Just got done watching the Ethereum Core Devs Meeting on youtube. This was my first time listening in and I was amazed by how much news I got. I like to read the github EIPS and follow the progress, but sometimes it can be a bit too much to process. Definitely will continue to listen in.
After talking about development updates on all of the different clients to see if they are ready for the fork. The team got to discussing the specific date or rather the specific block number to release on the main net. So the release for Byzantium the first part of the Metropolis update is expected to be coming out on October 17th or block number 4.37 million. The reason why they chose this date was it was a nice balance between giving them more time to test and being before devcon3. It also wasn't on Friday the 13th, despite Vitalik's admiration for this date, because it is on a Friday and no one wanted to potentially work on the weekend.
Other interesting topics they discussed were:
Hive (Ethereum Client Testing)
