UPD 02/24/2020

Gives a quick personal update from home in Colorado, chatting about the plants growing in the office garden, mint, basil, and thyme.

Celebrates that the OBFT hard fork went off without a hitch and nobody noticed anything happened.

Warns the community about scammers trying to trick people into giving up their private keys, reminding everyone IOHK will never ask for them.

Outlines the Byron reboot release, which contains the wallet backend and is the second major milestone on the road to Shelley, with a Shelley testnet targeted for March or April.

The release band process for the Shelley mainnet launch, a two month window that will narrow as certainty increases through March.

Shares tentative plans to hold the Shelley launch party in Kyoto as a thank you to Japan, though the coronavirus outbreak in Asia and travel restrictions could force a change of location or hurt attendance.

Details the remaining sprint work for the Byron reboot, including QA thresholds and audit remediation, with mid-March as the expected release.

Lists new features coming with the Byron reboot's wallet backend integration, including a command line, fast sync under an hour, new GUI elements, and possible ledger support.

Announces a new monthly product update structure starting the week of February 24th 2020, with the senior product manager giving an overview and each product area presenting a five to ten minute update.

Previews a commercial alignment workshop in London in early March with PwC, Emurgo, and the Cardano Foundation, including access to PwC's Fortune 500 client base.

Announces an upcoming trip across Africa, meeting the president of South Africa and traveling to Rwanda, Uganda, and possibly Tanzania for a telecom deal, plus Ethiopia.

Outlines plans for the Cardano Foundation to earmark 2020 budget for community development in Africa and meet Ethiopia's agricultural transformation agency about track and trace supply chain and voucher programs.

Invites the community to reach out to John O'Connor for a chance to attend a meetup in each African country visited, similar to a past event in Sweden.

Previews attending the zkProof standardization conference in London in April with IOHK's zero knowledge team.

Sonic, IOHK's fast user updatable zero knowledge proof system published in December 2018, which avoids the trusted setup ceremony that Zcash required.

Confirms the weekly Jormungandr release cadence continues, with Daedalus and wallet backend updates following each Monday as network stability improvements close out.

Winding down support for the Incentivized Testnet around the end of March or April, after which the team will move to two new projects.

Reflects on the ITN as a success that built a strong corpus of stake pool operators and a valuable ongoing dialogue with them.

The ITN's Rust code will not be the code Cardano launches with, so testing priority shifts to verifying the Shelley Haskell code.

In depth conversations with exchange partners about libraries, tools, and APIs to make listing ADA and offering staking as a service easier.

Reveals negotiations with three vendors for Ledger hardware wallet firmware support, adding Bech32 addresses, cold staking, and multi sig.

Sprint velocity remains steady despite an increased scope for the Shelley launch to accommodate lessons from the ITN and exchange requirements.

Highlights that Goguen and Voltaire development are progressing well in parallel, with infrastructure work on oracles, identity, multi asset, and metadata standards.

New commercial partnerships, including Beefchain, that will be showcased with launch applications at the Goguen launch.

Feeling tired after a hectic travel schedule that just included a trip to Washington DC.

Reflects on the difficulty of the multi year effort to build Cardano without compromise using Haskell and formal methods, admitting some choices would be made differently with hindsight.

Cites Amazon's use of TLA plus and Microsoft's discovery of the Xbox memory model bug as validation of the value of formal methods for large distributed systems.

Cardano's two programming languages are maturing to the point where developers can build tooling, shifting conversations from theoretical to applied topics like interoperability and execution units.

Uses an iceberg metaphor to describe how much work is finally surfacing, calling the next two months a wild rollercoaster of releases.

Criticizes an underwhelming product marketing pitch and notes frustration that proof of stake's invention by Cardano goes uncredited on Wikipedia.

Vow not to accept mediocrity in marketing anymore, given how much scientists and engineers have invested in the project.

Lists Cardano's best in class components: the extended UTXO accounting model, the Plutus language, and a self healing network stack built on thirty years of network theory.

Announces a full documentation overhaul for the Shelley launch and describes the long hours and weekend work the team will put in to ship it.

Closes with a recap: Byron reboot in March 2020, the first Shelley Haskell testnet announcement coming, continued ITN support, and Shelley release dates likely at the next product meeting.