Witness Spotlight: @reggaemuffin

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After the Hard Fork 20 fallout, I posted that we all needed to step our game up. While many wanted to blame Steemit, I proposed that it was not their fault. My knee-jerk reaction was to focus upon the Witnesses who approved the Hard Fork and implemented it. Yet, ultimately, the fault did not lie there.

Instead, it was on us, the community.

We are the ones who put the Witnesses in place. Thus, it is up to us to educate ourselves about what is going on so that we can vote those who best reflect what we believe.

To do my part, I will periodically post an article spotlighting someone I voted for.

@reggaemuffin is someone who joined a few months before I did in May of 2017. What I am posting here is a result of reading through what is posted, I have not had any direct conversation with @reggaemuffin.

So what are some of the things that make this a candidate for a Witness vote?

To start, @reggaemuffin is a programmer. I think many would agree this is a good starting point. As I will show there are a number of projects that are a result of the efforts of this Witness that are of benefit to the blockchain.

One thing to point out was in a post from last month. Here are a few of the highlights:

For a long time now I planned on overhauling my witness node, making it future proof and ready for the new hard forks. While there is still some time for 64GB nodes to shine, my witness is now running on 128GB of RAM.

Being a non-geek, I cannot tell you what kind of difference a 128GB node provides as compared to 64GB. What I do understand is getting ahead of the curve. While the 64GB nodes still are practical and working, @reggaemuffin upgraded already. To me, this really shows someone who is giving things some thought.

If you want to see the rest of the upgrades done:

https://busy.org/@reggaemuffin/upgrading-my-witness-to-128gb-and-appbase

As a part of the Steem community, one of the issues that many point to is voting bots. This is something that didn't go unnoticed. @reggaemuffin started a voting guild of handpicked people to upvote content they thought to be quality. Basically it is a manual curation trail using some fairly decent SP.

One thing that I noticed is the 30 minute voting placed by the account. This gives smaller accounts plenty of time to upvote before the 250K SP account votes, providing greater curation returns.

https://busy.org/@reggaemuffin/want-great-curation-rewards-introducing-the-reggaemuffin-awesome-authors-guild

https://beta.steemvoter.com/explore/guild/reggaemuffin/

I like when one sees a problem and seeks to solve it.

Not surprising when you read this in a post:

• ‎Stop crying reward pool rape and fucking do something. Should steem require witch hunts to survive then the system is flawed. Getting away from a linear curve and delegation could help, but more discussion is needed.

Get uncomfortable, buckle up, this will be a bumpy ride and there will be no heroes or villains, only humans.

https://busy.org/@reggaemuffin/some-thoughts-on-voting-and-bots

Now we can get to the nuts and bolts of the entire issue.

Hard Fork 20 woke a lot of people up. It made many of us aware of the importance of placing out votes for Witnesses who are deserving of being in the Top 20. This is where the power to change things lies.

After the mess with Hard Fork 20, @reggaemuffin wrote a telling post publicly stating changes and commitments.

I won't go the details since the post spells them out in easyto-read bullet points. My main point of emphasis is on the fact that @reggaemuffin took the time to analyze the situation and proposed solutions. This is what is needed on this blockchain. Also, there is a commitment as to what will be done if Top 20 Witness status is achieved.

With the problems associated with the Hard Fork, at least at implementation, it is good to see someone who is working at pushing the idea of more in-depth testing before any new releases.

https://busy.org/@reggaemuffin/witness-statement-for-reggaemuffin-proposing-hardfork-adoption-requirements

Finally, as I was working on this piece, this gem was posted.

We all know that the Steemit development team is responsible for the coding on the blockchain. There is no outside coding that takes place. Up pull tickets submitted are on their GitHub repository meaning nobody outside Steemit can create patches.

@reggaemuffin is addressing this. We now see the creation of SteemCommunity on GitHun which is a new repository for the Steem Community. This will allow pull tickets to be posted in there and patches developed by community members. This takes some of the burden off the Steemit development team. It also serves to decentralize some of the work which is always a good thing.

So for the last days, I was busy creating a community repository for the Steem blockchain code, complete with continuous integration, tests, and documentation.

Test coverage is automatically reported and creating additional tests for the blockchain is encouraged.

The plan for this new repository is to be a hub for all developers to contribute to. They get immediate automated feedback and later reviews from their peers. Accepted pull requests can be sent upstream to steemit/steem. This way, the community repo also serves as a buffer to reduce the noise for dedicated blockchain devs.

https://busy.org/@reggaemuffin/introducing-the-steemcommunity-organization

Certainly, I hope all developers on here will take a look at this initiative and get behind it. There is a ton of talent on this blockchain which can do a tremendous job solving some of the technical problems this blockchain faces. There is no reason the more advanced members of the community, in terms of development skills, cannot collaborate with Steemit and assist them where needed.

To me, @reggaemuffin appears to be someone who is stepping up post-Hard Fork 20. The projects listed here are not all that I saw this individual tied to. However, I think I captured the essence of the dedication and commitment to the Steem blockchain.

One final note: I can't find where I saw it but in one of the posts it said that @reggaemuffin continually reviews the Witnesses voted for. This is important because I am sure a lot is seen that is not like but also, because, it provides an opportunity to learn from the other witnesses. To me, this is an important trait to have.

So, I can not tell anyone what to do; I can only relate my experience.

I can say I feel very comfortable knowing that I followed this suggestion.

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Images from posts linked in article.