My name is Jon and I've been an active member of the Steemit community for over two months. This post is to announce my participation as a witness.

Steem activity

You might recognise me from my psychology series The Lies We Tell Ourselves where I write about cognitive biases that affect our lives.

I also regularly write posts where I try to answer questions by performing simple statistical analyses on the blockchain. Some of my more notable posts here are When Do Whales Upvote? and When is the best time to publish on Steemit?.

What I enjoy the most about Steemit is how it encourages creativity. I've started writing a novel called Black and even take part in Hive account@jamtaylor's photochallenge, managing to my surprise to come second in the Long Exposure Challenge challenge.

Being part of Steemit and these sub-communities is both rewarding and enlightening: there are so many talented people here.

Projects

These are the projects I'm working on for Steemit.

	steemduino is an open-source Arduino library for accessing the Steem RPC API. It already has support for monitoring new blocks which makes it possible to build custom notification systems. As more features are added, the possibilities will grow.
	The Follower Leaderboard is a new stats series where I show changes in followers over the previous week. The latest post now splits the most follower stats by level (e.g. superuser, hero, superhero).

Witness node

I'm fortunate enough to have an over-powered machine available to run my witness node. With two Intel Xeon E5-2670 v3 CPUs, each with 12 cores running at 2.30GHz, providing 48-cores in total through hyper-threading and a massive 64GB of memory, this machine will eat blocks for dinner.

As an experienced software engineer who has worked with Linux for the past 15 years, you can rest assured my witness node will be well looked after.

If you'd like to learn more about the important role witnesses play and what your vote means, check out A Full Steemit User's Guide to Steem Witnesses by Hive account@pfunk.