode) payment consent integration, started deployment, and engaged in more discussions with our team and partners. You'll get the latest updates on this in Cape Town. Looking forward to seeing you there.

Multi-tenant Rafiki

As we continue to advance our partnership with JoPACC, development on Rafiki continues to suit the unique needs of the Jordanian financial sector. Together with Abdallah, who is the CIO at JoPACC, developers at the ILF began a design process to add multi-tenancy to Rafiki. After multiple discussions and requirement-setting, we were able to finalize a design for multi-tenant Rafiki and begin its implementation. This feature will allow a Rafiki instance to manage multiple tenants, each with their own supported currencies and Open Payments resources. This enables JoPACC’s ambitions to enable Interledger and Open Payments capabilities for multiple banks and will enable similar use cases with other partners.

PCH Integration & Documentation

One of the main goals of our work with PCH is for Rafiki to enable the cross-border flow of funds from a sender in the United States (US) to a recipient in Mexico, including those who have an account with a rural community bank. Together with five members of PCH, we discussed several outstanding requirements that the PCH x Rafiki integration has, and what could be done in Rafiki to meet those needs. Some of the key topics covered were:

Expand incoming payment processing such that regulatory requirements can be met
Define how Rafiki could handle and send know-you-customer (KYC) data for transactions in the future
Discuss how a Rafiki node could handle a status update about a transfer if the Rafiki node had already marked the transfer as complete. We had an interesting debate about the possibility of supporting these notification updates on the play wallet, https://rafiki.money.

As a result, we have a few new issues on the project board, and some PRs have already been merged in the Rafiki repo, thanks to contributions from the PCH developers. Next steps for the PCH integration are setting up the environment for production deployment, and preparations for the 2024 Interledger Summit.

Finally, one of our tech writers, Mohammed, spent time with the PCH team for a deep dive into some of the hurdles the PCH developers faced deploying Rafiki as part of the project’s larger solution architecture. This has been invaluable for us to learn how to improve and add clarity to our documentation for integrators. (Max)

Rafiki Integrator Documentation

Our first order of business was to study a comprehensive document shared with us by the PCH team about setting up their Rafiki developer sandbox. We quickly learned that when Rafiki gets integrated into a larger payments architecture, the integrator has to make decisions about the infrastructure for the solution. Some of the infrastructure decisions directly impact aspects of how Rafiki gets deployed.

For example, the steps for on-premise deployments will differ from cloud-hosted deployments. We also realized that an integrator’s deployment steps could intersperse infrastructure configuration with configuration for Rafiki.

These lessons are helping us expand our documentation for future Rafiki integrators to include more contextualized examples, including key decisions, and using specific tools for a Rafiki deployment.

Interledger Platforms

During the recent work week, the official handover of the website and documentation sites took place from Hui Jing to Sarah. The week primarily focused on upskilling and onboarding, with an emphasis on building knowledge rather than producing immediately visible results. Sarah successfully got Drupal running locally. This process was made much smoother thanks to Hui Jing's excellent documentation and her comprehensive interledger.org wiki (https://github.com/interledger/interledger.org-v4/wiki). A few updates were made, including adding new buttons to improve navigation between the technical and foundation blogs, along with some minor tweaks. The most significant progress was the initiation of the Inteledger Summit schedule design, which is now advancing into the development phase.

Performance Improvements

The team started by walking through the high-level architecture to get everyone on par. We quickly moved to adding measurements in critical points of the software, trying to load the system, and analyzing where the performance issues were found and how the system would break. A few caching opportunities and optimizations were achieved, and the team was able to increase the performance of the system in some specific areas. In the end, the plan is to continue identifying quick performance wins and in parallel discuss the overall architecture with the objective of increasing its long-term performance and scalability.

