Project update and aspirations for the near future

personz (66)in #steemdev • 7 years ago

This is a short update for the month of March on my Steem related projects and activities, as well as some aspirations for the near future!

TLDR

In general, I've had less time than I hoped in March and so I'm behind where I want to be with some projects, especially Voter bot.

On the positive side some new project have come up, which diverted my attention a bit, but which look really promising.

COMMUNITY PROJECTS

Witness

Next week I will begin the process of setting up a dedicated witness machine. This will take some time because I am very interested in doing this well, securely and in a way which is cost effective.

Note that this post would be my witness update. I'll be doing a proper announcement when the time comes, but from this post you can see how I am involved in the Steem community, something which will be part of my continued to work as a witness.

Whitepaper update

After my call to get the whitepaper updated and subsequent experiment (and some advocation by @biophil I think 😉), @sneak created an empty whitepaper
project on the official Steemit GitHub organization.

I forked this last week and spent many hours copying and pasting the contents of the original PDF into a new document and make this LaTeX formatted. I hadn't used LaTeX before so there was a bit of a learning curve but it was great to have the opportunity to learn something new in the service of something important.

Also I created a simple build script which renders the TeX file to PDF, copying all images, etc. I'm working on a HTML render at the moment but it looks like @sneak wants to use Pandoc which might be a better option that LaTeX's build in HTML render, which isn't great. You can see my work on that here.

I created a pull request for them to accept this work, and I'm still waiting on the response but I'm sure they'll accept it when they have a chance to review it.

The idea is that then we can move forward with updating it to the current hard fork (will be 18 of course!) and then could use it to propose new ideas and make sure they are consistent with the overall vision and technical requirements of the Steem platform. It's really really exciting to me!

APPS

Voter bot

The largest and most developed app I'm working on is the Steem FOSSbot Voter project.

There was only one week of fixing done on this project this month, and as a result I'm about 3 weeks behind so I've had to extend the due date on the milestones main bug fixing milestone. I've also changed the due dates on all milestones so that one is due each month:

Voter milestones

The milestone Public beta bug fixes and minor improvements is now due at the end of April instead of at the end of March. I'm almost half way through this (big thanks to @shaunmza again, he spotted a few bugs and helped work through them).

As an overview, what is left in this milestone is the following, in vague order of action:

Add voting power conservation
Fix email updates
Increase speed and efficiency of processing, which includes moving analytics engine to separate project
Update docs, especially for undocumented features and local installation project

Once this is done I will consider the app in beta release 2, and next will come Golos support (due at end of May) and implementing new features such as new metrics and improving the web app UI (due end of June).

At this point, depending on how things are looking, we'll probably be at another round of bug fixing.

Subproject: voter-docker

The voter-docker project, which was a collaboration with @shaunmza, was released at the start of this month. It is a docker deployment for the Voter bot, including very handy scripts for set up and management.

I've already said a lot about this project in recent posts, so I'll skip it, as this project is in beta and has no real issues, largely thanks to its simplicity. Of course, like any project, if you find any problem please log a bug.

Team Work

This is the rewards share idea I first posted about some time ago, which is currently in the planning and experimentation phase.

The planning project had a lot of work on it on the first week of March, after which I made an updated post with the research findings and showing how the idea had developed.

Since then I have started implementing a skeleton UI for this in Electron, using Photon UI controls, and managed in this code project on GitHub. Here are a few screenshots, but you can try it out yourself on the develop branch there.

It's very bare I know!

Here is the plan for this project:

Implement the front end of the app, just purely the UI with no back end
Develop the Blockchain meta-transaction library, which will be the general way for these apps to run
Develop the specific back end for this app

At that time I will do a closed beta release with some testers to see how it works and get focused feedback. Then we'll be looking at the usual public beta / bug fixing cycle until it works well enough to really release.

Helping Hand

Helping Hand was originally proposed as a way for less powerful users to petition the community at large to counter a "undeserved" down vote / flag with voluntary up votes.

While potentially a good idea, I think other projects are more worth while at the moment and I am having doubts as to whether this project would be widely adopted. Perhaps it needs a rethink and definitely more feedback. Also I think that my other idea of reducing the effect on voting of SP (the old "rewards curve" issue) would solve this and is a hot enough topic for me to believe that this may get sorted in the coming months.

So this project is parked for the moment and I'll have to live with the empty planning project repo 😭

Bot or Not?

I'd like to develop this some weekend, I think it could be a small, cute, cheap and cheerful app that makes a guess at whether a particular Steem account is running a bot or not.

The idea is detailed a little here

Others

There are several projects which seem interesting but I won't have time to do for several months, if I do them at all.

I'd really like feedback from the community on them, and would especially love to see someone else take on development! I don't own these ideas. 😇