The Interview Showcase #110: Exclusive Talk with A South Korean Steem witness

This week, I had some productive conversation with @joviansummer from South Korea who owned the @jswit witness on Steem. You must have come across the automated @jswit witness message after a vote from the account. Well, he owns that.

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: Hi Joviansummer it's my pleasure to welcome you to my Show today, how will you describe yourself?

🔶Joviansummer : Thank you for having me on your interview. I'm @joviansummer, hobbyist developer and Steem witness(account: @jswit) from South Korea. I spend more time with computers than people(not a very social person), and I hardly use any SNS other than Steemit(and occasionally Blurt). In that sense, I'm kind of all-in Steemian. I have a full time job as an engineer, so I work on Steem in my spare time mostly.

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: Please tell me, what does your experience in Steemit be like?

🔶Joviansummer : I came to know about Steem as a blockchain based SNS in 2020, but I didn't pay much attention at first because I was not interested in SNS in general. A while later, in 2021, I signed up just purely out of curiosity, and then got really fascinated by its APIs. I was studying python programming language at that time, so I decided do dev projects on Steem with python for my coding practice. And here I am, still on Steemit after 3 years. Steemit, to me, is a big learning experience of coding/dev study. I guess majority of people are here to engage in community. My path on Steem is a bit different, but still I'm really grateful for my journey.

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: You introduced "STEEM.NFT" two years ago which looks like a promising project, what inspired you to come up with this project?

🔶Joviansummer : Obviously Steemit(SNS/blog) is a core part of Steem blockchain, but Steem's APIs have a big potential to do other things. When NFTs on Ethereum chain was getting popular, I was wondering if something similar could be done on Steem chain also. Not in terms of speculation and gambling, but in terms of preservation of digital arts. STEEM.NFT is an experimental project which will save your own digital images(photos/arts) to a decentralized internet storage called IPFS (InterPlanetary File System, https://ipfs.tech/) and write a proof of your creation/ownership on Steem blockchain.

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: Is it still active?

🔶Joviansummer : Yes, it's active and the server is still running. It would be better if I could provide a dedicated web front-end for this service, but unfortunately my web dev experience is pretty shallow. Thus, NFT creation/transfer is done via Steemit wallet which is a bit tedious. You can get more information from the following post:

STEEM.NFT - Preserve your art on Steemit & IPFS
(https://steemit.com/hive-185836/@joviansummer/33zbae-steem-nft-preserve-your-art-on-steemit-and-ipfs)

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: You are among the the top 50 witnesses on steemit, what are some of the developments you have contributed to the Steemit ecosystem which you feel could interest users to support your witness?

🔶Joviansummer : I have a few dev projects, and hopefully some of them may be useful to you and others.

First, you can visit https://steemit.vercel.app. Currently there are 3 functions: post search, information about useful Steem services, and recent posts within up to 24 hours. The "recent posts" function was developed when Steemit was suffering from the problem of not showing your recent posts. Now that the problem is gone, the first 2 functions are still useful but I just left the third function as is.

Additionally, I'm maintaining my own voting service called JSUP(service account: @jsup). JSUP has a unique feature which will let you share your SP delegation with others by specifying beneficiaries(friends, family members, etc). Voting service itself is a form of self-voting, but with JSUP you can split your delegation and give upvotes to others. I think this feature is important because when everybody is doing self-voting only without supporting others could undermine community as a whole.

You can get more information from the following posts:

• Steemit-Search: a simple website for post searching(https://steemit.com/hive-141029/@joviansummer/en-steemit-search-a-simple-website-for-post-searching)

• jsup 2.0 - make your upvote great again(https://steemit.com/hive-141029/@joviansummer/eng-jsup-2-0-make-your-upvote-great-again)

Also, I'm providing voting service and technical support for AVLE team(@avle). Finally, I recently started providing hourly report of missed blocks on witness Discord channel, using @steemchiller's SDS API.

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: One of your automated program always votes on users posts and drop a message and this seems not to go too well with most users, have you ever receive a compliant about that before? What's your say?

🔶Joviansummer : Yes. My witness account(@jswit) gives upvotes to users who voted for @jswit and automatically add replies. Actually fellow developer @etainclub suggested me to give users choice to turn off reply. Thus I implemented turn off feature. In @jwit's comments you'll see how to turn off. Write a reply to the comment with "@jswit reply-off".

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: Assuming you finally enter one of the spots of the top 20 witnesses, what would you like yo accomplish for the benefit of all?

🔶Joviansummer : I'm not sure I'll ever become top 20 witness, but if it happens, I think I want to do something that can attract new users and investors. For example, maybe I could develop a voting bot that will reward those who actually buy Steem and power-up. Or I could sponsor other Steemian's promising projects and initiatives. I can't do those things now because I'm operating at zero profit(if not at loss). Everything from voting service to witness node costs money.

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: Do you support charity, what type of charity do you sponsor? , do you have a criteria?

🔶Joviansummer : It's not much, but I sent Steem donations to regional events such as Steem Fest Korea a couple of times. I'm willing to continue my support in the future. Additionally, I support @kissteemkr with a portion of my witness account's SP by giving upvotes via JSUP's beneficiary feature. @kissteemkr is a South Korean project to help orphans, people with disabilities, etc. It's maintained by South Korean Steemian @epitt925.

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: What has been your greatest achievements in life and on the Steemit platform?

🔶Joviansummer : My greatest achievement in life is having a family. I'm married and have 2 sons. I'm trying my best to support my family and be a good, respectable father. Raising and mentoring kids is not an easy task, but it's worth every time and effort.

As for my achievment on Steemit, my python coding skill was greatly improved doing all those dev projects, and met some great people along the way. Besides, I learned a lot about linux system administration by operating witness node. It's mainly technical, because, as I told you, I'm kind of tech guy,😄.

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: What advice do you have for both new Steemains and those who are struggling to grow on the steemit platform?

🔶Joviansummer : Maybe you're asking a wrong person(tech nerd!), but I'll try my best. I would say this: use Steemit mainly to write and share your life's story or expertise rather than to earn money. If your primary goal is money or RoI(return on investment), you'll get tired quickly. If you can use Steemit regardless of getting upvotes or not, I think you have a good prospect.

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: What beautiful thing about your country can you share to the Steem community?

🔶Joviansummer : This is "tasty" rather than "beautiful", but I'll say this anyway: if you visit South Korea, try Korean-style fried chicken. There are various kinds and everyone loves it. I think foods are great in South Korea in general, but fried chicken is particularly great in my opinion.

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: What's your favorite music?