Eric Will Application 2008

My name is Eric Will and I'm applying for XFS membership for 2008.

Info
I am 22 years old living in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. I am originally from the St. Louis area. I currently work full-time at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. I've never been a member of the XSF, but I've been into XMPP ever since I heard about "this new IM thing." My first experiece with XMPP was running an original jabberd server in early 2000s.

Code

 * I'm in the process of writing the Synapse XMPP Daemon, which is a stand-alone, single-thread XMPP server written in Ruby. It's meant to be small and simple. I started working on this in 2006, but had to shift my focus on school, work, and life in general for a couple years. I've been back at it for only a short time and accomplished very much.


 * I've written other programs that are not XMPP-related. I've written many many IRC programs, my most "famous" being Shrike IRC Services.

Future
I eventually want to be involved in the standards process. My immediate future involves finishing synapse and writing extensions for it.

I like XMPP because of IRC, I think. I used to be very involved in IRC (contributed lots of code to one of the major ircds and services programs), but I was always frustrated with the general crappiness and non-standardization of IRC. I had actually written a bit about my idea for a "better" IRC, involving federated servers like SMTP, and someone pointed me to XMPP and I've been here ever since...

Contact
My email and JID are both rakaur -at- malkier -dot- net.