my witness thread

my witness thread - bobinson

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 ?