The Witness Files - Issue 2 with @riverhead

Welcome to the second issue of the Witness Files with @riverhead

In this series, I will be interviewing some of our top witnesses, to get an insight into who they are and what they do.

For today’s issue of the Witness Files, I interviewed @riverhead, currently the top ranked witness.

If you missed the first issue with @complexring, you can read it here.

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Hi James, thank you for taking the time to chat with me.

Tell me a bit about yourself; who is @riverhead?

Hi Jimmy, thanks for taking the time to interview me. I feel it’s very important for the community to know who their witnesses are, where they came from, and how they’re doing their bit for Steem.

I’m a forty-two-year-old computer geek with a BSc in Computer Science from the University of Western Ontario, Canada. I left twenty years of corporate life behind to focus on crypto projects. My introduction to crypto came back in late 2012 from a friend of mine who overheard a conversation about Bitcoin while working as a waiter. I immediately consumed every bit of information I could find; I was hooked. Fast forward a few months and I was heating my house with pile of GPU miners. The more I got involved in various projects and made new friends in the crypto space the more I realized this was where I belonged. I had found my people.

When you’re not on Steemit, what do you enjoy doing?

These days there aren’t many hours that aren’t Steeming or sleeping! My fiancé and I live in a home with a garage where I spend my free time wrenching on whatever old motorcycle or car happens to have found its way there. I am at best a poor shade-tree mechanic but the juxtaposition to crypto work is cathartic. My most ambitious project was bringing a 2004 Honda VFR back to life after having been destroyed in a warehouse fire. I’ve been meaning to write a post about that project. Here is a before picture but the after will have to wait for the post!

Burnt VFR project

My fiancé and I also enjoy getting away for weekend Kayaking trips with big plans to someday do an actual multi-day adventure. Someday…

Are you currently an employee of Steemit Inc? If so, how did you become an employee at Steemit HQ?

This is something I actually get asked a lot and I appreciate the opportunity to set the record straight. I am not an employee of Steemit Inc. and therefore I do not work at Steemit HQ. Over the last few years I’ve been involved with various projects related to technology from that office (ProtoShares, BitShares, Muse, Graphene, etc.), have a good relationship with the folks there, but have never actually worked for them. Many people confuse Riverhead with Roadscape who does work there so perhaps he can be the subject of your next interview.

How did you first become a witness?

Since April I have bounced in and out of the witness list a dozen times or so. In the beginning when Steem was in its infancy I mined the name Riverhead and sold a bunch of other crypto tokens and bought my way in. That lasted about two days and I was quickly voted out. I was deeply involved in another project at the time (https://makerdao.com) and also in the process of leaving my corporate job so I didn’t have the time to focus on mining. I kick myself every day for that as by the time I came back to mining the early days were long gone. Eventually I earned the trust and support of enough whales to get myself voted back in (and then out, and in, and out, then back in again).

For non-tech-savvy people like myself, can you explain in layman’s terms what is your role as a witness, and what does a typical day look like? As a witness I have two main roles, one technical and one not. The technical aspects are maintaining a stable node that signs blocks as well as providing a price feed. The non-technical, and in my opinion, more important roles are to be a visible member of the community and to use witness funds to sponsor community projects or otherwise strengthen the Steem ecosystem.

My day-to-day involves keeping up to date with the community, the crypto space as a whole (yes, there is a world outside Steemit – or so I’ve heard), and fussing with software, severs, etc., to perform the two roles stated earlier. There always seems to be something that can be scripted, improved, discussed, migrated, updated, broken, and fixed. I love it! In my corporate gig I was a clock watcher. With Steem, along with my other crypto projects, I work twelve hour days and want for more time in the day.

From your witness application post, I can see that you have had a lot of experience being a witness on other projects. In your mind, what do you think makes a top witness?

Being a positive force in the community but mostly being present in the community. Witnesses that get elected and then bugger off to who knows where aren’t earning their keep in my humble opinion. In other delegated proof-of-stake projects the witness lists are much longer on platforms with a lot less popularity. This allows people to hide in the crowd and not do much other than keeping a server up and running. With Steem’s few nineteen elected positions combined with a very popular first platform (steemit.com) it’s harder for “Just keeping the lights on” witnesses to hide.

In the early days of Steem I had bumped heads with @nextgencrypto a lot on this and I’d like to take this opportunity to publicly say he had the right of it and I was wrong. We’re all learning and growing as a community.

What Steem-related projects are you currently working on? And what new features/projects can the Steemit community look forward to in the next few months?

There are a few ways to be involved in Steem projects as a witness: Do them yourself, join another project, or support a project you are otherwise uninvolved with. The biggest on-going project, and my most visible contribution, is steemit.chat. Together with the help of @firepower, @ash, @pfunk, @acidyo, @steemitqa, @complexring, @gandalf, @smooth, and most recently @rocket.chat we are giving the steem community a place to hang out and collaborate.

@firepower has stepped up to take on the large task of growing steemit.chat into a much larger community. I don’t want to steal his thunder so you’ll have to ask him about his plans!

Thanks for taking the time to chat with me.

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Hope you enjoyed this interview with @riverhead.

For more interviews with our witnesses, follow me @nextgen622.

To vote for a witness, you can go here https://steemit.com/~witnesses

Jimmy