Why I am thinking of being a STEEM witness ?
I am a newbie on STEEM but fairly experienced when it comes to blockchains and distributed systems in general. I had seen the post about Steemit.com an year back and checked the code on github etc. Since I have some background with online advertising the idea struck me but I didn't sign up for the platform as it was asking for my phone number. Later this year the wired.com article on the steemit.com had made me check the platform once again. The idea of combining blockchain and social networking was really impressive. Around the time I was experimenting with the Brave browser and the basicattencoins from Brave sounded very promising. To my suprprise Steem came up with the idea of SMTs. For me this was looked very promising as the STEEM opportunity seemed like the one offered by barter platforms like VirtualBarter (disclaimer I am Technical Architect of the platform) combined with the models like simbi.com and finally the facebook/twitter model where people interact with each other based on the content. I feel with the advent of SMT's announced by @ned recently, STEEM will also be able to bring in features of BasicAttentionTokens. The opportunities looks to be unlimited.
I stumpled on a post by @gtg regarding the need for runing more STEEM nodes and that's when I looked into the details and setup up a seednode. Its being running for a close to 20 days now. I had also setup a witness node and been observing the load on it and traffic for last 21 days. I just wanted to be part of the community and contribute and I must say that I was part lazy and part unsure about the witness program as such. I was quite interested in looking at the block chain, the logs etc and even posted about it few times.
What made me take the red pill now ?
Though I was lazy and hesistant, yesterday two things happned.
- I listed to an online radio program by @buckydurddle which discussed about the opportunites STEEM provides to musicians.
- The second one was the beautiful initiative from @stephen-somers who is donating his STEEM earnings to Kiva.org !
(A photo from Attappadi, Kerala, India)
Few of my friends are looking to raise funds for a region called Attappadi in Kerala, India where the triabl community is dieing of malnutrition. I have thought of many ways to help but all in vein due to various reasons. I think this is generating revenue via running STEEM nodes could be a wonderful attempt. I am yet to discuss the details with my friends who are working in the region but I will mostly work with an NGO in the area which is now running community kitchn and teaching the tribal community on manufacuturing umbrellas. I will be donating a percentage of all the revenue from the witness program to NGOs atleast for the first 3 months. (I may have to get a better idea about the costs and make changes accordingly at a later stage.)
Who Am I?
From the other witness posts I understand its required share details about once ability to manage the nodes.
- a Computer Science Engineer by education, work and passion
- He had the fortune to handle the University Network with 5000+ students from 2000-2003 which I still consider as the toughest as pretty much everyone was attempting to get online and play games and my job was to block them from doing so!
- He has worked in the Telecommunication and Networking domains with an MNC
- He was First Programmer of a very successful cloud computing company
- He is a long term FOSS enthusiast with background in unicode fonts and input methods
- Occasional consultant to law enforcement on network - telecom security
- Co-Founder & CTO the first webTV platform in India by the name IndiaVibes.TV
- In 2016 he won an award for "Innovative Entrepreneur of the Year"
- He is a passionate traveler with interests in people and history & I take photos while I travel
- He has won handful awards in Photography and has 2 Solo Photography exhibitions and 2 curated photo exhibitions to his credit
- Currently he has a team of passionate engineers working on cutting edge products on Virtual Reality, Financial Systems and E-commerce
- A long intro is here
Technical Setup
Currently I am running a seed node on Amazon's EC2 cloud & a witness node on DigitalOcean. The seed node uses inbuilt fail over mechanism using a load balancer.
Witness node is monitored with Nagios for CPU/RAM/IO/FileSystem performance and currently requires manual intervention on failures. In the future, a high availability configuration will be attempted if required.
RAM: 16 GB
CPU: 8 cores / CPUs
Storage: 160GB SSD with backups
Network: 1gbit/s
Monthly Bandwidth: 6TB
Location: USA with geo-redundant backups to AWS
(Current uptime stats for the Witness node)
(A screen grab of the block chain when I started writing the post)
Why Vote for me ?
