Dear Steemians,

Let me proudly introduce myself as a new witness. I am a new backup witness who just has started signing on blocks 2 days ago, who is ranked around 80th and generates just around 5 blocks a day, which I have never missed so far. Smooth start, and I am pretty sure that my service will be constantly smooth. Huge thanks to the dedicated witness @clayop for his sincere support.

Who Am I

I am a full stack software engineer with more than 15 years of experience. I started writing code using gw-basic when I was like 10 years old , and then have been surviving through the all the software engineering revolutions until now. I started my career with the prehistoric web development and then became a hardcore C++ programmer. Being a C++ backend developer, I have gone through telecom, broadcasting, security sectors with the high obsession with the performance but finally got out from the black and white world and joined a startup company to learn the super cool web technology stacks, clouds, containers etc. Currently, I live in London, working for Amazon UK as a full stack software engineer. Now I am really into the cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies, and eager to jump into the rocket before it is too late.

Apart from the technical background, I am a runner, swimmer and a dog lover. I am especially seriously crazy for the black labrador retriever.

[Ggamji, a lovely lady of my dear Steemian @allpass]

How am I contributing to STEEM community

I have been an active user at Steemit for the last 8 months. Not surprisingly I read, write, curate, code and help newbies on steemit.com. But what I actually do for the community is slightly extraordinary than this.

Peaceful War on Spam

Due to the high rank, "kr" tag has been seriously abused by the other steemians who do not even understand what that means. Korean community took that matter very seriously because the situation seriously discouraged new Korean steemians joining. There were lots of downvotes and arguments that would have never been able to solve the situation peacefully.

In order to release the tensions, I invented @krguidedog which is a bot helping the Korean channel to be more usable and enjoyable. The bot tries to communicate with the authors, and persuade them not to add a "kr" tag in their posts if they think it is unrelated to Korea. Majority of the authors said they were just using "kr" because the tag was one of the top-ranked tags, and promised to stop using it.

@krguidedog is now providing multiple commands for:

• cheering up the other good authors with a friendly comment and 0.6 STEEM
• promoting outstanding postings by voting and resteeming
• welcoming new steemians and introducing him/her to everyone

Now @krguidedog only serves the KR community, but it could fit very well to Japanese community as well. I guess SMT might make @krguidedog useless, but then I will be even happier because we will own a cleaner community automatically. @krguidedog will happily retire. :)

Korean Translation

Average Korean tend to feel uncomfortable when they are using non-translated websites, which results in not returning to the service. Steemit.com was the one of the sites. I decided to drive the Korean translation project, and successfully delivered the 3rd revision of the Korean translation. I am going to start the 4th revision soon.

Related commit to condenser:
https://github.com/steemit/condenser/commit/ff0e50fa7e6957a4cbb1b1fd7ec36055262e5207
Pull Request:
https://github.com/steemit/condenser/pull/2169

I believe the Korean translation must have been definitely contributing to the increase of the Steemit account count.

Building useful tools

I've been playing with SteemJS and found it really exciting. No need to care of the backend and just start to code right away? Super awesome. So I've dived into it and created some useful tools. These are not fully mature yet but still useful. Especially "Steem Insight" can be quite interesting for everyone who wants to know more about their Steemit life.

Just give it a try for fun!
https://ianpark.github.com/steeme

My Witness Server

Server on Google Cloud
CPU/Memory: Intel Haswell 4 vCPUs, 26 GB memory
Storage: 750GB SSD (Raid0, 375GB x 2)
Location: US East

I prefer using cloud than any other options. Although it is more pricy, the great flexibility and the scalability cannot be beaten. Currently my server is fully capable for handling my duty. Once I get to the stage to afford and need a backup node, I can instantiate the side nodes and that's it.

Why not using AWS but using the competitors service? Because it's expensive, and no employee discount. :P

Why Vote on @asbear for witness?

I am a very capable person to deal with this job. I do understand how the high throughput backend system works. I do understand most of the fundamental network protocols, languages and the majority of the technologies that STEEM is built on. If not, I believe that I can learn very fast.

My short term goals are:

• Becoming a good and trusted witness
• Continuing supporting Korean community
• Providing my Guidedog service to Japanese community, which is also a huge market for Steemit.

My long term vision is contributing the STEEM projects with my software engineering experiences. I will build up the necessary knowledges and experiences while I am performing the backup witness.

My long journey has just begun.

Please support me:

If you think I can be a good witness, please vote on me through this link:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses