Mike Taylor Application 2010

About bear (aka Mike Taylor)
I've been coding since the days of paper tape and punch cards and I've always been involved in message traffic.

It started with my time in the Marines where I wrote code to translate mainframe and mini computer traffic to something the (then very new) Z100 computers could handle and output to 5 level baudot paper tape. After that I quickly progressed thru BBS's, FidoNet, UUCP networking, early email work, IRC before it was none as IRC and so on.

Now I'm working on building communities of folks and spreading the word of XMPP to anyone that will listen and introducing it to any company I work for, which happens to be currently Mozilla.

Current Community Involvement
Currently serving on the 2011 XSF Board of Directors.

Helped coordinate the XSF's Google Summer of Code 2010 involvement as Organizational Admin.

Working on finishing a PubSub/Bosh service for Leo Laporte that will setup nodes for all dynamically generated data from his collection of sites and also for news information that will be generated by volunteers and submitted via IRC and/or XMPP.

Working on generating a XMPP tools demo site to show what is possible and to gather code samples for Python XMPP and I'm also thinking about how to create little "howto" videos to show basic and intermediate XMPP coding samples.

Relevant Professional Experience
I've been using XMPP to develop many a bot for companies and projects most of which were created using xmpppy and more recently SleekXMPP. The bots and components I've created range from your usual IRC/MUC loggers, to developer support bots that monitor server and services and output information updates to IRC and the most complicated one was a bot that acted as the "front end" for a web based conference calling system where it accepted inputs from IRC, MSN, AIM, Jabber and SMS and then interfaced on the users behalf with the ruby app.

Successfully planned and implemented an XMPP and PubSub service for Seesmic - all Seesmic users had nodes for any of their public (and private) events and the PubSub nodes are now used as the source of real-time updates for the Seesmic ajax client.

Currently working within Mozilla to introduce more XMPP into their Infrastructure.

Plans As a Member

 * generate Python examples for XMPP tech
 * remember that there are meetings and responsibilities as an XSF member
 * help Fritzy make SleekXMPP the most rocking Python lib there is
 * help spread the word of XMPP to anyone that has ears
 * try and help the Comm Team do it's thing