Waqas Hussain Application 2008

I'm Waqas Hussain, and I'm applying for XSF membership in Q4 2008.

About me
I'm in my early 20's, living in Pakistan. I have been working with computers for nearly a decade. I graduated in 2007 with a CS degree. University was a time of fun software projects and programming competitions. The software projects are still fun, but I miss the competitions.

I like to code. Really, I do. And not just to code, but to design and engineer. To make things which are aesthetically appealing inside and out.

XMPP Projects
I am currently working on an open source XMPP server with Matthew Wild. We are planning to make an alpha release in the next few weeks.

Some of the unfinished projects lying around in my hard drive include
 * A small jabber client (everyone has one of these)
 * An HTTP proxy using jabber as a transport (for computers behind a NAT to expose a web server to selected JIDs)
 * An XMPP parser, this uses shared buffers, very tight memory management, etc to allow for parsers which are practically stateless between stanzas (thousands of connections being served by a few shared parsers)
 * A collaborative code editor which uses XMPP as the network transport

Future
In addition to bringing existing projects to a releasable state, I plan to help to further the protocol itself.

I'm keen on investigating ways to improve the reliability of the XMPP network, which has been a large problem for me, and is probably one of the biggest issues we still face.

Community Involvement
I have been involved with the jabber community since 2005. During this time I have been active in the MUCs, and while lurking on the mailing lists, keeping up with the latest protocol developments. Recently I am finally finding time to de-lurk, and join in the conversation.

Why I use XMPP
The openness, the protocol design, and the excellent community is what I was attracted by. When I discovered Jabber, it was mostly a matter of curiosity. But slowly I got to the point where all my IM communications tend to be XMPP only.

While discovering the joys of jabber, one day I knew this was the IM network I needed to use. So I issued an ultimatum to my contact lists: Want to keep secieving my snarky comments? Switch! And switch they did, my snarky comments being as popular as they were.

Why I'm applying
I'm keen to show my support for the XSF, get more involved in the standards process, and partake in the responsibilites of XSF membership.

Besides, out of the 10 most active people in the jdev MUC, I am one of only two who are not XSF members, and that needs to be fixed.

Contact
XMPP: waqas at jaim dot at

Email: waqas20 at gmail dot com