Witness Thread: jesta

Greetings steem! I'm jesta, but you can call me Aaron if you'd like. In an effort to experience all aspects of the steem platform, I am submitting myself as a witness for the steem network.

I have been a member of steemit.com for almost a month now and involved in cryptography since 2013. I haven't been this excited about the potential of a technology in a long time, probably since my original discovery of Bitcoin. I am diving deep, exploring and learning as much as possible about the people, the platform, and the poltics of steem as a whole.

My steem resume so far...

In order to give you a better idea of who I am and what I've been up to, here's a brief rundown of what I've accomplished since joining a month ago:

• Learned the in's and out's of mining steem.
• Created the prototype of SteemPress.io, a standalone application to run a blog off of the steem blockchain to learn how the content is stored.
• Created SteemStats.com for Account Monitoring & Statistics, a website attached to the steem blockchain, to learn how the rest of the data in the steem public APIs is accessed.
• A complete rewrite & open sourced SteemPress.io, allowing others to contribute and use the code how they see fit. It's still not complete by any means, but I think it'll end up being a pretty solid foundation.
• Created a community bounty for an awesome SteemPress.io theme. I wish it had gotten more attention, but it's not over yet! I've been engaging with the submissions so far and helping guide it's progress.
• Pubished a guide to setting up web nodes for steem, with everything I had learned working on steemstats and steempress.
• Teamed up with @xeroc to launch steem.ws, a public steem API cluster. Any developer can use our server cluster to access data from the steem blockchain.
• Became a contributor for steemit.com, developing the Following/Followers pages, as well as the prototype for the vote weight slider.
• Setup a seed node on seed.jesta.us to help propagate the steem network.
• Learned how to setup a witness node securely so I could submit this witness application.

Previous to all of this... I've also build hundreds of websites, dozens of community platforms, started a few businesses, and managed the distributed infrastructure for websites with millions of visitors a day. Most recently I worked in the video game industry, specifically focused on online experiences for communities. I think I've been around the internet once or twice in my 20 year career, and I'm excited that blockchain technologies are slowly becoming a part of my history :)

What's up next?

I have an unhealthy amount of ideas, as do a lot of people here. My current focus is a new project that will be very complimentary to SteemStats. This new project is also helping me refine the code that SteemPress will end up using someday. I also plan to continue contributing to steemit.com, to learn more python so I can help with @xeroc's piston effectively, and create some interesting experiments surrounding steem.

If I had to pick 3 things to state as my "goals" within the steem community, it would be as follows:

1. Using my abilities as a web developer and sysadmin to enhance the quality of life for everyone I can. Whether that's on my 3rd party sites or on steemit.com itself, whatever is best for the community as a whole.
2. Participate thoughtfully in the community, kill trolls with kindness, and help share the knowledge I've acquired in my journey. I also plan on trying to branch out and discuss other topics that aren't quite as nerdy.
3. Increase growth and engagement within the community, including slowly introducing the other communities I manage into the steem ecosystem. I have been building community-centric websites for over 10 years now, which millions of people have participated in. I hope to bring that experience to bear here.

I feel these three goals are within my capabilities and will do my best to see them through.

In closing...

I'm excited to be here, and while I could probably keep talking forever about this kind of stuff, this post is already pretty long. I hope you've found the contributions I've made to the community so far valuable, and I hope to continue providing that value as long as it's needed and I'm able.

My goals right now as a witness are to experience the process and become more personally invested in steem. I have no goals to reach the top 19, but if I do, I promise my efforts will be even greater and I will treat the position with the utmost respect.

If you'd like to support me as a witness, you have my sincere thanks.

Anyone can vote, each user can choose up to 30 people to vote for, and there are two ways to do it:

1. Visit the Witness Voting Page, scroll to the bottom, and enter jesta and click the Vote button.
2. Using your cli_wallet, enter: vote_for_witness YOURACCOUNTNAME jesta true true

Update: Voting right now is somewhat confusing. So if you're interested in verifying your vote, you can see it on steemd.com either in the activity feed or in the left sidebar (if you scroll down). I think I may have to open a bug report because I believe if you vote twice, it uncasts your vote :/

Thank you. Also, thank you to the entire steemit community for being so welcoming :)