Mike Taylor Application 2009

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 Seesmic where I designed all of the back end server processes which includes using XMPP as the main inter-process communication channel.

My goal at Seesmic is to make it into one of the first fully public and functional uses of PubSub that is more than just PEP :)

Current Community Involvement
Working on implementing a PubSub 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.

Currently I've been helping spread the XMPP love in the Laconica world and also thru Seesmic where I helped get Fritzy hired so he could be fully supported in his work on SleekXMPP and other XMPP tools.

I also encouraged Seesmic to contract with the Tigase devs so that they could put the final touches on Tigase's PubSub implementation.

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 now have 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.

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
 * find out the hard way how much work is involved in running a PubSub server for a Social Networking Web 2.0 site (aka Seesmic)