Hello everyone! I have recently set up a Steem witness server and would like to ask for a few minutes of your time to tell you about myself and why I feel that I will be a great steward of the Steem platform.

If you don’t know what a witness is, why they are so important, or how to vote, please see the Witness Voting Guide by top witness @timcliff.

About Myself

My name is Matt and I live in Philadelphia, PA in the US. You may know me here by my Steem account name, @yabapmatt. As a little bonus contest, I will give a 100% upvote to the first person who can figure out where I got the name “yabapmatt” from and post it in the comments (hint: remove the last “t”)!

I started learning computer programming when I was about 10 years old because I wanted to make my own video games. Despite my parents fighting with me to get off the computer and go outside, it turned into a successful career in software and game development.

Although I’ve moved into the management side of software development over the past few years I’ve recently jumped back into coding in order to work on some exciting projects using the Steem platform!

I have a wife, and a son, and a dog, and a cat, and I hope that my investment of time and money in the Steem platform will help secure a good future for all of them. Although I should mention that my wife thinks that I’ve joined a cult :-)

The Future of Steem

With the price of STEEM falling under $0.90 at the time of writing, it’s important to step back and take a long-term view of the Steem platform and where it is headed. As a witness I feel that it is part of my responsibility to have a clear view of how the platform can grow and become more successful, and to do whatever I can to help it achieve those goals.

For the platform to grow, it will need to open up to new markets that can bring large groups of new users and also large amounts of money into Steem. I believe that @ned and SteemIt, Inc understand and agree with this, and that goal is influencing their development efforts - particularly around SMTs. Allowing companies and brands to create their own Token powered by the Steem blockchain will open up huge opportunities for advertising and marketing dollars to come into the platform.

The most important thing to remember is that all of that money effectively goes to us, the holders of STEEM, rather than to Facebook, Reddit, or even SteemIt, Inc themselves! @ned has described the Steem platform as “the world’s advertising network”, and I agree that that’s where the real future of this platform will lie.

My goal as a member, investor, and now a witness in the Steem community is to do whatever I can to help the Steem platform achieve those goals and become the world’s greatest decentralized content publishing and advertising network where the community - not any one company - reaps the rewards.

My Investment and Contributions

I currently hold approximately 15k STEEM POWER and plan to increase that significantly in the near future. I regrettably do not have any huge gains from early investments in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, so all of my SP was purchased directly with money that I have earned through working and have saved over the years.

I have a lot to lose, so you can be assured that I am fully committed long term to the platform and making it into a huge success.

Over the past couple of months I have spent nearly all of my very little free time learning about and contributing to Steem, both through posting and development. I’ve posted a short series aimed at helping new users have realistic expectations and guide them on how to be successful blogging on SteemIt:

How To Steem - Part 1 - Learn, Learn, Learn
How To Steem - Part 2 - Create Value
How To Steem - Part 3 - Promote Your Posts
Stay tuned for part 4!

In addition I’ve built the Steem Bot Tracker tool to help users promote their posts in a smart and profitable way. Initially I built the bot tracker tool so that I could use it myself to have an edge over others who weren’t as tech savvy. I realized, however, that contributing to the community and helping others, rather than trying to gain an advantage, would ultimately lead to a better outcome for everyone.

As I mentioned above, I believe the future of the Steem platform lies in opening it up to new markets, so I have been a supporter of third-party sites and services that seek to push Steem into new areas. I was one of the very first contributors and sponsors of Utopian.io because I believe that open source development is very important and should be supported, and I also think it’s a great way to get more developers involved in Steem.

I have also recently spent time updating the documentation for the SteemConnect V2 JavaScript SDK to try to help others have an easier time figuring out how to use it than I did. Having good tools and documentation for developers to create projects on Steem is of vital importance to expanding its footprint, and I hope to continue to help support that going forward.

Last, but not least, I am currently working on what I think is a fun and exciting new project which will integrate with Steem - but it’s not quite ready yet! Hopefully it will be ready to show in the next week or two. If you’re really curious, everything on the blockchain is public, so you can probably figure out what I’m up to!

My Witness Server

Even though I will probably only be creating one or two blocks a week, I’ve provisioned enough hardware to show that I am serious about being a witness and can handle a larger block load when or if enough people choose to vote for me.

I have used @someguy123’s company privex.io to host my witness server so I want to give a big thank you to him. Even though it’s only been a day I have to say they have been great so far and I definitely feel like I made the right choice!

My server stats are:

32 GB RAM
2x240 SSD HD
8 Core Xeon E3

I want to thank @drakos, @yehey, @mahdiyari, and @suggeelson for their help with getting the server up and running in the #witness chat channel and I have also enlisted the help of a friend who is a very experienced sys-ops developer to make sure my server continues to run safely and securely.

I have no illusions of getting in the top 50 or even top 100 witnesses, but I will still keep running my witness nonetheless - even though I will likely take a loss on the server hosting costs. I expect it to be well worth the expense in the long run.

So there you have it! If you happen to agree with my vision for the platform and would like to support me in helping to make it happen, I would very much appreciate your vote!

You can cast your vote at https://steemit.com/~witnesses and since I’m not anywhere close to the top 50 you can write “yabapmatt” in the vote box at the bottom of the page!

I’m looking forward to doing my part to help keep the platform running and moving forward for years to come! Thank you for your support!