Hello,

dear Bitshares community, I want to propose my services as a Bitshares Witness.

Please vote for zapata42-witness.

Who am I?

I am a developer with 13 years of experience in finance sector, based in Paris (France). I have worked for BNP Paribas Corporate Investment Banking in the equity derivatives business for the past 10 years in projects as varied as price publication, position keeping or request for quotes, and as a developer, technical lead or architect. Java is my main programming language but I have good knowledge of Python, Javascript, and Ruby. See below for my full resume.

I came to know Bitshares about one year ago, and since then I closely followed it as I was impressed by the technology, the balanced economical model and the distributed governance. I started to contribute on my spare time as I could:

• multiples (5+) Bitshares ecosystem presentations (2h each) to numerous colleagues and middle/top management (~100);
• participation to Hackathons: see ETF on Blockchain topic.
• contributions to tools like HERTZ implementation (from @customminer)  in alt's script (discussion, PR), xeroc pricefeed review (and stock trackers implementation), monitoring script improvement, developer api documentation spike
• running testnet witness since 12/05/2018

Now I want to be more involved in Bitshares, and as I am not a C++ nor a React programmer (yet?), I feel like witness role currently suit me best to help the community. You will found below my current setup, and what I plan to do once voted in.


My current setup:

    Hardware: 3 x VPS 4 cores CPU at 2.4ghz, 24GB RAM, 100GB SSD hard drive, 250Mpbs internet bandwith, Location: France.
    (I consider this a minimum, see below for my target plan)
   
    I run 2 witness mainnet nodes (account zapata42-witness) and 2 witness testnet node (witness-zapata).
    They are monitored through an improved version of @clockwork's telegram monitoring bot that handle automatic key switch and price feed monitoring.

    The price feed is ready, I already publish @nasdaq assets (see AMAZONCOM) and I use a stabilized version of @xeroc's pricefeed.

    Additionnaly I host some services:
        Mainnet API:         https://api.dex.trading  (max-ops-per-account = 100)
        Mainnet Seed:       seed.dex.trading:1776
        Testnet API:          https://testnet.dex.trading
        Wallet:                  https://wallet.dex.trading or https://bitshares.dex.trading (patched version that use my referral link as default)

    Services are served through multiple proxies (currently NGINX) that do rate limiting and SSL termination.
    For SSL certificate is issued by Let's encrypt and renewal is automated.
    Everything run on a private multi datacenter Kubernetes cluster (so fully Dockerized and resilient) and monitored through Prometheus/Grafana.
    The setup is automated and ready to scale, see my plan below.

My plan:

If I get voted as an active witness my focus will be on:

• Providing a stable block producer
• Providing a stable, accurate and auditable price feed of most Market Pegged Assets
• Grow Bitshares infrastructure, community and software ecosystem

This means:

• Upgrade the infrastructure. With the current witness pay (~30 witness / bts=0.2$ / 1bts per block) I aim to add:
                      6 x Dedicated 4c/8t 3Ghz CPU, 64go RAM, 1To SSD hard drive, 250Mpbs internet bandwith, Locations: france, germany, uk, canada, singapore, australia
• Continuous improvements of the setup like: geo optimizations for latency (GeoDNS + regional vlan), premium wildcard SSL certificate, premium api acess, ...
• Additional to classic API nodes, I will install and serve community tools like: Open-Explorer, Python API Backend, Elastic Search database with a data visualization tool like Kibana/Graphana, Bitshares HUG, and any future interesting project of the community;
• Active participation (code contributions, code/issue/bsip review, testing) to community initiatives (core, ui, tools, documentation) as a developer;
• Participate to meetups and hackathons to promote Bitshares;
• Regularly run third party professional penetration testing on the setup;
• if BTS price allow me to do it, hire other people to help me.

So why voting for zapata42-witness ?

• Experienced software developer with professional experience in developing and running financial highly critical software;
• Professional experience in price contribution in a main financial company;
• Proven will and capacity to contribute on Bitshares related projects;
• Full setup (witness, pricefeed + api) in place, and wide range of services in target;
• Active investment in Bitshares ecosystem (infrastructure & time) planned;
• Knowledgeable in blockchain internals;
• Relations in French fintech and financial institutions;
• Fresh blood.

Contact:
  Telegram: @Zapata_42
  LinkedIn profile

* Edit 20180901: Update seed port.