Since we're now in "countdown" to HF24, I decided to make a weekly update on progress:
We found a couple of "strictly hived" bugs this week (hived is the core blockchain code for Hive). One bug was in the new code for saving/restoring state information. The other was in the code that converts Hive in the hive.fund to HBD. Both these bugs are now fixed. 
https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hive/-/merge_requests/78/commits
https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hive/-/merge_requests/2/commits
As expected, hived code seems relatively stable at this point, although we had to make a few more changes related to hivemind code (see below), which means we will delay at least 1 week before we put out a hived release candidate and testnet, as there's still a chance that further changes might be needed (because we haven't completed enough hivemind testing yet).
This week we completed the "automated build-and-test" (what programmers call continuous integration or CI for short) for hivemind. As a reminder, hivemind is the 2nd layer app that provides social media information to sites like this one. Getting the automated test system setup took a little longer than expected, so we only started being able to do automated testing near the end of last week (we ran some tests manually in the meantime). Nonetheless, we were able to identify some bugs related to voting operations now being stored in hivemind (previously this data was stored in hived) which required us to make fixes to both hivemind and hived.
https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hive/-/merge_requests/81/commits
https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hive/-/merge_requests/82/commits
https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hive/-/merge_requests/83/commits
https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hive/-/merge_requests/84/commits
https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hivemind/-/merge_requests/33
https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hivemind/-/merge_requests/34
https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hivemind/-/merge_requests/35
https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hivemind/-/merge_requests/36
During this work, we've also identified some weak points in the current architectural design of hivemind (e.g. no input schema validation for hivemind API calls which can result in hivemind crashes, excessive generation of SQL queries via string manipulation instead of parameterized stored procedures which leads to unreported broken queries when the database schema is changed), but addressing these weak points is too big a task to tackle right now, so we'll look into these tasks after HF24 is completed.
This week we completed implementation of the updated condenser user interface for support of decentralized lists and we're beginning testing this week. We expect this work to be completed in the next few days. Here's an early screenshot of the condenser UI (subject to change):
If you'd like to get a "feel" for the work going on at any given time in the Hive repo, I recommend you use this link:
https://gitlab.syncad.com/groups/hive/-/activity
One of the first things I do everyday is visit this link and read through what's been done for the past day.
Note this activity doesn't include work in hive-related repos that are stored on other sites such as github or personal repositories. It's also not a complete indicator of work by individuals, since people who do testing or setup systems (i.e. devops) don't show up well relative to the amount of work they are doing. But it is a useful indicator for seeing what kind of work is being done.
In the upcoming week we'll be focusing on testing and fixing more bugs in hivemind. I'm still hoping we can have a testnet ready by next week, but that's being quite optimistic. At this point, it's likely we're about a week behind my original optimistic estimate of 30 days, so we'll need to accomplish a lot in the coming week to keep to that deadline.
