Hey all. I guess it was time for me to go witness after all. Let me tell you more about myself first.

My Journey:

I joined Steemit back when I was still an engineering student. Knowing very little coding as well as having very little blogging skills, it was a struggle. My initial posts are evident of this. Consequently, I became dormant until 2020.

A couple of things changed for me in 2020. The lockdown gave me a lot of time to explore the decentralized world and I had just started building real-world apps. Seeing others do the same over here, gave me the push to start doing the same here.

Since my comeback in 2020, I have developed several tools exclusively for the Steem blockchain as well as taken charge of several initiatives as well.

^Scribe

1- Scribe : This is a tool that gives us the entire edit history of any post on the Steem blockchain.


^{Tag Searcher}

2- TagSearcher : This is a tool that was built to streamline the crypto academy initiative of the Steemit team.


^{Steem Income Report}

3- Steem Income Report : This is a tool that gives you the total steem/sbd/tron that you earned between the set dates.
4- Affable Bot - A bot has been running on one of my servers which helps automate the whole of Project Affable. Since this contest is open worldwide, having an automated tool to get the results really saves a lot of time for the organizers.
5- Automation scripts: I have also written several automated scripts that have helped us get the engagement stats, the voting patterns, etc. These scripts have helped save a lot of time for the BOI moderators.
6- Fight Against Plagiarism : I have also worked closely with @the-gorilla and @endingplagiarism to help curb plagiarism here in Steemit. We have definitely brought it down greatly.

I have also been actively reporting bugs in the steem hivemind APIs over here. This ensures that everyone is aware of why things are going wrong.

Well, building apps that others out there used was great. But it wasn't enough. I did face a number of performance issues along the way. I tried my best to resolve them in my apps. However, this was when I first connected with @steemchiller and it just clicked. My thirst for more knowledge kept growing.

I knew that working on the steem network is where I want to spend a lot of my time. Every time I speak to a witness, I discover things that I never know before and become more curious. What fascinated me the most was being able to use my own node as a data source for my apps. This is when I decided to run my own nodes for data.

Being able to connect with more like-minded who don't get irritated by your stupid geeky questions(@steemchiller, @ilnegro, @ety001, @xpilar) is simply amazing. I hope to learn more from them about the workings of Steem and contribute to its development in the future.

My Witness Node Config:

Currently, my node is running on a setup with(Backup node)
CPU : 8 cores,
RAM : 30 GB,
SSD : 800 GB,
Networking: 600 Mbit/s Port

I will soon be running on another setup of:(Main node)
Intel® Core™ i7-8700 Hexa-Core Coffee Lake
128 GB DDR4 RAM
2 x 1 TB NVMe SSD
1 Gbit/s bandwidth

OS on both machines is Ubuntu 20.04

This setup would ensure a reliable witness setup.

This configuration opens up a whole new world of development and I can't wait to tackle that. If you wish to support me in this journey, do vote for me as your witness. You can vote for a total of 30 different witnesses.

Vote for @starlord28 as witness
or search for @starlord28 here https://steemit.com/~witnesses

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