Witness Update - 9 OCT 2017: Towards a Stronger Foundation => @precise

I could not believe it was just 27 days ago since I launched my Witness proposal (with the motivation from @tjpezlo). It felt ages ago and so much had happened.

Before my witness turn a month old, I reckon this is the right time to set my short term goals towards becoming a successful STEEM blockchain witness.

What has happened so far?

• Culture shocked
  To be honest, I was kind of shocked when I joined the community. I was an introvert and campaigning for my witness was not my strongest suit. I'm used to working on the background and showing my efforts through deeds.
• Time Demanding
  Being a miner of PoW altcoins, I was biased and could not help but compare. Setting up the server was not the most time consuming part, but connecting with the community is taking most of my time. From keeping up-to-date with the latest news and discussions at #witness on the steemit.chat, to joining and interacting with fellow steemians on the discord server. On a positive note, I found myself slowly improving in terms of human-to-human interaction. Almost everyday we have new users joining on @steemph Discord Server who needed guidance and tips on steemit. I know how it feels to be full of questions and wishing everyone was approachable and responsive, so I make it a point to check discord even during the breaks from my day job.
• Fast-paced
  Steemit's growth as analysed by @arcange has been exponential. The direct effect hit the requirements of maintaining the witness nodes. Before an 8GB RAM was sufficient but it's no longer the case now. And later on, maybe in a few weeks or so, we might need to upgrade to a minimum of 32GB! It is exciting of course! who knows what challenges await us :)

However excited I was, I felt my shortcomings...

The best part of failing is knowing a thing or two, that you should not be doing.

... but I will persist

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Building the Foundation

Towards a stronger foundation, these 3 points are my priorities

• On self-improvements

1. My journey with steemit and @steemph community has been rewarding so far (if not the best I ever had) and it's beyond the monetary value. It doesn't bother me how much SBD I have right now nor the VP/SP in my wallet, because beyond the quantitative value, I know I can offer so much of qualitative value. Nevertheless, I know I needed to improve on my Time Management skills given that I have to attend to my day job.

• For the Community

1. Hosting of Weekly AMA (Ask Me Anything)
   As part of my community observations, people tend to learn more when there is an active interaction. So, I thought of doing a LIVE Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessions on the Steemit Philippines Discord Server. This is a modified AMA wherein, each week I will make myself available for at least 1-2 hours and prepare hot topics, issues and anything under-the-sun, concerning steemit and being a steemian. If a schedule permits, I'm also looking at inviting resource persons during the AMA. The first episode will be on 18th of October next week. Keep an eye for the specifics which will be posted later this week.

2. Collaborative projects with @steemph
   Also later this week, as soon as I have gathered my data and talking points, I will arrange a talk with the @steemph core to discuss, new and exciting collaboration projects to better serve it's community.

• Towards a better infrastructure

1. Server Upgrades
   Thanks to @someguy123, I finally got my new server hosted at @privex. My witness node is now running on a 16GB RAM,4-core VPS. This basically doubled the memory of my previous server and the good thing about it... it's also cheaper meaning I can allocate the extra funds for a new backup server node.

2. Encourage @steemph community to beta test the staging site of steemit.com for latest code updates and new features.
   The recent outages of steemit, underscore the importance of working together with the steemit developers. How can you participate you ask?
   Beta testing new updates and features ensures that bugs are found and fixed before they are implemented on the production site. So I encourage everyone to do our part in helping @steemitdev to test new features at https://steemitstage.com.

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persistence pays off

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If you think I deserve your witness vote, cast it here https://steemit.com/~witnesses and be guided with the image below.