Hello !
Well after speaking with @rubencress on his (great) https://hive.blog/hive-174578/@rubencress/my-introduction-to-the-hive-community introduce yourself post, he convinced me to do mine.
This initiative is from @Anomadsoul, the idea is to introduce or re-introduce yourself since this is a new chain and I guess it can't hurt to re-introduce yourself. My previous introduction post dates from 2017 so I figured it can't hurt to update things a bit.
So hey, I'm howo, or Martin, I'm a software engineer working mostly on blockchain technologies. I've spent most of my life programming various stuff. I think my favorite subjects are automation, blockchain and things machine learning (buzzword much ?)
I am currently living in Paris, trying to survive the pandemic, but that's another subject.
If you've never seen me at steemfest 3 or 4, here's picture of me at the https://spaceport-norway.com/ conference.
I've spent the last three years on STEEM creating various apps here and there. You may know me for my work on @steempress (soon to be rebranded !) with @fredrikaa. It's a wordpress plugin to bring new content creators to hive. Recently we've been focusing on our comment section.
If you're curious to see how it looks like, you can find out here : https://joythewanderer.com/vietnamese-pancakes-in-hanoi-and-my-remarks-for-this-restaurant
we think the potential is huge it's kind of a trojan horse to get hive to mainstream adoption, the more blogs we have with the comment section, the more people will get exposed to hive just by looking at the comments and seeing payouts etc. So the more blogs we emboard, the more eyes you get on hive and the more people are likely to use steempress etc. It's kind of a snowball effect. But in order for that to work, we want the plugin to be perfect and we don't feel it's quite ready yet, some things still need to be improve on hive like emboarding, complexity or our value proposition (if you emboard people by saying "come you'll earn money" you don't emboard users who are here to stay but rather people who just want to earn and dump).
Anyways, I did a lot of tooling here and there, there was a severe lack of documentation on how to code on steem/hive at first so I took it upon myself to create as much as I could with my https://github.com/drov0/steemsnippets repository. Right now it's a bit abandoned because better alternatives have come up, but I still update it now and then :)
More recently thanks to the sps I got to spend time on some projects, like https://downvotecontrol.com, a tool to automate downvotes. I believe it was an important step alongside free downvotes to heavily reduce bidbot use during hard fork 21.
I then spent a significant amount of time bathing in the SMT code, testing it, breaking it a few times and fixing it when the fix was simple enough.
And even more recently, I have actually started to contribute to the core code, I wrote a good chunk of the hard fork 23 which birthed hive. It's really interesting, I intend to continue to contribute to it. There will be a lot happening hive core in the next months, we have a lot more devs than before working on it, so now is the best time to submit the ideas that you have for hive core.
That's all about me, you can catch me on the chain or on my blog : https://brokencode.io :)
Welcome bro, I hope you will create some amazing stuff on hive too.
I entered crypto space and in steemit in 2017, but been inactive for some time.
I was wondering if I should reintroduce myself or not, but after reading your reintroduction, I believe it is a good idea.
Anyways, I am happy to find more productive people like you in this space.
Hope you keep updating your development progress related to hive here. I am quite interested in reading what's going on hive in terms of development stuff.
Happy to connect with you howo! :)
Thanks ! I think it's a cool idea because your introduceyourself post is very different than it was after 3 years :)
Hey! Good to see this post, sometimes you 'get to know' a name way after they shared something personal in their blogs, so this really helped me as I indeed heard you did a lot for the birth of Hive :-) (Thanks for that!)
We must've crossed paths at SteemFest 3 but unfortunately never had the chance to meet - Hive/SwarmFest will be a change I hope. If not: I've wanted to organize/plan a European meet-up for a while now, I'm not an experienced organizer, but something should be possible :D
Cheers and see you around!
Yeah I realized that it's probably been years since I shared something personal, my hive feed is very much focused on my work haha.
Yeah steemfest 3 had a ton of people, no wonder we didn't meet. Hopefully at swarmfest !
And sure I'm down for an european meetup, although I will be leaving europe relatively soon (aka when COVID-19 is over)
Glad to see your introduction post on Hive, Howo. I had no idea you made an automated downvote dApp. If I knew back on Steem, I would've used it for sure when it was really necessary. I'm looking forward to seeing the rebranding of Steempress. Welcome on board, and thank you for the shoutout :)
You're welcome ;)
Since you were on the front lines, I will ask you because I have not seen much on this since Justin Sun took over steem in early Feb ...
Has testing/development of the SMT hardfork essentially stopped or is it a slow crawl? Where do we stand with that? Thanks.
Testing has halted. Development has slowed down significantly, while we stabilize the network and perform a core improvements before going back to SMTs.
The issue with SMTs is that it's a huge beast that needs full focus if we want to release it, and right now we have a lot of higher priority tasks that needs to be done before releasing it. But I'm sure that we will get back at full speed on it after we are done with stabilizing and securing the chain.
That’s great! And makes a lot of sense. Thank you Martin. After my comment, I read your introduction post which hit on the topic. Sorry about that.
I am curious to see how Hive fills the holes left behind by vandeberg and gerbino. I was tracking their activity on github and they were producing a lot of daily updates in Jan and Feb. Hopefully Hive has the devs to pick up where they left off. It is hard to take over a project midstream like that.
Happy to read your introduction post.Thanks for sharing with us.Hope that you will continue your contribution to HIVE blockchain.
it's planned ! :D
Welcome @howo! Thank you for doing all this work behind the scenes! 😉
Glad to have you as part of the community and many thanks for your valuable contributions.
You are the man @howo!
I am new to hive too, You have done amazing job here, I am on steemit since 2018 and happily entering hive too. would like to be friends on this platform.
And it's a nice initiative to introduce here too.
Hi @howo, welcome to Hive! We've given you a 100% upvote as a welcome package.
It is our pleasure to welcome you to this great platform called Hive, and we sincerely hope you find what you're looking for here.
One of the best methods to stay connected and maintain focus on Hive is finding a niche/community that has your interests. It is, for this reason, we'd like to have you in our community, Build-it!
Build-ithere and earn extra 'HIVE' tokens. is a DIY (do it yourself) platform where you can find tons of how-to's, ideas, and advice to create or build something all by yourself. The platform leverages a robust digital token, called the BUILD. The recommended tags required when creating a DIY article are #diy, #build-it. #how-to, or #doityourself. Please subscribe to our HIVE community
Come have a chat with us on discord or telegram
Welcome to Hive bro.
Let's get along 😁
You're lokking cool
Welcome to Hive. #Team red!
Kudos to you @howo. I have recently started web dev and I know how important documentation is for people like me.
Your repo is awesome and I know it would be very helpful for my future projects.
Keep up the good work mate!
welcome to hive! people like you are the core of platform like these!
Nice introduction post