Dave Cridland Application 2007

I'm Dave Cridland, and I'm applying for a new JSF membership, if you'll have me. :-)

Background

I've a rather long background in messaging, dating way back to the ancient and largely forgotten telnet BBS, chat and MUD systems that formed the bulk of what we call instant messaging today. I was peripherally involved in some of the work relating to interBBS networking between YAWC based BBSes (and I appreciate this probably means nothing to anyone). Suffice to say that these systems represented one of the earliest instant messaging systems around. (X me to find out more, I should say...)

More recently, I've been involved in roaming configuration systems, like ACAP, and internet messaging, like IMAP and ESMTP. I have the unpopular viewpoint that XMPP won't replace ESMTP, and yet more unpopularly, that this is probably a good thing.

I have one published RFC (4731) to my name, and a smallish handful of drafts, but I'm primarily an implementor, and protocol designer, rather than a technical author. My name appears in several RFCs in the Acknowledgements section.

Googling for "Dave Cridland" works well, as does, for those with long memories, "Diamond White".

Code

Personal

I have implemented a significant portion of an XMPP client as part of the email client I've written. I've not had as much time as I'd like to work on this - it so far represents about 24 hours of elapsed time, and really only handles basic messaging. My intention is to use this later to examine how I might utilize PubSub and/or PEP to provide similar capabilities to the current ACAP support - that is, bandwidth efficient roaming configuration.

A glance over the IMAP support might indicate the kind of code I write - my IMAP client supports more extensions than any other, and does so with the express purpose of running as efficiently as possible, making the client usable with modern messaging needs over early 90's links. It's not a popular client, except amongst server implementors, who routinely use it to test their servers.

Work

Until recently I worked as a freelance technical research programmer, which is a posh way of saying I managed to convince a few people to pay me money to play with cool stuff to see if it actually worked.

Now, I work for Isode Ltd, a London based software company that's been around for a couple of decades. Isode doesn't produce open-source, but instead produces world-class proprietary implementations of strictly open standards based servers. So far, Isode has concentrated on directories and email.

Why I like XMPP

It works, which is a good start, and it has sufficient flexibility to cope with the future. In particular, it shows promise as a generalized real-time data network, which is a useful thing to have on the internet.

What I'd like to do

I'd like to work to improve the protocol quality of XMPP, both by implementation and by being fantastically picky about every XEP written. I doubt I'll write a XEP ever, nor write the most popular client or server, but I'd like to think I'm already improving protocol quality, and hopefully contributing sufficient ideas to move things forward.

I'd also like to try to get XMPP used as the core behind getting roaming configuration systems finally deployed. This has been attempted several times over the past decade, and having personally invested a significant amount of time, I'd like to get it right this time.

Dave Cridland - xmpp:dwd@jabber.org or mailto:dave@cridland.net