Kevin Smith Application 2006

My name is Kevin Smith and I'm applying to retain my JSF membership. The template for this re-app is extracted from Johannes Wagener's 2005 page so should hopefully cover all pertinent points; if it doesn't, please contact me over xmpp ([xmpp:kevdadrum@jabber.ex.ac.uk kevdadrum@jabber.ex.ac.uk]) and I'll ammend this page. My email's required for my app, but I'd rather people contacted me over jabber. If you must use email, my domain is kismith.co.uk, and my user part kevin.

History
I'm in my mid-twenties, currently living in Exeter, UK. My day-time is spent finishing my PhD at the University of Exeter, which is a study into Simulated Annealing Techniques for Multi-Objective Optimisation and I'm hoping to submit shortly. My BSc degree is in Computer Science (1st class honours), from the same institution. I've been a JSF member since last year, having finally applied after lurking for some time.

Code

 * I'm the project leader for the Psi client (Justin Karneges handed over to me when he abdicated in late 2004). Despite being one of the long-standing clients, Psi's still doing well and in the near future will be seeing updates for lots of JEPs which strengthen Jabber's position as a leading IM solution, rather than just an alternative to the other networks, such as ad-hoc commands, PEP, Jingle etc. Psi was also the first Jabber client to have a branch utilising Google's libjingle, only a couple of hours after libjingle was announced, having been working with the Google Talk team on integration in the leading weeks.


 * I use other unreleased snippets for handy tasks like alerting me when my computational simulations complete.

Jabber Protocol
Recently I've been having productive sessions with PSA mapping out some of the requirements for PEP, although I must place a disclaimer that despite adding me as co-author, he's done all the hard work this far.

I've also been working with others on a metacontacts JEP to allow contact structures to be shared between clients.

I sat on the list founding the Jingle JEP, most of which I didn't understand, and also sit on the whiteboarding discussions.

Jabber documentation
We've recently set up the Psi Wiki, to which I've obviously been contributing.

Plans for the future
As well as continuing (and hopefully expanding on) my work with Psi in the near future when I'm free of my doctorate, I intend to try and pump out some JEPs when ideas are presented, rather than my traditional approach of waiting for others to do the work and then poking holes. Our focus with Psi for the next couple of months is full XMPP1 compliance.

Jabber - Why I like it
I came to Jabber because I was on Linux and didn't like the thought of using clients which had to play catch-up to the commercial networks, rather that Jabber's open standard felt cleaner. Also, as a geek, helping to set up the university jabber server was an appeal. I got drawn into development with Psi and learned more about the protocol and I think this is a standard worth supporting.

Why I'm reapplying
I wish to continue doing what I've been doing so far; work with the Psi client, helping define extensions, and contributing to discussion of others' extensions and core protocol.