Welcome! Good to see more high tech people here. Some useful stuff.

There are two writing contests I like, Fifty Word Challenge from @miniature-tiger and Constrained Writing Challenge from @svashta.

There are two photography contests, from Jamtaylor, and Juliank.

At the moment I suggest Busy, Steemengine, Utopian-io, Steemfollower. They give another way of having your posts be more widely seen and evaluated in the very beginning, considering we have a paid advertising problem on the platform at the moment. (If you like my content, and would like to use my referrals, Steemengine and Steemfollower.)

Utopian is for programming efforts; Busy, Steemengine, and Steemfollowers are for things in general.

There is also The Daily Sneak curation group, and Steem Basic Income.