Replacing Rapyd with GateHub for the Test Wallet

Initially, our goal was to reskin the Fynbos wallet with the Test Wallet branding for hackathons and workshops, because the current Test Wallet faces rate-limiting issues with Rapyd, making it difficult to transfer play money when multiple users access it. During the work week, the focus shifted. Instead of rebranding the Fynbos wallet, we decided to focus on the Test Wallet and replace Rapyd with GateHub to avoid the rate-limiting problems. With the switch to GateHub, key wallet functions will be handled by their services:

KYC: GateHub Onboarding
Deposits/Withdrawals: GateHub Ramp

Since with GateHub we won’t run into the same rate limiting issues, we’ll also remove the custom Web Monetization wallet addresses implementation.

On Friday, we organized an impromptu speakers session, as many of our engineers will present at the Interledger Summit. It will be a full week of different events and celebrations in Cape Town, South Africa. We start it with a Hackathon that you are invited to participate in! During the week, we will be at the meetup organized by Cape Town Software Dev Group. And we close the week with the Summit, where we hope you can attend either in person or following online. It was such a great opportunity to get feedback from the group, to share best practices, and to have a small but mighty stage to rehearse, as some of the engineers will be doing this for the first time.

We closed the week with some demos where we could see the progress of all groups.

As we are open source, you can easily check our work on GitHub. If the work mentioned here inspired you, we welcome your contributions. You can join our community slack or participate in the next community call, which takes place each second wednesday of the month.

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A big mulțumesc to our hosts, BreakpointIT (Cristina & team) and our amazing colleagues that joined the work week and also wrote this blog post together. Kudos to our Engineers: Radu Popa, Hui Jing Chen, Sarah Jones, Pedro Barreto, Arpad Lengyel, Jason Bruwer, Max Kurapov, Blair Currey, Beniamin Munteanu, Bogdan Sandu, Dragos Palade,Tadej Golobic, Nathan Lie, our tech writers Melissa Henderson, Mohammed Islam, and Bradley Dow, executive assistant Erika Keresztes, project manager Matseliso Thabane, product manager Rabeb Othmani, our engineering managers Sabine Schaller, Timea Nagy, and Ioana Chiorean, and our CTO, Alex Lakatos.

We are happy to have met our friends from PCH: Roberto Carlos Cruz Villalba, Emanuel, Palestino Hernandez, Diana Laura Acosta Sebastian, Mario Antonio Ayala Ruiz, Roberto Valdovinos and from JoPACC: Abdallah Mohammad.

Web Monetization mid-year Work Week

Ioana Chiorean — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 07:52:50 +0000

As a fully remote organization, we at the ILF occasionally plan in-person work weeks to accelerate our work, align, and plan the next steps in different projects and products. One of the things that make a work-week really sing has been the presence and participation of members from the wider open source community, our volunteers or partners, who care about how technology and advocacy work can contribute to a world where digital financial inclusion is an enabler for those previously left out.

The latest work week took place at the beginning of July in the beautiful capital of Slovenia, Ljubljana. We were welcomed by our partners, GateHub, and their office felt like home for a week.  

Our focus was Web Monetization, and our agenda ranged from tech topics to the broader ILF vision. Big thank you to all our colleagues who bravely embraced traveling during an unexpected heat wave in Europe.

The meeting started with an opening discussion on the current strategy for Web Monetization. Alex Lakatos, our CTO, shared how we envision payments with the Interledger Protocol (ILP) being recognized globally. We're looking ahead to a future where Web Monetization has revolutionized remuneration on the Web. How? We believe that Web Monetization’s tech implementation should live in the browser. Yes, this might imply that the extension maybe should not exist in an ideal future. Our team is currently working on an alpha version of the extension and once available, we invite you to test it out in the upcoming weeks. So keep an eye on this space as we develop exciting new features.

For our audience, we quickly identified three personas: developers, publishers (content creators, anyone with a website), and users who make payments and donations. Which group do you belong to? Are we missing any important groups?

