Hello and welcome to the HexTech witness introduction. We are a new witness, managed by 
I've first joined Steem on September of 2016, shortly after launch. I was quite interested with the idea of blockchain and crypto after having used bitcoin since 2013-2014ish. I stumbled upon Steem and joined in, and was the first chain that I felt like had a community around it, mainly because of the social aspect of it.
Around late 2017, I started developing small tools for Steem. Most of them were just for me to learn how to program, small things like token distribution bots. I continued to learn and get better at it, and eventually I started making bots that have actually been used. Votefun(Githlub Link) is a bot of mine that sees use in discord. I also worked on the SBI lookup bot for discord. Soon, I made the SBI Lookup API that has since been integrated into SteemPeak(and now into PeakD). I've also worked with other projects and have made bots for them, including Qurator. I previously was also a witness for whaleshares, reaching top 20 for a short period of time, but retired from that position as I didn't like the direction that the chain was heading towards.
My biggest project has been GiftGiver, which helps provide users who are low on Resource Credits a delegation in order to help them continue interacting with the chain. The witness that we are running will be helping to fund this and to make GiftGiver better and with more of what I envisioned it to be, including an account creation portal for new users to join in with.
I first came to Steem during that fateful 2017 bull run when Bitcoin hit $20k. This was a sign for me that crypto was no longer a fringe programmer's play thing and instead a new financial system that would eventually replace the legacy economy. Since then I have struggled for the past few years to learn as much as I can and try to bring value to this fledgling network.
My main focus is on gaming. I've always been an avid gamer. I see cryptocurrency as a tool that can be used to increase the value of gaming by a thousand fold. By decentralizing ownership of online digital assets, intellectual property, and non-fungible gaming tokens, we can create systems who's inherent value is derived by community ownership rather than corporate dictatorship.
I have several big ideas and several small ideas on this front. I hope to gain traction on some of the smaller ideas so that I may one day fund something a bit more grandiose. Also, in the quest to complete my smaller projects I'll be looking to create building-block modules that can be reused in subsequent projects. The most effective type of development involves creating this reusable code.
Unfortunately, I've found that this space is so underdeveloped it becomes difficult to focus on my main objectives. We absolutely require better documentation and tutorials so that others may come here and build with as little overhead costs as possible.
I'm also working on my own reputation system that would be combined with a basic frontend for viewing information on the blockchain. We've all seen how broken the trending tabs are. They must be customized and improved (much like Facebook). However, unlike Facebook, these features must also be decentralized and open-access.
I have many paths to followup on, and I believe that this partnership will get me focused and producing results rather than engaging in the never-ending creation of unrealized potential. The bar has been set high, and I plan to deliver.
Hello all,
As far as what I've done since being on the platform, met alot of people to talk on discord and other chat apps. Something I'm not happy about, I believe we should be using the platform for platform things, we don't need backdoors and secrecy... I've started blokz.io, which aims to be a self-help/personal development and growth based platform with various integration with hive, what exists so far is https://profile.blokz.io which is essentially a personal profile first front end to hive, which is slowly getting my love and attention, as I tend to be more of a "done is better then perfect" type, MVP / Agile style.
I do have a lot of plans and idea's for Hive, which aside from this obvious blogging platform, is an amazing decentralized CRUD (thats create, read, update, delete) database, with versioning built in, I imagine things like version control apps (think GIT), personal information management apps (google keep or microsoft onenote), file storage apps (Hive for the organizing file lists, and addresses and IPFS to store the data) these types of apps. Most of this can be achieved with the keys we already posses, tag a file or note private and its encrypted with your primate memo key, etc... The frontend being an app on our phone or web app (static site, github hosted), and the back end being hive. We just need to build the bridges that make these things happen, all the tools are already here.
We all have separate projects that we are working on. We will all be working on them, but also have some plans on what we are going to make together for the betterment of the chain. Our witness will help fund them as well as help with their growth.
GiftGiver account creation portal: We'll be helping onboard new users once this is complete.
Running a full node. Currently, there's not enough full nodes being run. Each full node helps ensure that users of the chain can get data and send data to the chain. To help with that, we'll be running a full node.
Currently we are using the Privex-Node-In-A-Box to run our witness. As we continue to rise, we'll be upgrading our server and getting a backup witness as well, but this server will do the job at our current rank.
There's a few ways to cast a witness vote. The easiest of which will be to use hivesigner. All you have to do is click this link and https://hivesigner.com/sign/account-witness-vote?witness=hextech&approve=1 sign it with your active key.
If you use Hive.blog can also go onto https://wallet.hive.blog/~witnesses, scroll to the bottom, and then type our name in and hit vote.
Finally, if you are a PeakD user, head over to https://peakd.com/me/witnesses and look for us using either the searchbar on the right(name is hextech) or looking for us on the list(we are around rank 100).
