jesta witness update - 2016-09-09

3rd and final post for today, an update as to what I've been up to this week. It's now past 3am and I've spent the last 4 hours organizing code, deploying updates and writing patch notes for the various projects I manage. What better time than when everyone else is sleeping!

With as much writing as I've already done, I'll attempt to keep this witness update brief.

1. Accomplished the week of 2016-09-09:

• Bounty Proposal Progress: Saturday through Monday, I worked on a prototype for a bounty system. I have a fairly complete ux/technical document - which I'm still refining and will be posted hopefully by early next week. I also have a prototype frontend and two bots to support the proposed workflow (secure one for reward funding and one for bounty syncronization with a database).
• Upgraded the North American steem.ws node. I ordered a new server earlier in the week and have since replaced my steem.ws node with a much more powerful server. The server should now crash a lot less, meaning less downtime for steemstats. It's a 32gb, quadcore machine with a 480gb SSD. It's running two steemd nodes and consuming approximately 21gb of RAM, so we've got some room to grow. Funded completely by SBD generated by my posts.
• Updated steemstats to 0.3.5 - The first post I wrote today, explaining the new improvements to the post inspector as well as a bit about the future of steemstats + steemdb.
• Updated steemdb to 0.2.0 - The second post I wrote today, showing off the new "Lab" section of the site and new API endpoints available.
• Wrote up an alternative UI/UX for Voting Power, called Voting Tokens. I spent a decent chunk of time after 0.14.0 was announced to brainstorm some ideas on how we could improve the voting system, primarily to help make it easier to consume.
• Worked on a budget/pnl, milestones/timeline, and goals of a new potential business venture into the steem ecosystem. More details to come soon!
• Explored 3 different standard reactjs setups, determining the best to move forward with a SPA/no-backend setup for potential future projects using steemdb + steemstats.
• Upgraded my witness node with more memory as a bit of future-proofing. Will also let me deploy the 0.14.0 fork a bit easier.

2. Upcoming projects/goals

• Continued evaluation of reactjs configurations for steemdb/steemstats.
• Full day meeting on Sunday/Monday with my business partner to continue on our business plan, hopefully publishing some details
• Hopefully getting said partner to post his introduction thread.
• Full contract work days Tuesday through Friday, and attempting to maintain sanity over the next 2 weeks while completing my projects there.
• Publishing my proposal for the Bounty Program.
• Updating my Witness Node to 0.14.0 for the hard fork.

3. Thoughts from this week

Voting. Voting is all I've been thinking about this week really. It's also all I've had time for since this contract work is eating most of my Tuesday through Friday.

It's been a hot button issue I feel since 0.14.0 was announced. Originally I was somewhat apprehensive about the change, but the more I've explored the issue, the more I'd like to see the changes in action. Lowering to 5 votes a day (@100%) at face value sounded bad, simply because it's somewhat confusing.

To test this out, I started voting a lot harder than I normally do over the past few days. I removed any consideration I had for my voting power, and if I thought something was useful or entertaining, I upvoted it. Normally I would consider my voting power before casting the vote, but I didn't over the course of this test. Funny thing is, my voting power never dropped below 90%. After seeing this - I think we do need to lower the rate at which voting power regenerates.

I'm not sure 5/day is the right regeneration rate, maybe 10/15 a day would be better, but I am willing to see what 5/day feels like and I welcome the change.

4. Previous week's update

Update for the week ending 2016-09-02

Finally, don't forget to vote for witnesses here.