Development All Around

Yesterday I was excited to see some great news, one of them being the release of the first version of the Steem Engine, a possible alternative to SMTs. And it's not the only attempt on this front.

Today, I've heard while listening to the State of Steem Forum recording about communities and retention (at 1.5x speed, a trick I picked up from @exyle, and while working out, because that's a great combination of multitasking) that progress is being made in the development of communities, using Stratos nodes. If you never heard of them, don't worry, I am not that far ahead. I'm not sure if this is the initial report on the project, or a progress report, but you can read more about communities via Stratos in this announcement, from about half a month ago. From the intervention at SoS Forum, we find out there is work being done to integrate it with SteemPeak. ETA for these communities is still a few months into the future, but apparently still before anything Steemit Inc. can commit to.

^Source

That sounds great when community is picking up tasks and strives to speed up the development on the blockchain, and mostly on top of it, and competition is beneficial. Cooperation would be even more so.

Remember though, that speed is not the only factor, although on Steem there is a long history of discontent about missed deadlines, so speed is what people might look for.

But a product has to be more than minimally viable. Hopefully it is planned and coded thinking at future iterations, to minimize the necessity to rewrite stuff, or worse, to understand at a later stage that something you'd like to build is not possible because of a decision you took at the beginning, without thinking much further down the road.

The worker proposal system talks are not yet dead apparently, but there might be quite a few points of negotiation or where the community's feedback might help. You can learn about the current stage of this system and the way forward from @pennsif's discussion with Ned, Dan from Blocktrades, Elizabeth and Michael Vandeberg, if you haven't been present to the live discussion, in the audience.

Also today, I've read @steemchiller's weekly report about SteemWorld. And there, surprisingly, the focus of this last post is not SteemWorld, but another project, Open Source Steem Service.

To quote from his post, here's what the new project would be about, in short:

• Can be run locally (even on your grandma's home pc) or as public web service
• Enables each of us to analyze and work with the Steem blockchain data in a simple and very efficient way
• Syncing is possible via available public instances (very fast) or regular Steem nodes
• Provides automatic downloading of already parsed data (no need to start from block 1)
• No need to setup any database services (all file-based -> no layers in between -> faster than light)
• Offers configurable datasets (if you just need a DB with all transfers for example, you can run an instance with something like parser.parse_transfers=1 and parse_[things you don't need]=0)
• Also 'virtual operations' can be parsed (or downloaded from one of my servers that will provide all parsed datasets in nearly realtime)
• Highly compressed data (some crazy stuff and a bit of magic involved here, more details on this soon)
• Interfaces to other database systems planned
• Completely free to use, will be released under MIT license

Judging by SteemWorld, the man over-delivers when he develops something. And I for one thank him for this. So... let's see Open Source Steem Service then, when it's ready. I'm sure we'll be happy to have it. :)