Nearly every week since starting my witness campaign I've tried to create a brief post letting folks know what I've gotten up to in the week in regards to STEEM service programming, maintenance and creation. This weeks @tippy development endevours brought with them some delicious progress in regards to how the tipping engine scans blocks as well as some security features as well. If you're interested please check out the information below to get yourself up to speed with where the project is at.

A more concentrated effort and increased coding hours were deployed on the @Tippy project this week. It's currently my primary focus to get the tipping service engine completed before the end of this month. As any service dealing with user funds the code will have to be tested, bullet proofed and deemed production ready before it is launched out into the wild.

Something that seems easy in theory and ends up incredibly more difficult to create is a nice way to sum up my thoughts on the @Tippy project. It didn't take me very long to get the code written for the bare bones script to operate as I had intended, however the early alpha versions of the tipping engine were crude in comparison to the version I've currently got running locally.

The engine is now at alpha version 0.0.7 and with the past weeks work on the code now showing signs of proper functionality I'm pretty confidant that a launch of the server may very well be doable by the end of this month. While a few functions still need to be coded in and tested the likely hood of it taking me a week or two more to get everything included in the service I would like is pretty high.

Alpha versions of the script v0.0.1 through v0.0.6 used the steemJS features steem.api.streamOperations & steem.api.streamBlockNumber which rely on reading the head_block of the STEEM blockchain, which works amazingly well for fast responses, functions, replies and tips but is not in the least bit secure to use for deposits sadly.

Big thanks to @fabien for implementing the 'irreversible' option on the two features listed above allowing steemJS users to stream the last_irreversible_block.. Which is far more secure for dealing with deposits of any type on our STEEM network!

The @Tippy engine as of this latest version now actually monitors both the head_block as well as last_irreversible_block to achieve incredibly fast response times to commands as well as maximum security. Next step is to finish off the sync on start code and ensure it's functioning correctly and get the queue system started to allow the service greater scalability and load resistance.

It's coming together and I'm very excited to get this coded, tested and launched soon. I'll be up all night working on code, Woke up late today so may as well get working now!

	VOTE @KLYE FOR WITNESS steemit.com/~witnesses