Tim Henkes Application 2021

About me
Hi!

I am Tim Henkes, known as "Syndace", a student from Germany currently going for my masters degree in computer science, which I'll be done with in April. My passion is programming, and I am specializing in the topics of low-level hardware development and post-quantum cryptography. I run a little server with self-hosted open source alternatives to some proprietary mainstream services.

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. As part of this mission, I have 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. I have largely contributed to the recent versions of the OMEMO XEP, especially the cryptographic details.

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
This year has went by in a blink. Sadly, due to the lack of in-person meetings and the workload of finishing my masters, I have been unable to push my goals regarding XMPP forward.

I am very optimistic that this will change in 2021. My next goal is to push the switch from "legacy" OMEMO towards our new OMEMO standard, and to specify a master-key approach to OMEMO's key management, which I promised at last summit.

I really hope that this year we'll be able to meet in person again.

Previous membership applications
https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Tim_Henkes_Application_2019 https://wiki.xmpp.org/web/Tim_Henkes_Application_2020