Un post interesant de pe reddit referitor la faza de alpha testing:
"I'm seeing lots of posts on the telegram channel asking when we can trade, what the tokenomics are, why alpha testing isn't yet open to everyone. And whilst there's a pinned FAQ explaining the process, not everyone seems to get it. Hopefully, this will explain what alpha testing is, and what it isn't ...
TLDR ("Too Long, Didn't Read" - although I hope you do) or as they used to call it when I was at school ... 'Summary':
This is about IT. But it might help you understand what alpha mining is trying to achieve.
Websites are very complicated applications. They need to run on stuff. They need to be scalable. They need logging and monitoring and a whole host of other things to support them. When a change is made, it can be horrific to roll out. And ideally no-one should notice! This web application needs to run on every device in the world (including smart mirrors - and who knew they even existed? Not me!). Oh and real users do stuff developers never expect them to do (this often results in swearing, and sometimes ... crying)
There is a team of five people doing all of this. They are doing a shedload of stuff. They want it to run on a shedload of devices. Like billions. They need people to test it. We (the eventual end users of some use cases) are the best testers. By seeing how we actually use the website, and by breaking it, the team can learn and build out the product.
This is what alpha mining is all about.
First of all, my background:
I have a background in IT development, more specifically in designing websites which sit on front of horrifically complicated, old pensions systems, with horrifically complicated and fragmented IT systems connecting the printing system (actually the five different print systems because the old systems NEVER go away ..), the processing, the call centre, the sales team. You get the idea.
I don't have a background in crypto, or ICOs. I farmed ripple xrp back in the 'computing for good' days. That's it.
I don't know anything about neural nets.
So I come at this purely from an IT perspective. I know first hand a lot of the issues surrounding 'web development'. And the first issue, really, is that 99.999% of websites are far from 'just' websites ...
It's not 'just' a website
The website is almost exactly like the tip of an iceberg. Under the water is a complicated web infrastructure providing resilience, security, data caching, routing to name a few things. Then there's the service layer - the things that process the requests from the website. Then we get to the data layer. Databases, and backups.
For all of this, we need infrastructure (computers) to run it all on. Enter the cloud. It's wonderful. You may know it in such forms as Microsoft 360, or Google drive. But ... The cloud is really made up of a lot of machines which are 'just big enough' to do what they need to do. Bigger or faster machines cost more. Why pay more than you need to?
But, what if you want to add, say, 3000 users to your system? You need more capacity in everything. Almost at once! That doesn't happen by magic. Usually there will be some kind of automated scaling process which increases capacity as required (for instance by upgrading a server to the next model). When I say automatic, obviously I don't really mean automatic. What I mean is that actual people (the dev team) have to craft code to allow the system to do this. And test that it works. Oh ... And make sure that the 'website' stays up and running.
What if the team want to change a bit of code? Well depending on what the code does, it could impact just the website (really, in this case, I do mean just the website), or maybe the service layer, or the data layer. In a lot of cases it's going to hit them all. And the team need to be able to test it then roll it out. All that infrastructure is going to be replicated (at a very much smaller scale) for testing. Likely the team will also be putting in place automated testing - the idea behind that being you can run a suite of tests 'automatically' that will give you the confidence you haven't broken anything. These tools are going to cover a lot of things - like code syntax, and basic functional tests, and will need to be able to stop a build if it fails - and report back to the team. Once again - all of that needs built, and developed (this is a very basic summary of a 'devops pipeline').
And then there's the monitoring. You need more things to 'automatically' restart other things when they fail. You need things to monitor the website usage. Who is using it? How are they using it? Are they getting errors? What about logging? All of these things log. When systems are 'live' (I mean really out there, like Amazon. Not in alpha testing) they probably just log errors. In early testing you'll log everything. And there will be a lot of errors at the start. So you have lots of logs. You need something to search those haystacks for needles, 'automatically'. So someone needs to work out (ie write) the rules for what's hot and what's not in the logs.
Security. Did I mention that? All our personal data is encrypted 'at rest', for instance. And then the hackers. If you are able to be reached on the internet, they will try to hack you. So threat detection etc needs built in. And if you get hacked, well, the reputational damage will be huge. You might never recover.
This is what a 'website' is.
You don't have to get it right from day 1, but you need the backbone of everything in there so you can build out features as you develop the application.
None of this is easy. But this is a flavour of what this very small team of FIVE have been working on (Apologies Hadron. I will have missed a significant amount of stuff!). Oh yes and at the same time as all of that, they're very actively supporting a telegram channel with 8.6K people on it (and rising). Setting up welcome bots, and spam bots and responding to queries. Applaud them. They deserve it.
So let's talk about testing now!
Remember this is a small team of five. They want us to be able to perform AI computations on billions of devices. How on earth would you test that? Most likely you'll take advantage of software like Browser Stack which allows you to 'virtually test' on real devices (I never had any idea how that magic worked ...!). Or you might be able to hire a room from a company who have devices for testing. It's highly unlikely they'll have a smart mirror though ...
At some point the team will have done all they can. They need to start rolling out an early version of the product to testers - us!
So the first wave of testers was small. I'll speculate (perhaps someone can confirm) they were asked to test very specific scenarios. I think I heard of someone running 96 tabs? I imagine there was a lot of structure and communication sitting around this first wave. And debugging and retesting. Then the numbers increased gradually. I think I was part of the second wave. I saw a lot of people joining the mining thread at the same time. We broke it. I could barely mine at all for the first day. I think I got 4 coins in total! But we're not mining - we're testing. And that was an extremely successful test. I saw a lot of server gateway timeouts (that's one of the things sitting behind the website) so I imagine the infrastructure scaling didn't go quite as planned.
This is what we are doing - helping get the product stable. Once that happens they team can turn their focus more to other aspects, like tokenomics. And start to answer some more questions.
Conclusions
So for everyone who is in the queue for alpha mining, I hope this gives you an idea of what we are testing and the work that is going on behind the scenes. The team are doing a great job of fixing problems, and we're seeing ever-increasing stability. Rest assured your time will come to test, hopefully soon. This is a great opportunity for the community to help build a valuable product, and from what I hear, the opportunity to contribute to a product this early on is scarce. Grasp that opportunity, and remember, when you do, contribute to the mining thread, raise bugs when you find them and contribute to the project. Think about more than just getting to your echelon cap!
I hope this helps you understand why not everyone can mine at once right now, and what we are helping to build. It's definitely not 'just a website'."