Hey guys, I just wanted to take some time to reflect on recent months, and share a few things that have been on my mind related to the upcoming months.
Over the past 1 year, the Hive Pizza community has grown tremendously. A ton of my time has been invested in this project, and many tools have been built by the community. A lot of these bells and whistles are only visible if you are active in the Hive Pizza Discord, and active in the game-specific groups within the guild.
Some of the by-products of building the community have been leveraged by other communities. The 
We also spend time and resources supporting other communities and projects. For example, we stood up a SpkNetwork claim chain node (pizza.spk) and developed the SPKCC Monitor tool which is a tool that helps monitor the network.
Recently the most interesting project we launched is called Burning Za. It's a dapp where the Pizza Guild can collaborate and create art, one pixel at a time. We plan to periodically mint NFTs using snapshots of the pixel art.
Here's an example of what it looks like:
9 different Hive accounts participated in this painting.
Content creation is extremely rewarding. My goal is always to create long-lived, valuable content. I often feel like more time needs to be spent here. A balance needs to be struck between building and story-telling. After all, useful tools aren't very useful if no one knows about them!
These content creation projects need some attention, and I need to rebuild my writing muscle. The two projects worth mentioning are:
@HiveToday - started as a weekly newsletter consolidating announcements from many Hive projects and sub-communities. As other distractions and life happened I was unable to maintain the weekly pace and put it aside. However, I firmly believe this kind of service needs to exist.
It's worth mentioning that maintenance of code and infrastructure always takes some time. Code breaks and services go down. This is often a thankless job, and I'll keep on doing it!
Pizza.witness (Hive witness node) has steadily continued receiving community votes, which is awesome. I keep an eye on it, standing by to jump in in case of emergency. Similar support and attention is paid for pizza-engine (Hive-engine witness node), Duat (Ragarnok) node, and other Pizza-hosted infrastructure.
After launching Burning Za, the community raised a lot of ideas and new directions to take it. We already implemented some tweaks, such as an easter egg where the background color of the page changes based on the colors of the 4 corner pixels. I see this continuing to evolve as we iterate on it.
We are gamers at heart! Expect more games to show up in the Hive Pizza arcade.