We started the work week by tackling the big items on day one. We continued to check where we were on the roadmap and confirmed our path for the next few months, especially regarding the first official version of our web extension. Speaking of the extension, we will include features that allow you to connect a supported wallet, authorize and control payment amounts and frequencies, and see your remaining balance.

We are also considering tools for web developers, such as embeddable Web Monetization banners and payment buttons. If you are a web dev, let us know what you'd like us to have ready to make your adoption smoother.

Led by Hui Jing, we took a deep dive into user personas and our current pathways for someone who first lands on the Web Monetization website. One challenge we identified was how to communicate the availability of Web Monetization-compatible wallets. We considered users from areas that have an available wallet provider and spoke about how to address users outside of these areas. As far as web developers are concerned, the Web Monetization API is still fairly new and we think they will try it out even if they can't receive payments yet.

By now you can see we were on fire. Jokes aside, the temperatures were super high, and in our breaks, we enjoyed ice cream and stuffed-date snacks. You read that right. And to my surprise, there was plenty of ice cream left by the end of the week. Who says no to ice cream? 

We went over the existing tools and the ecosystem from a publisher's point of view. This is one of the situations in which we would like input from you. If you are a publisher (content creator, web dev) do let us know how you feel about the current implementations, how they work for you, and what would you change or add.

As mentioned, one of the goals for the week was to be aligned. One step towards this was Sabine’s session on the ILP Stack. This was super helpful and Sabine did magic. So we will recreate the magic for you all too - Sabine is currently writing the blog post for it! Yay!   On the second day, we took time to discuss some of the processes being used for our documentation.

Melissa - our tech writer lead - led discussions on how the docs could be made clearer, identified topics that we should explain better, and examined which responsibilities lie on our side vs the wallet provider. We also discussed ways to provide recommendations to web devs and publishers about user experience to give site visitors a sense of consistency. We also had a session about the terminology we used. Are we too abstract? Do we use the same terminology consistently, from user docs to conference talks to blog posts?

Our engineers present - Radu in person and Sid remotely (yes, unfortunately, some did not make it to Ljubljana but we did our best to include them in the recording and streaming session, actively seeking their input) walked us through the technical implementation of what happens under the hood and the challenges we face. We discussed a number of different solutions and will see some of them coming in the next release.

We also tackled Dev Advocacy, which is currently more of a team effort, as we do not yet have anyone fully dedicated to this. PPK shared his vision for the web’s future and how he would like to tackle our message of “Pay the web forward” in future conferences. Among the things mentioned were where we got our message to web devs, and the trends in terms of languages and tools used. We brainstormed for possible conferences we want to be part of, content that would fit our mission and reach all our types of users, platforms to be active on, and most importantly…. swag! What is trending these days that is also useful and would fit our vision? Share your ideas with us!

We ended the second-day session with a remote session about our WM libraries and plans to migrate them to the latest version of the specification, driven by Santosh. Stay tuned for more details about this in a future Community Call deep dive! Speaking of Community Calls, we all joined the monthly community call together from Ljubljana. If you want to participate in the next community call, here is all the information you need. Join us!

The last day was a bit more diverse as we covered alternative payment models and privacy, a possible header implementation, IBAN support in Open Payments, ILPv5 ideas, and a few more. We also organized a Testing and UX feedback session hosted by Bibi, based on a survey sent before the work week. We considered ideal paths for first impressions, onboarding, usage, and discoverability.

We closed the work week with a celvebration: Alex Lakatos marked his 3rd anniversary at ILF and we all shared and tested a few types of Struklji, one of Slovenia’s traditional desserts.  

We wrote about the work we did while meeting together. Some highlights though, rose from spending time offline. From daily runs in the morning to watching some football games in the evenings.

It was a week full of discussions, sharing, and time spent as a team. We are super grateful for it. Big big thank you to everyone, I was impressed by the creativity and knowledge of our team!

PS: Wanna meet our team and attend our Summit? Grab a ticket now!

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