[tor-reports] What Nick did in December

[Nick Mathewson]

In December, I did some things that are programming, or related to it:

 - I merged a bunch of patches in Tor, and reviewed a whole bunch of
   code.  Notable things (see changelog for more info)

     - Thanks to patches from "teor", chutney networks now bootstrap
       in seconds instead of minutes.  This will make our scripted
       integration testing run much, much faster.

     - I merged a bunch of new test cases, including tests from
       rl1987 for "resolvemyaddr" and  for and
       wrote a bunch more.

     - Statistical analysis and port scanning for hidden
       services. (Thanks to everybody who worked on these.)

 - Unit test coverage is now up to 36.56% (up from 30.84% in 0.2.5).
   Integration test coverage is at 45.96%, though integration tests
   need more automation to actually do the "testing" part.  Combined
   test coverage is at 59.75%.  This is far ahead of track for my
   milestone of 60% by some time next year, and 80% by some time the
   year after.  It's a bit deceptive, though, since the integration
   tests don't have enough "test" in them.  Nonetheless, I think
   this is decent progress.

 - I released Tor 0.2.6.2-alpha.  The change log is here:
    https://gitweb.torproject.org/tor.git/tree/ChangeLog

 - With help from Rob and Yawning, and idea from Bryan Ford, and
   relying on Andrea's circuitmux refactor work, I hacked together a
   quick Linux implementation of the KIST write scheduling
   implementation for performance testing:
   https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/12890

 - I helped brainstorming for designs for improved transports,
   hidden service improvements, and stuff like that.

And some things that are not programming:

 - I met with Aaron Johnson and Rob Johnson, who were in town to
   visit. We talked about designs for improved network performance,
   improved bandwidth detection,

 - I started the month with a multi-day retreat with Mike, Roger,
   Wendy, and Andrew to try to figure out our organizational needs
   and how to meet them.  We came up with a fairly extensive list of
   stuff to do, and shared it with the company. This is starting by
   making sure that everybody has an assigned advocate to make sure
   that they have a contact who can figure out beaurocracy issues
   for them.

 - I met with some HR people to figure out how to make our hiring
   process more streamlined.

 - I helped Karen a little with some fundraising stuff and Kate with
   some communications stuff.

 - I wrote a few blog posts, and helped draft a few more. Topics
   included why people should be kind to each other, and why
   interpreting science is hard.

What I hope to do this month:

 - I want to spend more time programming.

 - I want to finish building the initial design for the integration
   testing framework, and specify more about module decoupling for
   testing.

 - I want to come up with code metrics to see where our biggest
   problem-areas are.

 - I want to freeze 0.2.6.x, or get it close to freeze.

 - I want to finish ed25519 id keys:
     https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/12498

 - I want to merge improved work queues:
      https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/9682
   and consensus diffs:
      https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/ticket/13339
   and as many other pending patches as we can.