My OS Steem Projects & Future Plans

The code for the projects I talk about is available on Github code-with-sam

Another week passes by and I’ve been doubling down on figuring out how best to proceed with my projects. I wanted to share a little background along with some extra thoughts.

As you’re aware over the past year (yes its almost a year already) I’ve been working on many open source projects. Primarily my projects have been running on the STEEM Blockchain. While there has been some success and traction in these projects I’ll be first to say that there is nothing groundbreaking to report. With that In mind I needed to take a step back. Time to check-in with myself to see if these projects are worthwhile to wider community. It would be easy for me to just-keep-going but feel its important to check you’re going in the right direction .

When I re-discovered STEEM at the end of last year I dove straight into learning about the available API’s. I started smashing out all sorts of project ideas. This post from 10 months ago details a few of the ideas I was building.

• Steem Compare
• Steem Notifier
• Steemversary [Bot] + [Website]
• Steemconnect Node Boilerplate
• Steepshot Scheduling Tool
• Steem Share Button
• Steem Token Diversifer Tool
• Steem Bot Tutorials
• Steem Comments Plugin

Looking at this list, it’s now pretty obvious I was working on too many ideas. I was learning,I was excited about the opportunity to build projects on STEEM. It felt like there was another chance at the internet of old, where it’s not ‘everything has already been made five times over’.

I dug deeper into the Steem Comments Plugin which became Finally Comments. I sunk a decent amount of time into the mac app Steem Notifier. I also kept making tutorials whilst learning.

From there my ideas started to get more ambitious.

• Goodbook.reviews - Github
• Recipehero - [Github](Still private sorry) - highlighted in this video
• moveclub - Github
• photofeed.club - Github

Finally 😉 all of these projects culminated into @finallynetwork. I thought Finally might be able to encompass many of these ideas together. It worked to solve the main problem I had encounter over the past year - ‘talking about and sharing steem posts/project was a bit gross’. It's difficult from an outside perspective to see past the dollar amounts and ‘less-than-stellar’ steemit.com UI. My thoughts with FinallyNetwork was to put the power of how the content looks back into the hands of the users.

So that’s a very brief rundown of what happened. Completely open to talk more about my thought process.

Where am I at now?

Finally network

I am still excited about the potential for Finally. With the release of @engrave (similar to Finally). It's important to differentiate the projects. There is nothing wrong with competition, in-fact it is a great thing for the community. That said It's not the best use of my time to re-invent the wheel as a solo-developer.

I will still be working on @finallynetwork but my main aim will focus on collaborations/custom sites and Patreon style features (support this creator etc).

Finally Comments

I've taken a considerable step back from working on Finallycomments. Why? the target market of users who would install this plugin is tiny. A better approach is to work directly with projects/website owners who want ta deeper integration with STEEM. Any thoughts?

Goodbooks.reviews

I still feel there is huge potential to compete against Goodreads.

Recipehero

Spotted @dtaste yesterday - may have a missed boat here. Still don't think everything needs to be called dSomething though

Moveclub

There is now @actifit (did not exist when I was creating moveclub) - very different than I had imagined move club. Still a big potential to create a more integrated platform with other leading tracking tools. That or push for a platform that focuses on documenting/sharing/improving training.

Photofeed

I still like this site and believe there is potential for the @photofeed community to live and breathe in its own eco-system not on other STEEM interfaces.

These ideas lead me to ask a couple basic questions -

What platforms do I want to exist and support on the blockchain?
Are these platforms just because ‘blockchain’ or do they have a real purpose in the eco-system?

My current thoughts and next steps are to double down on tutorials. I've received the most positive responses, questions and engagement when sharing coding tutorials.

Follow @codewithsam if you want to be first inline to hear more about the next chapter.

As always I'm super keen to hear about your thoughts on my projects.