Meet our moderators : Howo

I've been on the platform for a little over 7 months, I actually celebrated my 200th day on steem yesterday.
I originally came here to write tutorials about various things and basically blog about some tech news. I received very little feedback and struggled to connect with people and build a following. It did not stop me and I pushed through for some months.

But then I realized that this was not going to work. I did not get pleasure when writing posts and it kinda became a chore. So I drastically changed the way I blog on steem, I wrote an article, changed my name from howo to Martin Lees and did a face reveal. You can find the article here. I switched from basically writing stuff on news to actually articles on what I do and it was way more interesting. I did a long series or articles on a gaming bot that I wrote in python, and how I defeated the anti-bot security inside of it thanks to machine learning.

At the same time I got more social and started to hang out more on steemit.chat there I met a lot of cool people who helped me a lot to grow and fix my mistakes. I won't name them all because it would take too much space ;)

I discovered utopian.io pretty much like everyone else when it started to get trending everywhere. So I looked into it and instantly found it so very cool ! I wrote an article about how Utopian.io could be a huge step forward for steem and the open source community and I still believe in what I said.

Shortly after I became a moderator. There I moderated a lot of various things that came on my plate. When the category-specific mods arrived, I decived to specialize myself into tutorials (because there is always things to mod there and you learn a thing or two) and graphics (Still don't know why).

After a while I realized that I did not moderate stuff in graphics because well, It's not my field of expertise so I asked my supervisor @mcfarhat to change it to development.

My contributions to the steem ecosystem

I come from a computing background, I'm a software engineer and I've been working on code since I was young, so I am used to tinker to create stuff. So apart from my blog itself and utopian moderation, I work on a range of projects related to steem :

• steemsnippets a collection of snippets to ease the learning curve for steem developers

• Steemgifts An account creator with a gift card creator github repo

• MemoBox A python class to prove that memos can be used as an attack vector to load the blockchain with useless data which would raise the bar for a witness server hence increasing centralization.

• A wordpress -> steem plugin. No links yet but it's coming very soon, you can contact me or @fredrikaa on steemit.chat if you're interested in testing it out.

• A gamified steem tutorial, no links yet either but the core of the programming is done. We just need to figure things out. And write the actual thing

And a lot more is coming soon ;)

Right now my focus is mostly on helping steem gain adoption. Be it "normal" users or developers. I think starting out as a developer on steem is really not easy, I talked about it here : The problems with the steem development ecosystem that are slowing us down. So I try my best to fix it.

Anyways, this is end end of this moderator introduction, if you're curious about a project and want to know more, come meet me on steemit.chat or discord :)