State of the Witness #12 - Words From a Truly Humbled Witness

Witness Reached New Highs (21)

First and foremost, I want to get this out there ... Witness #21!!!!! This is such an incredible accomplishment to me. In June of this year I was laid off from my job, given a small severance pay, and told the company was going to be taking "a new direction". Essentially I automated away my job and became expendable and easily replaced for a cheaper salary.

Thankfully, and unbeknownst to me at the time, I had just made the best decision of my life.

"What was that decision, netuoso?"

In summary; joining the prolific Steem community.

In detail; at the time I had just profited from a very timely decision to move all of my savings into Ethereum at $19. Now, my savings was nothing very pretty, but it was far from small. Following the 1578% price increase they became even larger. Finally, for the first time in my life, I was starting to see the light at the end of the dark tunnel called DEBT.

This rise in liquid holdings led me to immediately diversify and find safe places to invest and contribute to cryptocurrency. Without much surprise, I ended up at SteemIt. I read the Whitepaper. I analyzed users posting habits. I tried my best to learn the network, the people, and its politics.

Being a programmer, things of a technical nature resonate very well within me. Whether that means I fully understand them or not (I don't think any one person understands all of technology) isn't important. The important factor here is the fact that I am naturally more interested in reading technical documents over fiction any day.

Tons of Love for the MinnowSupport Project!

After analyzing the network and the technical details, I decided the right decision was to dive in and invest. The first thing to do was to create an account. Luckily, I got in before the demand went sky high and was able to get my account created in short time. Great, with that done, I started the way any Minnow does ... I powered up a bit, dropped a post in #introduceyourself and waited for the money to come flooding in.

Of course, the money didn't come because we all know that is not how this works (unless you are famous). MinnowSupport made its way to me thru mention of an AUTOMATED POSTING BOT that brought up the group. A simple Google search later and I was in the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Discord server. At the time, the server had probably about 1000 users or so (that number is well above 6000 now). Eventually, some mysterious wizard that calls himself Hive account@aggroed, because he is still obsessed with World of Warcraft despite his ever increasing age, suggested that I pursue the route of a Steem Witness.

The Wizard said PURSUE so PURSUE I DID

During my early days with MSP, I provided the group with a bot framework that worked behind the scenes the enable several users to control several bots without risk of endangering the posting keys. (This was before SteemConnect -- these days I really urge developers to use SteemConnect auth in their applications if they need users auth permissions)

Through the use of this platform, thousands of posts were curated manually, enabling the most efficient use of voting power possible. Suddenly minnows were starting to get much stronger votes on content that was verified as valuable.

I have since released Steem Bot Framework as a Rails application that users can run locally or add to if they wish. At this point, it is probably just a good learning/entry point for developers interested in seeing Steem + Ruby (and thanks to Hive account@inertia for his sweet Ruby gem, Radiator)

Be sure to check out MinnowSupport Radio Show at http://mspwaves.com

A Wild Utopian Appears!

Screen Shot 2017-11-13 at 12.41.36 PM.png

This post would be nothing without bringing up Utopian. Not sure how many times I can say Utopian ... Just hearing the name makes me smile.

"What is Utopian, netuoso?"
You mean you don't know?!?! Stop right here, right now, and swing by https://utopian.io. I'll wait.

Okay, now that you are back, and you saw it we can break it down a bit. Utopian is a platform geared around getting open source contributions paid thru the use of Steem. This project was created by Hive account@elear and is so prominent that Hive account@ned and Hive account@steemit have collectively delegated over 2 Million Steem Power to the Utopian bot (the account responsible for voting the approved content). On top of that, user Hive account@freedom has delegated OVER 1 Million Steem Power. Hive account@transisto has delegated over 100 Thousand Steem Power!

These numbers are incredible! Read more about the recent updates at this post by @elear.

Users are able to add contributions to a wide range of different categories, as long as they relate to an open source project. This method of ensuring payments for open source developers is absolutely revolutionary and unseen in practice. Many developers I have spoken to have expressed their desire to contribute to open source, but after programming all day to be able to pay their bills, they are completely exhausted and unable, or unwilling, to contribute to open source projects.

This problem is COMPLETELY solved with Utopian and Steem by allowing these developers and "thought inventors" to get paid for their work.

Utopian has me feeling secure in my decision to pursue Steem development full-time

Have You Managed to Read This Far?

If so, I appreciate your time and I promise to wrap this up quickly.

Why You Should Vote For Hive account@netuoso As Witness

Personal Projects

Contributed To Projects

Recent Code Submission Posts

Shoutout to everyone that helped me along the way and still continues to support my efforts. Without you guys I literally wouldn't be here.

Let's conclude this with you voting me to the Top 20 and raising a glass with me!

Click the header above to cast your vote; alternatively click this link

PS: If you didn't get a direct mention don't feel left out please. I fucking love you all