Jehan Pagès Application 2011

I am Jehan and applying for the third time for XSF membership.

Me
I am 28 and live where the wind blows me. For the last months, it has been in South Korea. My main activity is "wanderer", though I also happen to work as a Senior developer, mostly Freelancer. Lastly I have had several contracts with the Japanese company MyGengo.

I like computer science as an art. I don't develop for feeding me or because I think I can be rich with this or whatever. I simply like to make beautiful codes, beautiful designs, which usually also means efficient, obvious and "fluid" logics.

As a hobby, I develop Free softwares: my own projects and also small fixes or developments in other projects. If you need, send me a message through XMPP, and I can make a non-exhaustive (because I don't note every time I send a patch to some project!) list of such Free softwares I can remember of lately (this wiki page is not meant as a "resume").

I have a few other hobbies, like music in particular. I play a lot of music in blues and rock jam sessions, and sometimes in concerts. And I wander.

Why XMPP?
Because I think XMPP can be one of the base protocol of an interesting and secure Internet in a close future, so I want to improve its basements as soon as possible. The current Internet is based on a lot of outdated protocols (web protocols, email ones, and so on) that many people are simply trying to "fix" again and again. Though these "fixes" are often very interesting, I think it is better to begin from a sane base from time to time. Probably XMPP itself will be the outdated protocol in some years. But it is ok. This is how things progress. We should never stagnate.

XMPP related Code
Though I am also (mainly?) writing a lot of non-XMPP code, I have several XMPP-related projects going on:

I have left it a lot unattended lately but I plan to come back to it at some point. Actually I have some other project going on, which is somehow related and it will be much more interesting for me when I will have both side by side.
 * Jabber Feed is a plugin for Wordpress automatically feeding Pubsub nodes with comments, posts, etc. and which provides other related features (like templates for creating XMPP PubSub links, autodiscovery links, a Wordpress widget, etc.).


 * xbookmarks is a Firefox plugin implementing a, for now, very basic bookmarks system through XMPP. It is based on XEP-0048. But honestly it is a very early version, not that hype. This is also a "work in progress" that I plan to go again with. I know it seems to some people that such a plugin becomes useless with browser now embedding by default bookmarks saving system, but I have ideas that any current implementation I have seen don't do. In the end, my goal was also to improve (a lot) the XEP which is -- let's be honest! -- right now in a pretty sad state. So I plan to propose enhancements/rewrite it.


 * I have began to write an Objective Caml XMPP library. It is not officially released right now, so there is no description or official website anywhere about it. I wait for the code to be in a good enough state (it is working basically now for tests, but not for use on a real usage), so I prefer not to give any link to my repository (though it is opened, and findable through the Internet. Some people even happened to find, read my code and send me emails about it). This is sad that last year I was already saying this, but this is still true. I have advanced since then, but I like to take my time.


 * I have also an XMPP related project in the ADA2005 language. I prefer not to speak too much of it now while it is very experimental. This is not a library, but a software.


 * My main interests in XMPP have not changed much lately: it deals mostly with PubSub or derivated works. I am also interested a lot about the collaborative fun/work processes (like dashboard, but also other stuffs), and Jingle related topics as well (multimedia exchanges in general).


 * I am an active bug reporter in other people's projects.

XSF and community participation
I am participating in the XMPP community mainly with messages on the mailing lists, though I don't allow me to follow any conversation all the time. I do unfortunately too many things in parallel. I would need several lives if I had to do all I want to do. But this is ok with me. I live this well and simply do what I can in the time I give for each activity. But I guess my participation into the protocol development is still good enough so that I am cited in the acknowledgements parts of the drafts of rfc3920bis, rfc3921bis and xmpp-address.

I also happened to send small feedbacks and erratas on several other IETFs's rfc, not directly "about" XMPP, but usually somehow related (like generically in SASL related field, SCRAM in particular, or stringprep also).

I am not always the most social type (don't search me on any social-related website/service: I won't be there) but I try to make some efforts. The good point is that, when I make a message, I only do it when I think my answer can be interesting. The drawback of such a thing is that I don't speak on some topics and suddenly drop a huge message at once! Sorry for this, I know some people don't like this.

I also run my own private XMPP server (running ejabberd) for several years now, with only some friends, family and myself as users. This is not intended to be a public service, I just like to host myself and also for my tests with my projects.

I regularly happen to help and present XMPP to those who are interested. I have among other things organized an event for the 10th anniversary of Jabber, late February 2009 in Paris, France. And I write regularly XMPP related tickets on my public diary, or other websites. Sometimes I advocate XMPP to people I know in other projects (like Mozilla, but although some people there show interest, I wonder if they will really ever get into XMPP "for real" some day). Hence I guess one can say I am a rather active advocate for XMPP in the time I spare for it.

Contacts
You can contact me either by email or IM. Both addresses are my name (Jehan) hosted at zemarmot.net.