Thank you for taking the time to review our 2017 Roadmap. This document is composed of
three sections, one each for Steemit, Inc: the organization, steemit.com: the social media
application, and the decentralized Steem Blockchain and Platform.
Note well that this document does not include a complete view of the functionality that we
will eventually implement: some smaller features not included here we will ship in 2017, and
many important things we will tackle only after these major initiatives are complete, in 2017 or
beyond. This document outlines only those we have identified as the most pressing in the
short term.
One thing that may seem missing from this document is our communications plan for serving
the existing social community—we haven’t forgotten about you! This document is not all-
encompassing and we are currently evaluating various plans for establishing a dedicated
team to manage and improve external communication, both with the existing steemit.com
user community as well as the wider world of blockchain and liberty enthusiasts. Stay tuned!
We have a ton of huge plans for the platform and steemit.com (far more than can fit into one
document!), and are tremendously excited to share this first set with our amazing community.
Goals
Our long-term goal remains the same: to provide the best platform for censorship-resistant
publishing and store of value to the widest user base possible, in an effort to increase human
freedom and accelerate the spread of access to basic rights for all people on Earth.
In doing so, by growing the Steem Blockchain, we will have created a permissionless,
censorship-resistant data layer for the entire Internet. The first obvious application is
publishing, but the possibilities for applications on the platform are limitless. Vastly
expanding this community has the notable side-effect of placing STEEM in the forefront as
the ultimate blockchain-based currency.
Our primary short-term goal is to drastically increase the number of weekly signups, weekly
active users, and weekly social interaction events on steemit.com. It is our belief that in our
attention economy, more readers, reading more writers, performing more interactions is the
single best way to develop the overall value of and to the community, and thus the Steem
Blockchain and its economy and token.
Simultaneously with user growth, it is essential that we provide support and resources to
entrepreneurs and developers building upon the Steem Blockchain as a platform. We
recognize that steemit.com will be only one of many killer apps built upon the Steem
Blockchain, and it is our goal to empower as many as possible who wish to build upon our
platform and incredible community.
To this end we have established a set of priorities for the near future upon which to focus our
efforts.
Summary
This document exists for you: the user: the entrepreneur, the developer, the writer, the reader.
We understand the challenges you face, and want to provide a predictably moving target for
our ecosystem so that we can grow together.
It includes our organizational plan for Steemit, the company, and how we work. It partially
specifies the social features and functionality we will implement presently for steemit.com,
the social application. Finally, it dives into the underlying blockchain technology we will
design and implement to support the use and scaling of the network far into the future.
TL;DR. (Roadmap Overview)
1: steemit.com
• Migrating all services to auto-scaling, self-healing infrastructure.
• Useful blockchain data microservices for both internal and external developers to
accelerate application development.
• “Batteries Included”: Highly available public service endpoints for third-party developer
quickstart.
• An Ethos of Deliberate, Reasoned Design
• Steem Login and signing service for safe and easy third-party app integrations.
• Rebranding: new logo, colors, logotype to distinguish the social app from the blockchain.
• UI: Design language overhaul for all user-facing application UIs.
• Apps: We’re developing iOS and Android native mobile applications.
• Feature: Free image hosting.
• Feature: Comment moderation for post authors.
• Feature: Community Namespaces and Moderation.
• Feature: New user tutorial.
• Feature: Achievements and User Insignia.
• Feature: Mobile notifications.
• Feature: Easy-to-understand status bar.
TL;DR. (Roadmap Overview)
1: steemit.com
• Migrating all services to auto-scaling, self-healing infrastructure.
• Useful blockchain data microservices for both internal and external developers to
accelerate application development.
• “Batteries Included”: Highly available public service endpoints for third-party developer
quickstart.
• An Ethos of Deliberate, Reasoned Design
• Steem Login and signing service for safe and easy third-party app integrations.
• Rebranding: new logo, colors, logotype to distinguish the social app from the blockchain.
• UI: Design language overhaul for all user-facing application UIs.
• Apps: We’re developing iOS and Android native mobile applications.
• Feature: Free image hosting.
• Feature: Comment moderation for post authors.
• Feature: Community Namespaces and Moderation.
• Feature: New user tutorial.
• Feature: Achievements and User Insignia.
• Feature: Mobile notifications.
• Feature: Easy-to-understand status bar.
eemit.com, The Social Application
High Availability, Scalable Infrastructure
The use of a blockchain allows for nearly unlimited horizontal scalability of read operations,
however the current steemit.com beta web hosting infrastructure has been architected to
provide service on a best-effort basis. We are in the process of automating the deployment of
our software into Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), providing for
nearly unlimited, automatic horizontal read scalability of web site hosting as site traffic grows.
Additionally, the use of a self-healing, automatically expanding and contracting pool of
services provides high availability (HA) in the event of any system failures or disasters,
ensuring no single points of failure (SPoFs) in the supporting services for the public-facing
web site. This allows us to focus all of our time and attention on development of the site,
software, and community, not on scaling or maintaining servers or hosting infrastructure. This
project should complete in early Q1 2017.
Developer and Startup Friendliness
While the peer-to-peer nature of the blockchain allows every participant to build out their
own infrastructure in a decentralized manner, many new developers and startups coming to
the platform have neither the time nor resources yet to operate their own. Between our
infrastructure upgrades allowing users and developers to depend 24/7/365 on our highly
available web service endpoints to run their businesses, as well as specific site and service
features designed with rapid prototyping and ease of developer access in mind, we provide a
clear upgrade path for new users to the platform: from quick weekend hacks all the way up to
Serious Business—without having to learn new blockchain-specific paradigms or
programming APIs
circumstance is achieved by features available via the web at steemit.com specifically
designed for rapid development by third parties.
All such functionality will be clearly and simply documented on our developer site, reducing
time-to-market for newcomers.
Lower Latency To Production (CI and CD)
Some people have compared software that has been developed but not yet deployed to a
dealership lot full of cars not yet sold: sunk costs that are not yet generating returns. Through
the use of modern best practices surrounding automated continuous integration testing (CI)
and continuous automated deployment (CD), we intend to reduce this window as much as is
practical.
Our target for automated testing of all new code in our repositories is 30 minutes or less, and
deployment in 1 hour or less to our staging environment, and 24 hours or less to end-user-
facing production systems. (As our automated testing systems improve over time, we hope to
further reduce these an order of magnitude over the following 2-3 quarters.)
This is part of our deployment into AWS, and will also complete in early Q2.
An Ethos of Deliberate, Reasoned Design
The most compelling digital experiences are those that are unencumbered by use of the
tools to participate. With the help of some of the world's leading User Experience (UX)
designers, we are refocusing our efforts on an extremely functional, discoverable, user-centric
design that permeates all of the interfaces we build across the entire spectrum of web and
mobile. Our ethos is that consistent behavior from a set of clean and uncluttered interfaces
reused consistently across our applications is the best way to "get out of the way" to allow
users to engage in the thrill of rich discussions
Upvote this comment to keep helping more new steemians
Welcome to steemit @whalesteem. Join @minnowsupport project for more help. Checkout @helpie and @qurator projects. Send SBD/STEEM to @treeplanter to plant trees and get an get an upvote in exchange of your donation (Min 0.01 SDB) Send SBD/STEEM to @tuanis in exchange of an upvote and support this project, follow for random votes.
welcome! Glad to see a like minded person joining the platform. Live long and prosper!