Pedro Melo Application 2008

History

I'm 36, married with two kids. Well, three if you count the dog.

I'm a freelancer since Set 2006, working mostly in Perl projects related to exchange of electronic invoices, helping grow the SAPO XMPP service, and my own personal adventures with E-learning sites.

I'm also involved with the SAPO Messenger for Mac project, an open-source project to add a nice Cocoa front-end to the Psi core.

Between March 2004 and August 2006, I worked at SAPO as the technical project leader for the XMPP service. My main job was integrating the server with the other SAPO properties, using custom-made transports and bots, and gluing the SAPO internal publish-subscribe cloud to XMPP.

I've also managed 4 release cycles of the Windows version of the SAPO Messenger client.

I live by the sea in Figueira da Foz, Portugal.

Jabber/XMPP Projects

Most of my code was written for SAPO, to integrate internal systems with the XMPP server.

At SAPO, I did:

• a web presence system that currently is getting over 100 requests per second;
• integration between publish-subscribe systems from SAPO and XMPP: first project was pushing RSS updates via pub-sub to clients;
• did the second generation mobile phone presence system: allows users to add phone numbers to their roster and send/receive SMS messages;
• a patch here and there to pyMSNt.

Plans for the future

Sitting on my hard-drive, I have a high-performance Perl library that I hope to clean up for release this year.

I would like to start a XMPP Server testing suite, something that could be run on any server to test the capabilities of it.

Also, related to the SAPO Messenger for Mac project, I want to specify a standard DOM for XMPP integration with Web applications running inside XMPP clients. These application would be called Xiclets, and you could run them on any client supporting the same DOM. Basic groups communication primitives are part of first level spec.

On the documentation front, I would like to create a XEP index per subject, for example grouping all the avatars or communication blocking XEPs in separate categories. I think this would make it easier to find information per subject.

Also, I would like to write some blog posts saying that instead of sticking a Comet client inside web-browsers, we should have a XMPP client. For basic content-push, XMPP has all the tools we need today, and it would allow content providers to deal with large number of clients easily. Instead of tens of thousands TCP connections to my server, I could have hundreds of TCP connections between servers.

Finally, some of my work with the clients at SAPO lead to the creation of several small protocols. Some of them are XEP worthy, and I plan to write at least one, a protocol to transfer clipboard contents between XMPP clients.

XMPP - Why I like it

Most of the solutions I designed during the last 15 years in the ISP business involved publish-subscribe, push technologies, and distributed event collection and processing.

XMPP started working as a hub in early 2000, using chat-rooms as meeting points for services running on different systems, and my interest in it grew from that.

I'm not a IM person, but more of a XMPP-as-service-network person. My favorite presence priority is -1.

Why I'm applying

I've been involved with XMPP for more than 6 years now, and it's time to pop the question.

Being more interested in automated systems over XMPP, I think I can help out keeping minds open to a even bigger picture than just IM. For example, of the more of 200 XEPs right now, not many deal with interaction of negative presence resources.

We have 6 billion possible IM users, but the number of devices that we could connect to XMPP is even more impressive.