State of the Witness #10
SteemFest, SteemIt Upgrades, Jussi In Production, AND MORE
Jussi In Production
First and foremost, you may have recently noticed the speed increase in the entire https://steemit.com website. This is largely due to the fact that Jussi is now in production and is providing a highly efficient caching layer in front of Steemd. Essentially, this means when there are many users browsing the website and performing the same actions, thing will go drastically faster because the data will already be in a very fast memory database waiting to be reused.
SteemIt Upgrades
SteemIt got a new logo, and the frontend website, Condenser, got some UI changes as well as a new "night mode". Seems some users are happy and others a bit less so about these changes, but just keep in mind SteemIt is a company in its infancy and some changes in marketing are bound to take place.
SteemFest
Also, SteemFest 2017 is currently going on in Lisbon. Make sure to check out the #steemfest tag and help curate the posts that are getting the proper level of coverage to represent the event for the entire community. Be sure to check out my post below if you are attending SteemFest (and you see this in time -- may have to extend the deadline), for a chance to win a nice sized prize.
In Progress
I am currently in progress making a publicly available AMI on Amazon Marketplace where users can easily create a new instance and customize a couple files before running a script to install a Steem Witness, Steem RPC Node, or Condenser. The point of this will be for improving automation of my own projects, as well as offering a base setup for other users to be able to follow along and learn from. Any support and suggestions as to what you may want to see in the AMI prebuilt for users is encouraged and welcomed in the comments on this post or in the SteemDevs Discord Server.
I will be making a more in depth post via Utopian for the AMI later this night or week. Please stay tuned.
Vote for 
as Witness
And of course, I must finish out by humbly asking for one of your witness votes. The support given to witnesses via the witness votes help ensure the stability of Steem for generations to come. Help us ensure that the top 20 witnesses are active users that are knowledgable and present in the running of the entire Steem code ecosystem.