Lloyd Watkin Application 2013

Contact

 * JID (Personal): lloyd@evilprofessor.co.uk
 * JID (Work): lloyd.watkin@surevine.com
 * Email (Personal): lloyd@evilprofessor.co.uk
 * Email (Work): lloyd.watkin@surevine.com

History
I became involved in programming during my time at university. I worked on identifying stars in images using neural networks on a parallel-computing machine (Fortran 77/90/95 + MPI). During my masters I worked on creating a simulator for one of the instruments on-board the Herschel satellite (IDL). After my degree I went into atmospheric modelling/instrumentation utilising a hugely parallel distributed processing. After getting disgruntled with research I started a company producing web-based applications and playing around with SMS gateways.

Since then I have worked for various startups mainly around PHP but have also worked with Java, Javascript, Python, Ruby, probably some others. At the moment I'm very much enjoying working with nodejs.

I was introduced to XMPP after starting a new position with Surevine in early 2012 via the buddycloud project. I find the "new age" of realtime very exciting and think the XMPP should be a major part of this.

Coding

 * I am writing a xmpp over websocket using JSON library http://github.com/lloydwatkin/xmpp-ftw / https://xmpp-ftw.jit.su
 * I contribute to the various budycloud projects https://github.com/buddycloud
 * I have made a small change to the node-xmpp library https://github.com/astro/node-xmpp

Work on the XMPP Protocol

 * Co-organiser of the XMPP/Realtime UK meetup group
 * Our first meetup on 13th March 2013, hopefully a regular event
 * http://www.meetup.com/XMPP-UK-Meetup/events/92855262/

Why I'm applying
XMPP is a really exciting technology to be involved in. Its inherent extensibility means that any number of future applications can be catered for. I'm personally very interested in using something along the lines of a buddycloud channel for machine to machine communication. The built in federation also makes this technology easy to use for interesting cross server projects.