jesta witness update - 2016-12-02

With v0.16.0 coming next week, it's been the focus of most of my attention (alongside of Reprint). It's also been a few weeks since my last update, and I imagine the frequency of my updates through the rest of the year won't improve an incredible amount. This time of year (with the holidays) ends up always being incredibly demanding of time :)

1. Accomplished the last half of November:

• Helped @charlieshrem with the launch of geekinprison.com, a Reprint powered blog based on his activity on steemit.com.
• Reprint now supports pagination by default and author pages. Author pages load an account from the steem blockchain to display information on a custom HTML page. With today's update to steemit.com, even more customization options are standardized and those fields will also be included in the near future. These author pages can also have custom URLs by using the Reprint routing configuration, and could even be combined in a custom route to build a "team" page.
• I've been working on a new "theme" for the base installation of Reprint, which I'm calling develop. The develop theme is built for designers and developers looking to get involved and understand how the data is organized in Reprint. It displays the information passed to the frontend, the site configuration options, and other additional bits of information that should help in crafting a steem-powered website.
• steemdb.com is now on a much more powerful server, one in which the entire database can actually fit into RAM. This has sped up the site significantly and should allow for growth right alongside the community.
• Progress on a steemdb <-> reprint integration has been started, which simply use API calls to steemdb for calls that cannot be completed (optimally) through the steem api.
• Testing and upgrades of servers to 0.16.0 (and it's various release candidates). I've build this version dozens of times at this point across a number of configurations, and am almost prepared for Tuesdays's hard fork. My witness nodes are upgraded and I'll activate the block signing on them over the weekend for final testing.
• Worked with @arhag to update the get_ops_in_block patch updated for 0.16.0, which he also issued a pull request for inclusion into the main repository. This modification to steemd is what allows sites (like steemdb.com) to query each block for all virtual operations (such as rewards).

2. Upcoming projects/goals

• Development on Reprint has been moving slower than we had anticipated, so my primary focus is on it's progress. When we first started building Reprint, we had a very vague idea of exactly what was required to make it work, and at this point the picture is much clearer.
• This weekend and into next week, most of my efforts will be in finalizing the 0.16.0 steem nodes powering my witness account, the private server that powered steemdb, the public (US) node behind steem.ws, the private (read-only) nodes for our Reprint hosted sites, and the test servers I have setup for development.
• I have slowly started researching what it takes to build plugins directly for steemd, which is foreign territory for me. The documentation is a bit out of date (which is to be expected with a massive change like 0.16.0), but I'm still figuring it out. My hope is that I can build some useful APIs to help the needs of both Reprint and steemdb (as well as anyone else needing similar data).

3. Thoughts from this week

It's been a little over 3 weeks since my last witness update, and during that time I burned out pretty hard and ended up crashing for a little over a week. Comparing my productivity (and even post history) in September vs November shows a stark difference in how much I actually have been accomplishing recently. I am not complaining or have objectives in addressing this, I just wanted to recognize that this occurred. The one thing I don't want is to leave the impression that I've stopped caring about steem, or even worse, that I'd given up.

The situation is far from that, and I really believe 2017 is going to be a banner year for steem. Throughout the remainder of the year, I plan on slowly increasing my efforts again to try and find a happy medium of "productive" and "not working so hard I end up crashing". It's a fine line for someone like myself, who tries to optimize and push the bountries of my work as far as possible. However with the Holiday season rapidly approaching, I also plan to just "go with the flow" of things and not set the bar too high.

Burnout is no joke, it's just really easy to ignore when you're excited :)

4. Previous update

Update for the week ending 2016-11-11

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