I'm Giving a Talk on the Blockchain, Bitcoin, Ethereum and Steemit at the Famous Pubcon Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA in October 2016

I think this is a prime opportunity to bring people who are both early adopters, and social media experts, to the steemit platform (and by extension into the Bitcoin and blockchain space in general). These influencers can help "bridge the gap" between the masses of social media users and the early adopters who are already on steemit.

Twitter

I've been tweeting selected posts to 400+ followers - many of whom are from the Pubcon crowd. This has alreay drawn a little more attention to steemit.

Wordpress

I've been cross-posting selected posts to a blog on Wordpress.com, and sometimes Medium.com. These always include links to steemit.com to help hook people in.

Medium

I've also been toying with posting things to Medium.com Haven't done very much of this but plan to do this more.

Server Administration Experience

Here are some of my qualifications

• Have been online since 1993 (we also use to set up house to house networks to play video games - my friend's sister did NOT like this as we tied up the phone lines).
• First part time job related to the internet was creating a website for a professor in 1997.
• Purchased and installed colocated GNU/Linux servers as early as 2001.
• Was a part-time system administrator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the early 2000's.
• Have been administering Linux servers for my own websites (and in some cases employers) for over fifteen years.
• Worked full time at Liquid Web as a Senior Developer for almost four years. Most of my job involved writing custom code to automate server deployments.

Here I am with my first colocated webserver. I dug it out of the garage just for this post.

I loved my first "serious" site running on a single colocated Supermicro Superserver which I bought, configured and set up at home and then drove the "datacenter" south of the U of Arizona in Tucson. I cared for it like it was my baby (even though I had other actual babies at the time). Sometimes Googlebot (Did you know it used to be called Backrub? A robotic spider that crawls the internet and gives your website a backrub. Creepy, huh?) would hit it so hard that the poor thing would become unresponsive. So I used to wake up in the middle of the night, drive down to the datacenter, do whatever I could to mitigate the issue and get the site back online, then go back home and go back to sleep. There were no full time support people there at the time so one else would help me. Luckily I think every datacenter has full time support people now. Skip to the end of this document to learn more about the kick-butt server host I'm using for my node(s).

Projects and Coding Experience

I recently put together a whitepaper on steemit titled "Project @thunderwhale! A decentralized curation pool application. Whitepaper Version 0.1.5". This received a lot of community support from whales and minnows alike.

As a witness, I would have more resources to purusue this and other projects.

GPU Mining and Development Experience

I haven't gotten into Steem mining yet, but this is something I'm considering and which I may be able to contribute knowledge and/or code to. As you probably know, Steem GPU mining is currently an important issue because there is (to my knowledge) no open source Steem GPU mining code. It does seem, however, that someone is successfully mining Steem with GPUs. I'm not promising that this is something I can solve or even dive into right away, but it is a possibility depending on the level of support I receive in terms of witness upvotes.

Highlights

• Solo mined some of the first million Ethereum blocks in 2015.
• Have written NVidia CUDA C code for non-cryptocurrency related reserch.
• Attended NVidia's GPU Technology Conference in Silicon Valley in 2016.

The top right picture is of a slightly more advanced Supermicro server than the one I bought for my first colocated web server :)
That last picture is from when I snuck away from the conference hotel on Sunday and checked out the Pacific Ocean. I was one of the only people at the beach who went in the water. It was chilly but it was worth it ;) I'll have to make a post about the conference soon.

More than 20 Years Software Development Experience

Highlights

Steem Power? How about steam power. This was the intrepid Liquid Web Scottsdale team (much smaller than their Michigan teams). I mostly worked on the back end of the Storm on Demand cloud server platform.

I have more than 20 years of development experience. This includes my time coding C for the Medium Energy Nuclear Physics Group at U of Massachusetts, C++ to analyze proton-antiproton collissions at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and more than 8 years doing software development full time for three Fortune 5000 companies (the fastest growing companies in America).

I currently code C and C++ on a daily basis and have a lot of experience with languages and technologies including Perl, Linux, Apache, MySQL/PostgresQL, PHP, Redis, JavaScript, Git, Lua, etc. See my Linkedin profile for a more complete list. A full resume is available upon request (email [email protected]).

