Daniel Brötzmann Application 2022

Summary

• Name: Daniel Brötzmann
• Nickname: wurstsalat / wurstsalat3000
• Occupation: Researcher at University of Oldenburg
• Jabber ID: daniel [ät] spacecloud [dot] one
• E-Mail: daniel.broetzmann [ät] posteo [dot] de
• GitHub: wurstsalat3000
• Projects: Gajim, xmpp.org, providers.xmpp.net

Projects

• Gajim: Development, Issue Tracker caretaker
• Author of gajim.org and Gajim’s Development News
• xmpp.org: Since xmpp.org needed an update for its backend, I took on the challenge and rebuilt the website using Hugo
• providers.xmpp.net: A frontend for the XMPP Providers project
• XMPP Newsletter: Contributor since 2019
• XMPP DOAP (Descpripton of a Project): Contributor
• Personal chat bot based on SliXMPP: Development
• Various other XMPP projects

About Me

I'm a PhD student at University of Oldenburg. My research topics include Dragonflies and their habitat use, sphagnum farming, and landscape fragmentation. This has nothing to do with XMPP, but it's what I do. I have studied Environmental Sciences and Landscape Ecology, and I've always been a computer enthusiast. For my bachelor's thesis, I had the opportunity to combine both topics. I developed an Android App which helps users to determine certain insect species. So much about my background.

In search of an alternative solution for proprietary chat apps, I found XMPP and started to look at various clients. Gajim caught my interest, because it's available on both Linux and Windows, thus enabling most of my friends to use it on their computers. I started helping the project by contributing translations, small fixes, and by taking care of Gajim's issue tracker. Being written in Python, it promised an easy entry into client development, which it was. Thanks to patient and helpful maintainers, I was able to learn many things from this project (git, python, and much more).

Motivation

Giving people the ability to communicate freely and in a decentralized way sounds like a good idea to me. But there have to be good XMPP chat clients in order to be able to compete with proprietary chat clients. My main goal in contributing to Gajim is to make it easier to use. The client has been around since 2004, and it shows. In the past years, I helped redesigning various areas, including the most critical bit for first time users: account creation. At the moment, I'm involved in rewriting Gajim's core features, which is really exciting for me, looking back at where I started.

Having good clients is step one, step two is promoting them. In order to provide new users with an overview of available clients in the XMPP ecosystem, I believe using Compliance Suites and establishing XMPP DOAP are the way to go. On the other hand, users have to make a decision about the service provider they want to use. XMPP Providers started to gather infos about various providers, offering a machine-readable file for XMPP clients to use. In order to give a better overview and to raise visibility, we launched a user-friendly website at providers.xmpp.net. This is what I want to work on in the future.