jesta witness update - 2016-09-02

Another week, another update on what I've been up to. It's been a very busy week and I've been sneaking in updates where I can. I think I may have broken my record for "most time spent actually being productive in chat" - helping others with development problems, talking strategy, exposing information and helping brainstorm new ideas.

This post is following along with my standard witness update format I'm working to establish.

1. Accomplished the week of 2016-09-02:

• Awarded 1550 SBD in bounties, split between @dudutaulois and @pkattera for their awesome work on steempress
• Both bounty themes now running:
  • jesta.us, my witness blog
  • steempress.io, which currently follows updates about my projects (subject changes regularly)
• Reworked the docker container for steempress's development environment, which has no allowed both @dudutaulois and @pkattera to run it locally and experiment with their designs. I can't tell you how thrilled I am that they're both interested in furthering their themes.
• Posted and promoted a PSA warning people not to use the promoted post feature on posts over 24 hours old. Worked with @picokernel to get a pull request issued to hide the buttons on bugged posts to prevent this from happening until a real fix can be implemented.
• Changed all of the number formats on steemdb to kilo/mega/giga/tera/etc... 1 MV = 1 million vests, 1 TV = 1 trillion vests, etc. They are all color coded just like steemstats as well. Hovering or tapping on these values reveals the full number.
• Added some new features to the account page on steemdb - you can sort by vests/posts/followers/reputation, now only displays 10 at a time, and added a control to change pages on the bottom.
• Added a few new API endpoints to steemdb by request from various members of the community, including percentage of vest vs supply, account snapshots, global currency supplies by date, last 500 global properties, snapshot every 6hr.
• The "witness" tab displayed on each account on steemdb now factors in proxy voting as well as normal witness voting.
• Spent 2 days with my business partner really hammering on some new ideas involving the steem blockchain. We may start prototyping one of the first ideas within the next week.
• Added support for a few of the new operation types coming in 0.14.0 in steemstats and steemdb.

2. Upcoming projects/goals

• One of my main goals over the coming week is to really explore a few technologies and determine if they are suitability for a possible combination of steemstats and steemdb. The more I work on each of these project, the more useful I think they would be if they were the same thing. Combining the real time updates with the historical perspective.
• The memory leaks and crashes on steemstats are getting annoying, and it's been 15 days since my last commit (sounds a little like a confession lol). Depending on how fast the point above this goes, I may take a bit of time and see if I can streamline the way the data is stored and stop browsers from crashing every few hours.
• This weekend I plan on starting a new prototype for a new service involving the steem community.
• I didn't take a day for steemit.com work over the last week - so I'm going to attempt to get one in next week, or at least a bit over the weekend. I put in a lot of contract hours this week which prevented me from focusing as much on steem related projects. I'm excited to only have a couple more weeks of contract work.
• Finishing up this contract work I'm doing. I have to be done by the end of the month, but hope to be sooner!

3. Thoughts from this week

I've been thinking a lot about steem on the macro level the past few weeks, and my head is still somewhat spinning. Aspects of gamification, ways to distribute content, and methods to help users build communities have all been very present in my thoughts. I've started 3 individual documents to start outlining the concepts I think could be applied to each. Eventually I plan on writing blog posts on each topic, hopefully spurring some ideas of how the platform could evolve.

Putting the grandiose ideas aside, I still very much want to push the idea that we need to focus on the new user experience. I don't feel it's been getting better, it may have gotten slightly worse. From users not understanding posting restrictions, to new accounts not having enough SP, and the lack of guidance given to users when they sign up from the platform - it all really needs to be improved.

We have had some chats on the topic of the new user experience this week, which is a huge positive. The problems are starting to be identified and hopefully soon we will start finding solutions that will help with the growth of steemit immensely. We need to stay vigilant on this topic, because every time a new feature is added, it gets a little bit more complicated for new users to figure things out.

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Previous week's update

Update for the week ending 2016-08-26

Finally, don't forget to vote for witnesses here.