As the year comes to a close, it's a time to reflect upon what I did throughout the year. Overall, I think this year was a good one, it could have been much better, and there were ups and downs, but in the end, it is what it is.

_{Image taken from Pexels}

Looking Back

Hive Related

Going Solo On Witness

One of the biggest things of this year is that I went solo on my witness. Late October, I started running my own witness node rather than being part of a shared witness. It's gone pretty well so far, I've gotten to rank 50 so far(active 47 as of right now).

My main witness node runs in Fremont, California on a virtual machine with access to 12 core of a Ryzen 9 5950x, 32 GB of RAM, and access to 1 TB of a 980 pro drive. I'm still running on 1.27.3 as .4 isn't really a big upgrade for witnesses, and .5 is only in RC mode(or was when I last looked), but will be looking to upgrade when .5 releases it's final form. I use @someguy123's HIAB software to easily deploy my witness node.

If you have a spare vote or want to support me, you can do so using this link: https://vote.hive.uno/@rishi556.

More Seed Nodes

I've also got a goal of spinning up a worldwide constellation of Hive seed nodes, starting in the USA. So far, I've gotten nodes up in the Bay Area(San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland) and Kansas City(both Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas are next to each other and I don't know which one the datacenters is located in) so far. My goals for the next year are to get at least 2 more nodes running, one in Chicago, and one more in the east coast(Ashburn or New York/New Jersey most likely).

If you'd like to use my seed nodes, feel free to add hiveseed.rishipanthee.com:2001 to your seed node list like the following:

p2p-seed-node = hiveseed.rishipanthee.com:2001

_{This might be the wrong type of server needed for seed nodes! Image is from Pexels}

While hived doesn't support IPv6 at all for p2p, I've added the records so when it does support it(something I've actually started looking into myself, and have an issue created on the repo https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hive/-/issues/381) there won't be any changes needed on my side and things will just start working. It won't cause any issues as of now as the IPv6 records are ignored(see here: https://gitlab.syncad.com/hive/hive/-/blob/d7f12b8dfe6d5d63ee12aa575f0b454e95c311a7/libraries/fc/src/network/resolve.cpp#L18).

╰─○ host hiveseed.rishipanthee.com
hiveseed.rishipanthee.com has address 64.62.202.12
hiveseed.rishipanthee.com has address 23.150.40.194
hiveseed.rishipanthee.com has IPv6 address 2602:2b7:d11:5916::2
hiveseed.rishipanthee.com has IPv6 address 2602:fb95:2::4

The hardest part of running more seed nodes is obviously the high cost of them. Getting a dedicated server in the US isn't the cheapest thing, especially since I'd like to have something modern-ish with NVMEs so I don't have to wait quite a while for the node to sync up and a solid connection to the internet(preferably with unmetered bandwidth or an extremely large bandwidth cap).

Launching Holozing

I was involved in launching a new game on Hive, @holozing. I don't have too much to say here as I'm involved in only a fraction of the work here(requires quite a bit of people to bring a game of this scale out) but I'm hoping to see us bring out even more from this front over the coming year.

The Rest

Recovering From Injuries

This year was kinda bad for me injury wise. I managed to get involved in a car collision due to someone else running a red light. After a literal shitton in medial bills, I finally got the "there's nothing we can do but wait" from my doctor, and I just gotta live life with this pain(luckily it's very rare at this point and only shows up when I'm driving). People please take care when you are driving and get the fuck off your phones! A second either way and I could have been in much worse condition. Plus the medical and insurance system in America is ummmm, lets say not the best. Without insurance, I'd have been fucked with bills(not to say I'm not with insurance, the other party's insurance company won't pay out without all the bills being finalized so I've got to float the money for now...). At least this is over.

_{Image is from Pexels}

Upskilling

This year had me learning quite a bit. The most important of which is that I've gotten a lot better at learning how to write frontend code. I've been using react for both work and personal projects and I've made 2 decent looking interfaces using it. Part of the best thing I've done is rewrite the Ryamer website. I did heavily use the tailwind templates to get me moving quicker, but learning how to put things next to each other correctly is hardest part of writing UIs.

_{Here's an example of what I wrote}

Work

Work wise, this year was a trip. I'd graduated school December 2022 and had a job lined up which I started during January of this year. Things were going well till the Silicon Valley Bank Collapse, the day of which I got laid off. And thus began my job search again. I took till the end of May to start looking for work again due to wanting to take some time off(I had basically 2 weeks between graduation and starting working). The multiple layoffs going on around the country didn't make finding a job any easier, and having a referral to multiple companies still didn't get me too far. I did end up starting working again at the end of July and it's been going great!

_{Image is from Pexels}

Cat Tax