Posting Bug Reports to Github

This is something I've already done once. It helped bring a bug in the Steem core code to light, and it was fixed within a few hours (thanks again @proskynneo and @roadscape!). I also made a follow up post to explain what happened and also how others can go about submitting bug reports in a responsible way on Github.

Thank You SteemIt & Steem Devs for Fixing a Tricky Bug Quickly + How to Report a Bug

Code study / review

I have already downloaded the steem source code from GitHub, and plan to start learning more about the Steem blockchain source code and Graphene. Once I learn enough I can help with code reviews if that is desireable.

Debugging

I enjoy step through debugging and figuring out ways to debug large complex pieces of code. As I learn more about the technology, I will endeavour to find ways to debug the code in order to learn more about how it works and of course try to figure out bugs.

Testing

I am a fervent believer that tests are critical to the success of any project and have been writing tests in various langages for years. I prefer to write tests as I code to make it easier to find bugs and step through debug new code.

Profiling and Optimization

I have experience profiling CPU (C++, Perl) and GPU (CUDA C) code to find performance bottlenecks. This of course includes making changes to the code once issues are found in order to improve performance.

Writing core code for Steem?

This will take time, but once I learn more through code review and debugging I may be able to contribute to the steem core C++ code if my skills are desired.

Document Versioning

I will post versioned updates to this witness thread. Subsequent versions will supersede the information in existing versions - please check my feed for the most recent version.

@nonlinearone Witness Node Information

My witness node is located in North America in a high quality data center with redundant backups, quality support, and insane internet connections.

Quality Sever Host

I've learned a lot of things when it comes to server hosting. Uptime matters. Support matters. Network matters. Quality matters.

And for these reasons I'm hosting this node with high quality, high reputation host I've been using for over six years. Their support and uptime have been amazing. We'll see how things go with this new server - I'm hopeful that my experience will be as good as my past experiences have been.

This is more expensive than many alternatives (it costs three times as much as a similar configuration at a discount host), but I think it will be worth it. Steem deserves nothing less.

Traditional dedicated server configuration

Though it is now a hated buzzword, "the cloud" has been a big success. There is no question that it has enabled all kinds of innovation and cost savings for many companies.
However, exactly due to their lack of extra complexity, traditional dedicated servers can be more reliable, more secure, and I think can make more sense for a Steem witness.
I'm starting with one server but will be adding more if this witness thing takes off.

• Processor: Intel Xeon E5-1650 v3 Hexa-Core
• RAM: 32GB DDR4 SDRAM
• HD1: 2 x SSD Software RAID 1 (+250GB Crucial SSD (MLC))
• HD2: SATA Backup Drive (+1 TB SATA (7,200 rpm))
• DDOSProtection: Standard DDoS Attack Protection (up to 2gbps)
• Network
  • Bandwidth: 5 TB Outbound Bandwidth
  • N+1 Network Equipment, Tier-1 Bandwidth Providers, Diverse Fiber Paths ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tier_1_network ).
  • Peering connections with Amazon, Equinix, Google, Motorola Mobility, Microsoft, Netflix, and Yahoo ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering )

When I become a top 19 witness, I plan to hire at least one experienced, trusted friend with tons of experience to assist with administration of the witness nodes and also to ensure someone is available to fix issues 24/7 to ensure node reliability (since no one person can be available at all times).

Pay Me 100% in Steem Power

To show my support for Steem and steemit, I have chosen the Pay Me 100% in Steem Power option for this post. Please support those who support steemit. Thank you.

A call for feedback from experienced witnesses

If you are an experienced witness and can offer me any advice on how to improve, please comment below, hit me up on steemit.chat or at [email protected] I welcome any and all feedback.

Please Vote for @nonlinearone as Witness

Ready to cast your vote for me? Thanks!

Just head to https://steemit.com/~witnesses

Once I'm in the top 50, you'll be able to click the upvote icon next to my name to show your support. Until then, you'll simply need to scroll down until you see a box like this. Simply cut and paste nonlinearone into that box and hit the vote button.
Thank You!

If you really want to help support my campaign, please also upvote and resteem this post :) Thank You!