Steemit Retrospective for July
At Steemit we perform monthly “retrospectives.” Retrospectives are conducted at the end of a “sprint” and are a time for teams to reflect on how they have been working with the goal of continuously improving their processes. We want Steemians to have as much insight into what we are doing as possible, so today we’d like to share with you a summary of what we discussed in our most recent retrospective which covered the past month. If you would like to see last month’s retrospective, go here.
What went well?
- All ad slots are now working with our 3rd party service provider Freestar
- Hardfork 21 was released and the hard fork date was set
- Things went relatively smooth despite having a critical team member on vacation. This made us realize how well we do with 'shielding' other team members from distractions (because we ourselves were handling distractions that normally would have been handled by Michael).
- A lot of SMT work was accomplished over the last month even with all of the testing and bug fixes necessary for HF21.
- HF 21 Testnet caught bugs that we were able to fix prior to release. We have increased our confidence in this hardfork as a result of successful testing.
- Community developers and witnesses pitched in quite a lot with testing of the hardfork which lead to finding and fixing bugs that may have otherwise not been discovered.
- We (the engineering department) have been interacting with the community more. We've had both discord shows and posts from our own accounts in order to facilitate this communication.
- HF21 Steem-js support was released
- We were able to make headway on Hive communities by beginning to implement the core logic into Hivemind
- We decided to re-write the wallet proposals UI instead of merging in additional technical debt
- Released a MIRA performance tuning guide
- Merged in more community contributions to condenser
- Completed our first SMT burnup post since development on SMTs has rebegun
- Clumping ICO work in to a single PR made Steve happy and more productive.
What didn't go so well?
- Failure to keep steem-js up-to-date over time made it very difficult to troubleshoot a problem with integrating new SPS operations.
- Because we don't have adequate tests in steem-js for serialization we didn't identify that it was a problem immediately
- We've been unable to handle quite as many community PR's because of our focus on HF21 related tasks and Hive Communities.
- We still found bugs after HF21 testnet. API issues are minor, but the BMIC database revision bug is problematic and will likely lead to another release or retagging of the current release.
- Deployments are dependent on three cloud services to succeed. (AWS, DockerHub, and GitHub). This can be problematic if one of the three is down (namely GitHub earlier this month).
Escalations
- Check AWS billing heat map for next cost reductions as this has drastically changed since our last review.
- Look into the possibility of adding the ability to use an API key with the public API.
- Check AWS dev EC2 list monthly to ensure that there aren't any forgotten/abandoned developer test instances still running.
Your Feedback
What do you think went well over the last 3 months and what do you think we need to improve the most? Please leave your feedback in the comments section below.
The Steemit Team
Selling less steem would be nice! :) Just kidding, well sort of. In all seriousness you guys seem to have gotten a lot done and things seemed to have changed for the better over the last couple months. Keep up the good work!
Also, any chance we could get on Coinbase any time soon?
When will this shit finally get solved?
https://steemit.com/censorship/@pagandance/this-post-was-hidden-due-to-low-ratings
We'd love to get on Coinbase, but that's entirely up to them.
Does that mean you guys have done everything you possibly can to get listed there? There was a rumor floated that they (Coinbase) wanted a listing fee that was refused to be paid?
Coinbase would have to build in support for Steem (and a liquidity pool) and all that to make it tradeable there right?
They would only do that if Steem were judged to be top rated... so it would have nothing to do with paying some kind of listing fee?
Yes that is my question.
Yes, I personally polished Brian Armstrong's dome, and still nothing.
Must not have done a good enough job...
Coinbase would add Steem if it would gain as much traction as Eth for example, so perhaps just aim for improving the product...
How does steem do that? It already is faster and and has no fees by comparison... Ether is changing to be what steem already is.
Well if people are this clueless, it's no wonder we're doing so poorly. Ethereum is already much more than Steem, there's no comparison, only now it'll also be as fast as Steem, which will leave people wondering why the hell use Steem in the first place as it does me, as a developer. The speed and no transaction fees has been the only reason I'd choose Steem over Ethereum and that comes with negatives like developing on a chain that's mismanaged, abused and isn't really decentralized, rather close to oligarchy actually.
This chain and its people need to wake up and face the reality or sink with the ship being delusional.
Coinbase would add Steem if it would gain as much traction as Eth for example, so perhaps just aim for improving the product...
When will this shit finally get solved?
https://steemit.com/censorship/@pagandance/this-post-was-hidden-due-to-low-ratings
or sometimes buying back the steem they’ve sold, since cost reduction has been a success and personnel costs also reduced I believe after the 70% cut. If everything looks so good.
They won't be buying steem any time soon, if ever.
Then how do we HODL
You don't, as the price trend suggests. The cow is being milked dry as we speak
:(
But after being dirt cheap for some time, it'll jump back up perhaps as some see the opportunity to make some money but the system we have here is flawed, just see Trending, Haejin and Bernie.
more like 90% of the stake are abused from what I've observed, not only trending with bidbots, inc, H and B, also many others, just they probably have smaller smake, or they self vote not as obviously.
Like the improvement of your publicrelations attitude 👍
Does anyone here know where the button is for the thing?
