I'm submitting this post to the Utopian.io blog post function, I'm not sure it fits exactly in the rules so I'm not expecting the moderators to approve it. I just want to write down my thoughts and if I get any author rewards at least a portion will go to Utopian.
I have been following Utopian.io for a while now, kinda lurking in the background and upvoting contributions that I see as helpful to the opensource community. But 4 days ago I submitted my first contribution to Utopian and it was a very pleasant experience. I have been wanting to do a series of posts on some of the tools and techniques I use to ensure my privacy online. I have been featuring some of the tools that the EFF has open sourced. So I figured that my post could be considered a tutorial since I talk about what the program does and why it's important.
So I logged in to Utopian.io and submitted my post Using HTTPS Everywhere to Increase Privacy and Security on the Internet. And within a few minutes, I already had some votes. Now I'm pretty new to the STEEM platform, I'm still very much a Minnow and my posts typically don't get very many upvotes. So I was excited to see that someone out there actually appreciated the work I put into this tutorial. And then the Utopian.io bot gave me a pretty hefty upvote which got me super excited about the platform.
I have always believed in opensource projects and software. I'm a penetration tester (aka white hat hacker) for my day job and I would say that about 90% of the software I used to do my job is opensource so I benefit greatly from a thriving opensource community. I think this is incredible if the platform continues to grow like it is there is the possibility that developers out there could quit their day jobs and just work on opensource projects.
I'm no developer and I have never claimed to be. I'm decent at writing scripts, but only if they are in python or bash, so I don't see myself submitting many development contributions to Utopian. However, I do consider myself pretty good at explaining things. So I plan to write more tutorials in the future and even do some video tutorials. I have always wanted to be more involved in the opensource community but have always been too scared to even submit issues on GitHub. I've never really known where to start with contributing to GitHub projects, but this platform is super supportive of people contributing so I feel a little more at home here.
Being a penetration tester I also have a unique skill set in finding bugs. So I do plan on picking some projects in the future that I will test for security vulnerabilities. I'm actually working on a post about how Utopian can contribute to the responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities to open source products. I'm still working out how to do that on Utopian so look for a suggestion from me in the next day or so.
I love this project and I want to see it succeed, however, as a minnow I don't have a lot of STEEM to contribute to the success of this project. So my promise is this, for every post I author on Utopian I will delegate all the STEEM Power I receive as an author reward back to Utopian. Starting with my first post and including this blog post. At first, it won't be much, but I hope that in the long run, I can help the Utopian platform succeed.
