Wow it's been a while since writing a post on Hive. And that has a reason, a once in a lifetime crazy cray cray experience....
First off... Hello! My name is @roelandp, initiator and organiser of Hivefest, builder of Hive apps, designer of the Hive logo... but ever since running HiveFest Amsterdam last year, very busy BUILDING OUR OWN HOUSE.
Yes. Stubborn as I am, I thought: Ok I can organise an event... building a house is all about organising, so let's do this yourself. Who needs a main contractor any way :P Obviously not completely by myself, but at least being the lead, arranging all specialities: architects, construction engineers, arranging suppliers, build-up teams, permits, sewage, concrete, exterior, roofing, isolations, handling all supplies, and so fort. Fast forward to almost one year later and here I am confronted with reality: It's a fricking difficult job and takes up all my time and energy.
No complaints here though! The Hive Shag is here to stay :)
This is not a post complaining by the way, more a gentle warning: Think twice before you build your own house yourself :) I feel very blessed I am in the position of being able to build a house these days, and it is partly thanks to Hive actually I am able to do this! Therefore once the house is completed it will boast a full fledged (independent) guest room with its own bath room. More than happy to call it the "Hive Shag" where you can (hit me up! to) stay for a couple of nights, in a very natural area close to Amsterdam!
Not all fun and laughters though... Hivefest M.I.A. :(
We love the design of the house. The city counsel too and last year we got our building permit and started the build in November. But one of the neighbours living further down the road objected and later launched a lawsuit, which is actually going to happen this week. Next to being very busy with getting the house (which is currently in a very fragile state: no windows / no full exterior cladding yet / no permanent roofing yet) ready for the harsh autumn weather. So.... sad to say, I am going to miss out on HiveFest. Which sounds weird to me... Missing out on the little baby I started in 2016 and grew to such a great community of experiences.
HiveFest 2023 - In greatest hands obviously!
I already knew I would not be able to organise this year's edition with the devotion and attention I would normally give to the annual gathering, so I was already very happy with the offer by @Starkerz and @Theycallmedan to setup the Rosarito HiveFest 8 edition back in april/may to keep the momentum going!
In the past months I did hand over my experience and "the concept" of the event and have been helping since then with mainly the digital part of the event: website, some design, little bit of the app, setting up livestreaming, issuing tickets and such, but nothing like the work the boots on the ground in MX are doing in preparation of the REAL DEAL, happening this week.
I have been postponing the decision to go to Mexico until the latest time possible, but it has now become clear I have to make a decision between having our house being poured down with rain (which is happening this week, quite some unfortunately), and not attending the lawsuit / court, or drinking and still thinking about that far far away in Mexico.... So I took the hard decision to bail out last minute.
I wish you all the very best of times in Mexico, it will be a blast as always, and I especially wish the whole team lead by @starkerz and @theycallmedan greatest success of pulling this edition together! It will be one for the books I am sure of!
Witness updates - seed node, APR 👀, attending TechEx in Amsterdam:
@gandalf pointed me towards my failing seednode... which is part of the default config.ini and which should be online to maintain decentralisation during the initial sync and setup of the p2p network discovery when launching new node. Since the hickups I found the server was having issues and I phased out the node and started on a fresh dedi-box for hive-seed.roelandp.nl which is in the meantime all synced up and running again.
APR - With much interest (haha he said interest) I have read up on @gtg's decision to gradually lower the APR on Hive savings and am internally dabbling with my own stance. I do think 20% is a great and crazy selling point for our blockchain, but it could also sound like a "too good to be true"-selling-point in the long term.
FYI I've been running 1.27.4 on my nodes since last spring. I am looking forward to the day our house is finished, as we will have a double redundancy internet provider (cable and glass fiber) and can have some backup nodes running from the basement!
Next week 26/27 september Hive is sponsoring the TechEx Blockchain event right here in Amsterdam and I will be attending as one of the representatives of Hive. I will post an update afterwards!
For now I wish you HiveFest go-ers a superb time, wonderful surf, new friends and connections, many learnings. Shedding a tear for missing out, love you all...
See you on the chain, at the livestream and next year IRL again.
One of your witnesses,
@roelandp
(all rewards from this post go to HiveFest.mx23 (see beneficiaries))