TimCliff Witness Update 2019-02-23

Hello Everyone!

It has been a long time since my last witness update, so I thought I'd take the time to let everyone know what I've been up to.

Non-Steem Stuff

• My spouse and I started a "hobby career" as antique dealers to generate some extra income. We are renting a 30 square foot space in an antique store in Stillwater Minnesota and making some extra money buying/selling antiques. It has been a lot of fun :)
• New job - I started a new job as a software developer / data engineer consultant for a company in the Twin Cities (Minnesota). It is a great job and I love it there.

Balancing Steem and "In Real Life" (IRL) Stuff

• Unfortunately, having to work a "real job" in addition to being a witness has meant less time for Steem. I'm still doing my best to balance all my Steem and non-Steem priorities to ensure that I still do a good job as witness. Monitoring all of my servers and ensuring 24x7x365 availability is still my top priority.

In terms of Steem activities, here is what I've been up to since my last witness post:

• All of my servers are currently running version 20.8.
• After the events surrounding hardfork 20, I created a set of Witness Hardfork Approval Standards.
• I continue to monitor and moderate the steem.chat "help" channel (along with the help of @drakos and several others), assisting the users who report issues there.
• I continue to spend a lot of time discussing potential changes and issues/concerns with stakeholders and users, in order to try and find the best ways to advance the platform and community forward.
• I was very involved behind the scenes with the discussions between Steemit, Inc. and the community regarding the various issues that the community has with Steemit, Inc. (including the powering down of Steemit, Inc.'s stake).
• I published a Steem Blockchain Development Lessons Learned 001 post with information about what I learned though the process of developing two changes for hardfork 20.
• I launched SteemEconomy.com, an up-to-date list of businesses that accept STEEM/SBD as a form of payment. I also submitted a pull request to add a link to this in the main menu of steemit.com.
• I did a review of all the available RPC nodes, and compiled an up to date list (as of August 2018) of all the active nodes. I submitted a pull request to update this list in the dev portal. (It is probably time to do another round of review on these again..)
• I ran a discussion thread to try and better understand What are reasons investors avoid STEEM?
• I created a SBD Explained post to help users understand the reasons behind keeping SBD (even in it's current form).
• I ran an Investor Focused Steem memes contest and Steem: The Gateway to Cryptocurrency Art/Graphic Design contest.
• I created an article It's time to start paying attention to Steem to try and help make the case for why investors should consider Steem.
• I organized Steem Blast Day to help get the word out about Steem.
• I encouraged community developers with Steem related apps to help support future hardfork testing by creating more tools on the testnet.
• I participated in several campaigns to try and encourage Coinbase to list Steem.
• I did several interviews with large Steem stakeholders as part of an Interview a Steem Stakeholder series.
• I ran a bounty which resulted in the successful creation of a multisignature transaction guide which will help facilitate more developments on Steem related to multisignature transactions.
• I submitted a condenser pull request to correct the text on the steemit.com witness page from 50 to 100 witnesses.
• I submitted a Steem pull request to update the default config value for shared-file-size to 54GB.
• I submitted a condenser pull request to update the text that shows to users when they run out of RCs after hardfork 20.
• I submitted pull requests to update the Steem whitepaper and condenser FAQ to be current based on the changes in hardfork 20.
• I submitted a Steem pull request to update the example config files that exchanges use to launch a new Steem blockchain node.
• I submitted a Steem pull request to fix the SBD print rate issue.
• I also opened several issues in the steem, condenser, steemconnect, devportal, and other Steem related repositories with various issue reports and enhancement suggestions.

Forward Looking Plans:

• I plan to continue providing support in the help channel of steem.chat.
• I plan to test and review the changes being proposed by @blocktrades for hardfork 21 once they are completed.
• I plan to continue running SteemEconomy.com.
• I plan to continue running my "full" RPC node.
• I plan to continue discussing potential changes and issues/concerns with stakeholders and users, in order to try and find the best ways to advance the platform and community forward.

Information / Suggestions / News:

• If you need a good tool to review the full edit history of a post or comment, check out the Steem Scribe tool from @drakos.
• If anyone you know is having trouble getting an account, check out Steem Ninja as an alternate option.
• If you are planning to be near the Minneapolis / St. Paul area on Saturday, March 30, 2019, @ddrfr33k is planning a Steem meetup. Details can be found here.
• @blocktrades is currently working on a change that will likely become the next hardfork (hardfork 21). You can read details about it here.
• If you haven't checked out the new Drug Wars game running on the Steem blockchain, you should check it out!

Summary of Current Witness Parameters:

• SBD Interest Rate: My interest rate is currently set to 0.
• Price Feed Bias: My price feed bias is also set to 0.
• Registration Fee: My registration fee is currently set to 3.0 STEEM.
• Maximum Block Size: I currently have my block size set to 65,536.

I welcome feedback if you think there are things that I can be doing better as a witness. If you think I am doing a great job, I would really appreciate your witness vote!

Thanks everyone for reading my witness report!