Steem's dysfunctional family...

So, I happened to hear a funny story about an ETH dev complaining about the oligarchy that runs ETH. They were sick of it. No way to break in, and frustrated by the lack of accountability. A Steemian said "Give our dysfunctional family a try." The ETH dude said "I'll take a dysfunctional family over this any day."

The dysfunctional family comes through

Today there were a lot of people that were involved in fixing the hard fork problems. Steemit, top 20 witnesses, and backup witnesses worked together to fix a bug that was difficult to model in the testnet that made it into the code.

You might be thinking "but aggroed, your stupid fucking hard fork fucked up and ruined everything!" I'd argue it's not quite true. The chain stopped because a bug made some user data break rules. The chain did what it was supposed to do. You could make an argument that this didn't go perfectly, but honestly, a few hour downtime is a small price to pay to get a better trending page and a DAO/SPS.

Props

I'd like to give special props to Hive account@reggaemuffin who seems to have been the first to vocalize the likely source of the bug in the code. There were some great plays made by the highly technical witnesses of Hive account@gtg, Hive account@anyx, Hive account@netuoso, Hive account@cervantes, Hive account@therealwolf, and Hive account@drakos. Hive account@smooth was good for smart commentary as per usual. I'm especially grateful to Hive account@someguy123 and his quick updates to steem in a box. No secret that I'm less technical, and his program and someguys work there allows me and several other witnesses to keep this chain running.

Second shout out to Hive account@therealwolf for his witness essentials kit. I stopped using conductor and now use this. it's pretty nice. In addition to 190 blocks that most of the top 20 missed while gandalf restarted I also missed a few block. Witness Essentials got me rotated to a backup witness and was running again without missing a beat.

What did I do as a non-dev?

Today I did my best to help make sure good ideas were shared and fetch whatever I could for various groups of devs working on different pieces of this whole thing. Coordination and questions can be helpful. I also paid attention and got my witness up and running nearly as quickly as the more technical devs did. Was getting blocks and building the chain within a few minutes of the tech boyz.

Steemit

I think the Steemit team did a good job today. Hive account@justinw and Hive account@vandeberg were acceessible and helpful. Hive account@elipowell and Hive account@andrarchy had steemit.com updated, twitter updated, and had a well timed and accurate post about the hardfork and it's implementation.

Today could have sucked, but it didn't

I know it was frustrating. I'm kinda wiped from the day. But at the end of the day we have a cleaner trending, a functioning proposal system, and a team that did it's job. The negative voices will say today sucked, it was a clusterfuck, and everything was terrible and bad. But within a few hours we're up and running, a longer term fix is coming, and we have a chain that works. it's game on. So, don't let the perma-haters get you down.

Happy #newsteem day and welcome HF21

Palnet, Steem-Engine, Steem Keychain, and Splinterlands are all open for business. See you there!