You can touch my button if you'd like. Wink, wink.
I have a headache.
we know what YOU
do
I have concerns over the value of steem. Don't you think that it is still an underrated coin?
It's important to distinguish between price and value. Markets determine prices and are often irrational. We believe that the Steem blockchain is far and away the best blockchain protocol for powering web applications and we believe that this makes it extremely valuable. Whether the market reflects that value is a question for the market.
But if the value is in the blockchain itself, can't people just fork it or clone it and capture that value themselves?
I'd say its a mix between Technology, Community and Accessibility.
Steem excels on accessibility (it is exceptionally easy to develop application on top of Steem) has a decently large actual user base (hosts many of the biggest dapps out there) and has a decent technology stack (not as good as EOS but better than many others) which give Steem its "value".
The price depends more on "having real use cases for Steem". Most blockchains have closely to no use case besides investing the coin, but the investment and hype for them are strong. Which is what, in my opinion is mostly missing for Steem.
Also, many years of mismanagement also resulted in many people not trusting Steem and Steemit Inc anymore. This year they did a turn around. But gaining trust back is much more difficult than establishing trust at the beginning.
Very well said :)
Also when it comes to actual price of the token - we need demand, but not from speculators or individuals that "believe in the idea" but from businesses and enterprises that want to build on STEEM.
That's the only way to establish a long-term stable token economy. And that's what we should be interested at.
+1
it's open source, anyone who wants to can run their own from scratch :-)
which means it's obviously not that simple or everyone would be doing it
which would be bad because since the rise of crudcoins value has been dispersed more and more ...
it's all possible imo, but one shouldn't expect it to fall from the sky , and not by tomorrow either, its a long road, and we're in the world of finance here, "blockchain" and "crypto" are just magic words that sound cool, but in the end it's a battle in the marketplace at this very moment, and Larrimer, Justin 'tron' and Vitalik won't just sit around because people at that level tend to be what i call
competitive psychopaths, they NEED to win, no matter the collateral damage
Was hoping Ned was also in that category...
There's a lot of value in the community of users and developers. Building that from scratch takes years.
I could even package LAST year's steem as a powerful bitcoin competitor if it just had a mobile app, an ad campaign and a team of wolf of wallstreet style stealth sales people.... the massive value in steem is right there on @blocktivity
just have to push this ONE image and our A grade FCAS score
the population of potential investors out there just needs education.
Also, coinbase earn program for STEEM will also do this (looking at you @andrarchy tweet to coinbase custody about steem being on that list )
Push the price of your favorite cryptopcurrency up 10,000% with this one trick
Coinbase would have to build in and list Steem first... not a likely proposition in the near future.
It is an overrated coin as long as they can't fix thing like this:
https://steemit.com/censorship/@pagandance/this-post-was-hidden-due-to-low-ratings
As I see it, it's better to keep steem under some other coin in steem engine. Surely you will have more monetary value under your account in few months as if you keep it in steem. Andrarchy does not care about that. We, the users do.
Quite impressed with all these weekly updates, Discord chats etc.
I mean 6 months ago there were 70% more people working at Steemit inc. and we recieved Steemit Team news once every 3 months. You guys are on fire.
Does the amount of Steem sold by Steemit Inc. in a given month depend on expenses or is it a set amount no matter what and the extra is saved for when needed?
If it is dependent on need, is it at all helpful for steemians to purposely click on ads? I don’t click on ads but if I knew every click meant less Steem sold in the marketplace I would make a point to click on a few per day. I don’t even know if clicking on the ads improves your ad revenue.
Any update on the current monthly ad revenue?
we have update on your criminal activity/past coming up shortly
I said this before but I will gladly repeat it again , you my friend are going to jail ...
Sounds fascinating since I have no criminal history.
Did I fart in a public place or something?
after I received first flag from you 13 months ago I knew something is fishy about you
I actually don't eat fish.
but you can't hide that smell
13 months is a long time.
Are you all still selling 800k steem each month ? Last financial I saw said costs where 100% covered and you made profit from ads alone ? What do you plan to do with that surplus in funds? Buy back and burn ?
Since this is a retrospective, and has nothing to do with HF21, What about this Cloudflare, I think it is called, when I use my smart phone to access steemit? Half the time it lets me in the other half of the time it does not, rather annoying,.
perhaps a post explaining it and why it is there and where we as users can go when it will not let us through. I currently do not have an e-steem or partiko account as a mobile back-up.
When you are seeing that it means that steemit.com is undergoing a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS). That service is protecting the site from the attack.
Nowadays I get similar messages from a couple of different sites. All probably common DDoS targets. The bigger sites (Google and Facebook etc) probably have their own homemade solutions for these kind of things.
Is it something on my phone then? An android virus that I need to look for or something? I never get it on my desktop.
It's probably some statistical thing they do "Likelihood depending on device and IP"
I know when I get the message it says something about the problem not being on my end, but I do wonder. There must be an android thing running around, I use my phone as my internet connection, so I am not sure it is an IP thing, but as long as I don't have a phone virus all is well on my end. A shame though that I have to wait til I get home to do anything steemit wise.
I have the issues too @bashadow .
I only have an Android phone.It doesn't happen all the time.