Tim Henkes Application 2020

About me
Hi!

I am Tim Henkes, known as "Syndace", a student from Germany currently going for my masters degree in computer science. My passion is programming, but I'm also down for a bit of hardware hacking, server administrating or mathematical theory, especially cryptography. I run a little server with self-hosted open source alternatives to some proprietary mainstream services.

While I'm not hardcore into the topic, I still enjoy myself some good privacy and security.

When huge hype is going on about a topic, I often develop an anti-reaction to that. Currently, when someone says "Bitcoin", "Golang" or "Rust", I usually try to change the topic or I just run away.

My connection to XMPP
Being quite unhappy about the state of mainstream messengers and the ongoing transformation to put everything into the cloud, XMPP caught my interest when a friend introduced me to it. In 2017 years ago I made the jump from just using XMPP to learning about it/joining and participating in the various MUCs and developing to improve it.

My current "mission" is to improve OMEMO. I've spent a lot of my free time in the past years to write an OMEMO library from scratch which slowly creeps its way into the first bigger XMPP-related projects like Goffi's Salut à Toi or Slixmpp/poezio. At the Düsseldorf sprint in 2018 I started my work on a huge update to the OMEMO specification with the goal to fix the issues that practical use of OMEMO revealed over the past few years.

My experience over the last years in the XMPP community was very positive and I am optimistic that XMPP will continue it's current uptrend with all of the motivated members working on it.

I want to stay a part of that.

Contact me
Jabber ID: tim@mailbox.bz

E-Mail Address: syndace@web.de or me@syndace.dev

Why I am reapplying
The beginning of 2020 is really exciting, due to a lot of active discussion about issues with OMEMO, the founding of the E2EE SIG and the introduction of full stanza encryption. I really hope that the next months will yield a new version of the OMEMO XEP, which stops it from being a pain topic throughout the community.

Even though OMEMO is my current focus, I also have plans for the time when work on it is done and I'm looking forward to become active in different areas of the community.

Previous membership applications
https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Tim_Henkes_Application_2019