jesta witness update - 2016-10-30

Apologies for missing my update last week! I ended up getting lost in a few projects (and a few games). If I do miss an update I apologize, once a week is a lot more of a commitment than I originally anticipated :)

1. Recently accomplished:

• Golos launched, and I ended up setting up a decent amount of services to support their launch. golosdb.com and golos.ws are both running now.
• Released an alpha of steemphp, a PHP library for interacting with steem.
• Implemented steemphp in Reprint. The abstraction between the two still needs to be worked out a bit more.
• Created test environments for high performance Reprint installations. Page load times are now sub 200ms, still a bit more room for improvement.
• Created a chart to track rewards on steem over the last 90 days. Also added a bit more data to the block pages.
• Researched a lot of different DNS solutions for steem.ws - haven't been able to find anything that fits our needs. I basically am looking for a latency based dns load balancing solution, one that has nodes worldwide. We use AWS right now for this, but AWS doesn't have datacenters everywhere.
• Found a way to make steemdb update a lot more regularly - still needs full implementation.
• Lots of work on the steem.ws cluster - I've actually migrated over to all new hosts as of today. Sorry about the downtime!
• Migrated all of my utility scripts over to a Raspberry Pi running a docker host. Each script is it's own little container. Currently running 3 scripts, and it looks like I could probably run hundreds of these small utilities from it. Low cost way to keep them running!
• Continued progress on where @greymass is heading.

2. Upcoming projects/goals

• Try out the new chainbase implementation of steem
• Continue development on steemphp - there are still a lot more methods that need to be covered and tested.
• Continue development on Reprint - the core engine is getting close to complete!
• Implement more rapid sync scripts on steemdb

3. Thoughts from this week

The last two weeks have been somewhat of a blur, I haven't had much time to think about anything except for the tasks on my todo list.

The biggest steps forward I think I'm making right now is with the abstraction of steem into steemphp. I'm pretty pleased with the direction it's heading and the way it's all setup. The entire codebase is covered by PHPUnit test cases, which are run via travis/coveralls everytime code is added to the github repository. You can check on the status of these two things here:

• https://travis-ci.org/greymass/steemphp
• https://coveralls.io/github/greymass/steemphp?branch=master

This library should hopefully prove useful for anyone building PHP based applications with the intention of accessing the steem blockchain. The package itself is available via composer which should make it a breeze to include in any modern project.

4. Previous week's update

Update for the week ending 2016-10-14

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