Core development proposal year 4

Hello everyone!

I have had the pleasure of working on Hive for three incredible years, and I am grateful for the support you have all given me. And I would like to carry on working as a core developer and contributing to Hive for a fourth year.

Who am I

I have been on this chain for more than 6 years now.
I went from regular blogging, to contributing to open source on hive to building dapps and running a top 20 witness (Hive account@steempress). I became much more involved in core development when we forked away from steem, rising up to the occasion as we needed every manpower we could get to birth the chain. I contributed to the soft fork that locked justin sun's funds and later the very first hard fork that created hive. Ever since, I've been working on hive as a core developer contributing to hive and hivemind implementing sensible requests from the community.

If you're interested in my full journey I made a throwback post retracing most of my activities on steem then hive here: @howo/my-hive-story

Notable examples of my work

If "core development" does not ring a bell to you here's two features that I shipped to give you an idea:

Recurrent transfers

Before if you wanted to subscribe to a service on hive you had to either pay upfront for a long period of time (eg: a year), send a transfer every month or worse: trust their active key with the service (NEVER DO THIS), which was a pretty terrible UX for want to build businesses on top of hive and benefit from one of our main selling points: fast feeless transactions. Now with recurrent transfers users can simply set a recurrent payment, and every time it hits their desired frequency, the money is sent from their account. It's a much simpler UX similar to one you're see on web2 payment solutions like paypal

RC delegations

If you've joined hive in the past two years you probably heard a decent bit about this one. RC stands for resource credits, whenever you do a "free" transaction you spend RC, but unlike other chains like ethereum, it's free and recharges over time. The more Hive power you own, the more total RC you have to spend. And for the longest time Dapp developers had a bit issue when onboarding:

Either you make users pay for their hive power when you onboard them, which is going to drastically hinder your growth, or you have to delegate hive power to them, which means people will try to abuse it by registering hundreds of accounts to get free hp and self vote. We've seen this play out times and times again and the solution that most dapp developers has been to police and check every new subscribers. Which obviously is a lot of wasted time and money that should instead be spent on buidling.

Rc delegations allow you to delegate RC but not hive power. allowing users to execute transactions and try out dapps, but without any monetary power. It also can be executed with a posting key as opposed to an active key for hp delegations, so should this be executed by a bot, you no longer need to expose your active key to an online environment (eg: a server)

Other things

Obviously big features isn't the only thing I do. I also work on smaller things, low hanging fruits, here's some examples:

adding virtual operations to help users track automated chain processes more easily: Add additional vops: producer_missed and hive_in and hbd_out values when sending hive to the treasury account
fixing bugs: Fix api issue with the cli wallet
improving UX: set minimum rc value when delegating RC

On top of regular core development, I host a monthly meeting where all the core hive devs sync on things and write recaps that you can find on my blog, eg: @howo/core-dev-meeting-47-with-full-transcript

Finally, when I get the chance I help developers or write documentation eg: HAF-powered Hivemind dev environment setup guide