Brendan Taylor Application 2008

Me
I'm an Electrical Engineering undergraduate student at the University of Alberta. I'm employed to work on software unrelated to XMPP.

In my spare time I work on several open source projects, mainly in Ruby and Python. Besides XMPP, my main interests are in the Web, RDF, Atom and REST.

Relationship with XMPP
In 2007 I was one of the XSF's Google Summer of Code students. I wrote an Encrypted Sessions (XEP-0116) test suite and implemented the XEP in Gajim. I've continued to improve that implementation and other aspects of Gajim since then.

I've started a presence leak test suite.

Once Gajim has plugin support (soon, with Summer of Code 2008) I'd like to implement some simple games; go, chess, Diplomacy, etc.. I think that is a logical direction for IM clients, and an incentive for legacy network users to adopt XMPP.

Interest in Membership
Mainly, I'd like to settle on an end-to-end encryption spec and get it widely deployed.

I think it's inevitable that XMPP will absorb much of the real-time traffic on the Internet (open and extensible is a winning combination), and I'd like it to be the best protocol it can be.