The Witness Files - Issue 10 with @roadscape, a developer at Steemit Inc.

I had the pleasure of having a chat with @roadscape for today’s issue of The Witness Files. He is a top witness and an employee of Steemit Inc.

If you are new to The Witness Files, it is a series of interviews I did with some of our top witnesses, to get an insight into who they are and what they do.

You can find the previous issues of the Witness Files below: Issue 1 with @complexring, Issue 2 with @riverhead, Issue 3 with @picokernel Issue 4 with @jesta, Issue 5 with @roelandp, Issue 6 with @pharesim Issue 7 with @klye, Issue 8 with @clayop, Issue 9 with @good-karma

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Welcome to today’s issue of The Witness Files with @roadscape

Thank you for taking the time to chat with me.

Glad to be here!

Tell me a bit about yourself. Who is @roadscape?

Tim, Application Developer

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When you’re not on Steemit, what do you enjoy doing?

I recently moved to Virginia; I’m getting settled in and exploring. As of late I find myself spending entire days on the computer but I make time to cook and enjoy the outdoors. Otherwise I like to travel, research, and pursue random interests.

I enjoy working on steemd.com (and recently launched sister site: golosd.com). I’ve been refactoring the code in preparation for releasing it as open-source. And also side experiments such as this database-driven witness voting report.

When did you first become a witness on Steemit?

I found out about and dove into the platform April 1st, launched steemd.com April 12th, and published my witness bid April 21st.

If I’m not mistaken, you are currently an employee at Steemit Inc. Can you tell us your role at Steemit, and what you are currently working on?

Correct. I’m a front-end developer. Most of my work revolves around adding UI features and fixing bugs. My goals are to improve UX and to ensure that steemit.com as a social network can hold its own. My last project was building a new richtext editor (on hold at the moment, pending upstream fixes). Next I’ll be helping integrate user profiles. A lot of smaller tasks and bug-fixes are handled concurrently.

What’s it like to work at Steemit Inc, and what does a typical day look like for you?

It’s a pleasure to work with a team dedicated to pushing the envelope and finding solutions to hard problems. My co-workers are rockstars. A typical day depends on the task at hand. Some days involve heads-down work writing and testing code. Other days involve communicating, planning, triaging and bug-fix sprints. Mondays involve Mexican food.

What new features/upgrades currently being developed for Steemit, are you most looking forward to?

There’s a lot in the works, internally and externally. I’m looking forward to the upcoming backend update as it will greatly help with scalability. On the frontend, I’m looking forward to profile customization features and more powerful content discovery & authorship tools.

You are the developer behind Steemd.com. For those not familiar with Steemd.com, can you tell us how it differs from steemit.com?

Steemd.com was the first user interface for exploring the STEEM chain and its posts. This was back when steemit.com hadn’t launched yet and everyone was posting and voting through the command-line. So I created a more efficient tool for exploring the content. It exposes a lot of underlying data to aid in learning how the internals of the platform work and for easier debugging. On steemd.com you will find reports, user account histories, witness information, and raw block/transaction data. It also helps funnel traffic to steemit.com. You cannot post or vote directly from steemd.com, though it gives copy-and-paste CLI commands to do so manually – I hope to change this in the future.

If there is any one single thing you could change, or start over again on Steemit, what would it be and why?

I’d say any significant changes I want to see are already in progress or on the radar. For instance, being able to edit posts beyond 30 days – to encourage living pages and wiki-like content.

How do you see the Steem ecosystem evolving over the next year or two? And what new features and projects would you like to see implemented?

I see a lot of apps leveraging our blockchain and existing apps maturing. Embeddable widgets for any existing site. Browser plugins. The community will continue to expand organically. The platform becomes more stable, developer tools and resources improve, making it drastically easier to build out our ecosystem.

Thank you for your time

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Hope you enjoyed this interview with @roadscape.

For more interviews with our witnesses, please follow me @nextgen622.

And to vote for a witness, you can go here: https://steemit.com/~witnesses

Jimmy