Petertag Witness Statement | Post HF20

After seeing and being affected by what happened during hard fork 20, I decided to speed up my setup of witness servers. I had been working on setting up a test server on my gaming laptop, which was going okay, but seeing the issues with the hard fork made me want to get involved more quickly, because the setup on my gaming laptop was taking forever due to low RAM. I've got a witness node up and running already, and I'm working on my seed node. I'm going to throw up a guide in a bit after this for those looking for more explicit and up-to-date instructions on setting one up, along with a bit more explanation that I was looking for on some parts. I'll introduce myself a bit more and explain my intentions below.

Who I Am

I'm a 22 year old college student majoring in Computer Science and a software developer, currently working for a startup on a cryptocurrency and some other things. I've been interested in crypto since about 2012, with investments in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and some altcoins along the way. I love Steem because it's one of the first good implementations of DPoS, and a great community formed around it pretty quickly. I want to become a witness because I believe in Steem and the community around it, and I want to help build Steem up along with everyone.

My Intentions as A Witness

As a witness, I want to improve Steem itself, as well as its hard fork preparation. One of the main things that prompted me to speed this up was seeing @reggaemuffin's HF20 witness statement, which contained a lot of requirements for hard forks that I would like to see adopted by the community. The most important that I would like to see are:

• A test net that mirrors the main net, where the hard fork is simulated before it goes live.
• A code freeze for at least 2 weeks before the hard fork is supposed to go live.
• One major change per fork.

All of these are very important for stopping the issues that happened with Hard Fork 20, most importantly a test net so that people could deplete their bandwidth before HF20, then push it to the testnet and see what actually would have happened with RC.

Of course, this list will be updated as time goes on.

My Pledges as A Witness

Other than what I plan to change in how the community approaches hard forks overall, I have a couple of things I pledge to do myself as a witness:

• Evaluate the code base and improve documentation on it.
• Work on the steemd code base along with all the other contributors.
• Release public testing results on every update (on the testnet)
• Run a witness and seed node (and later on a backup and testnet node)
• Be available for questions from users and (aspiring) witnesses
• Help curate and improve the community overall to get better content trending.

If I make it high up on the list of Witnesses, this will obviously change more as I'll take up more responsibilities the more trust is placed in me.

Thanks, vote for me as witness!