It is weird to say, but I am lucky that my rank as a witness is low. This week I will be facing a lot of pressure from my full time job, as we have a big project to delivery. The project is in production and deployed, but we had to make many changes and it will be big, so it is consuming both my time and energy a lot.

By being a low ranking witness, it is not as prejudicial to the community. Mostly anything I do is irrelevant, so I focus on engagement and gathering and discussing development ideas. If an idea is in my reach, as a programmer, I am down to help whenever I can!

I still engage much more than even some witnesses in the top 20. But social engagement alone is not enough. I need to develop code and tools to help Hive be more useful, but that requires time and effort that specially this week I can't afford. I do feel guilty, but since I am not on the top 20 it is materially not bad for the ecosystem.

The core stuff for a witness at my rank is taken care of:

• My Hive feed price (very important for Hive defy) is updated automatically multiple times a day
• I am voting, forward looking, for a 15% HBD yield. Since HBD managed to stabilize I might return to 10%, I am keeping an eye for it.
• My server is dedicated and was pre-pai for 1 year and it is very fast and never loses blocks, it missed 2 but it was a temporary incident when I had just started
• I keep open channels to post and engage with the community

Suggestions and tips are welcome, it falls into my community engagement goals to understand the objectives of people here in Hive and how as a witness and programmer I can help.

In regard to the open channels to talk to me, if you have suggestions I am happy to discuss what can I do that is practical and materially feasible taking in consideration my conditions. If an idea or project is doable and I see it can add value to Hive, I am in! Just be considerated of my conditions (being a programmer in a third world country makes me far from rich).

Here is a cool chart called difficult value matrix to explain how in software engineering we decide which tasks to tackle, how, when and even if they are worth or not the effort:

Using one of those channels @cliffagreen contacted me with an idea that he had of a tool that would help communities a lot and I loved it. Not disclosing it thought, because he contacted me privately, unless he allows open discussing which I think would be good.

As a witness and a dev I feel that, because his idea sounds as something I can do, I need to do. As a Hive user I saw potential for this tool to add more power, value and use to communities, so I want to do it and be envolved.

I just ask a little bit of time and undertanding, until I can finish some important stuff from my full time job, so I can dedicate some time to coding this tool @cliffagreen suggested me. It will be done as soon as it is feasible. I did not forget you and there is potential! Thank you for the contact and hopefully you understand why I am not being agile in applying it.

I am not disclosing his idea, as he messaged me in private on Discord, but if he wants to, he could disclose and maybe other devs could help so we do it faster, his idea, depends on him, but I am interested in helping!

I am mentioning him because it was a practical example of engagement and gathering ideas of what, as a programmer, I can do to add value to the ecosystem. Do not hesitate to do the same, just be mindful of my situation.

One advantage of being a small witness, while hive itself is still small, is that I can keep track of ideas, people and projects and work with them when I am available (I am sorry but I need my full time job so I need to manage my time).

Of course I want to grow as a witness. And I understand I have to be practical and materially build stuff if I ever want to reach the top 20. That will happen, maybe not immediately, but definitely.

For now, I will keep engaging and working with everyone I can as much as I can but without being negligent to my full time job, this job pays my witness node and brings my personal investments to Hive. I believe in Hive. My node is paid by my own money and I need this job to live. I am not selling the Hive Power I "mine" to invest in projects and on my witness node, it comes from my pocket and I think it is good since it effectively values Hive.

So you can help by engaging, but understand I am not full time working on Hive, not yet, but plan to be! Also I think it is good the way it is while I am small, because my job allows me to pay my server and my projects here out of my own pocket! Without having to sell Hive to keep it online! So in the end, things are going well if we really think about that. I am reviewing what could be better, but overall, being a low rank witness has advantages!

Let us keep in touch, and thank you for the engagement! Hopefully I am gonna take some vacations by the year end to be productive on Hive!