I am hopping to use my technical skills and give back to the society in whatever ways I can. Running reliable seed nodes for the block chain and witness for fast processing of the transactions makes it possible for all the wonderful things thats happening. So your votes to me can contribute to maintain a healthy blockchain and my attempt to contribute in however little ways I can.
How to Vote ?
- Go to the witness page here: https://steemit.com/~witnesses
- then,
Contact details outside of Steem:
Website : https://freebird.in
Identity : https://keybase.io/bobinson
!steemitworldmap 12° 59' 0" N lat 77° 35' 0" E long description d3scr
We need more witness with technical background. Welcome aboard.
Cheers,
@yehey
@yehey thank you very much
Upvoted on behalf of @thehumanbot and it's allies. Consider doing some charity by contributing to me so that I can spread the love to new steemians. Contact my operator @sanmi on Steemit chat for more details...
interesting post!
Congratulations! This post has been upvoted from the communal account, @minnowsupport, by bobinson from the Minnow Support Project. It's a witness project run by aggroed, ausbitbank, teamsteem, theprophet0, someguy123, neoxian, followbtcnews/crimsonclad, and netuoso. The goal is to help Steemit grow by supporting Minnows and creating a social network. Please find us in the Peace, Abundance, and Liberty Network (PALnet) Discord Channel. It's a completely public and open space to all members of the Steemit community who voluntarily choose to be there.
Good skill
Keep going
Wow truely humbled that my small contribution to the Steemit community and KIVA would inspire you to become a witness. I always feel a bit left out due to my lack of technical ability but it’s incredible the number of highly skilled and generous people I’ve met here on Steemit.
I was aware of Kiva for a while but it seems in India they are operating via other NGOs. As a matter of principle I always wanted to work directly with people than organizations. In this case I know the people who is associated and they are not in it for making profit and I could connect the dots after reading your post. In the past we were able to do few such initiatives which went really well and I am hopping to see similar success with this. Appreciate your thoughts and thankful to you!
Yes globally Kive use on ground in country partners to source and manage the projects that will be supported by the people who lend through KIVA. I like that you choose the project or person you wish to help with your loan contribution and get updates on their progress as they pay back the loans.
understood. Though for NGOs there is a overhead. Somehow I was able to find people who were working without that overhead. One initiative that essentially made me understand was this one : https://www.flickr.com/groups/297126@N24/discuss/72157603968908084/
it was 10 years ago. After the initiative started, I had to travel abroad but other volunteers continued the effort. We were so successful that we could also help another organization. All the travel, transportation, phone calls and such items that usually creates overhead was taken care by the volunteers.
Good luck! The witnesses play an important role for sure!
thank you :) @brian.rrr
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STOPgood. i already voted you as witness. i am resteeming the post so that it reaches more and more. your cause is noble. all the best.
Thank you so much @nagavolu
Hay my friend welcome here and I do understand why you want to be witness and it's seems that you really want a good change steemit. And we do support for you welcome my friend
This post has received a 0.05 % upvote from @drotto thanks to: @bobinson.
Yes man bravo
Gr8
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One of my favorite days on Steemit was watching you type this live. For that my friend you get my Witness vote on the write in list with other greats. One day maybe my own name will appear! Congratulations and may your life be blessed every day!
Need to add @neoxion mr @steemthat.
Very Happy Day Watching This Live!
thank you @binkley
If our members all stick together and support each other and help each other grow we will make great changes in the world one day! I help a member set-up an auto curation account and a promotion upvote bot this weekend so far. Plus helped other with writing tips. First hand interactions with people that have questions will grow SteemThat.com. We have picked up 30 members in 24 hours.
Wonderful. I have just voted you for witness. Wish to see you in top 100 soon.
thank you!
Thanks everyone .... We are at position 232 as per Streemian.info (a cool tool by @drakos)
You have my vote dude. Steem on!
thank you so much!
bobison bonita iniciativa me gusta tu aporte a las ONG vote por ti amigo exitos