User:Fishbowler/Council Candidacy 2024

Contact

• Name: Dan Caseley
• Nickname: Fishbowler
• JID: dan.caseley@igniterealtime.org
• GitHub: https://github.com/Fishbowler
• Email: dan [at] caseley [dot] me [dot] uk

About Me

I'm finishing my first year on the Council, and I can't believe it's up already. I've just found my feet, and the current council is working smoothly and picking up pace.

My XMPP journey started with a consultancy who picked up a short-term project, paid to contribute some changes they wanted to an OSS project called "Openfire". It was my first non-user experience of XMPP as well as my first time being paid for OSS. I was hooked.

Like last year, I'm no encyclopaedia of XEP numbers, and I don't spend a lot of my time writing the code that implements XEPs. Instead, I'm a professional software tester (and will happily soapbox on many testing topics if you ask... and sometimes if you don't). In the last year, I've leaned on knowledge gained from involvement in the XMPP community and open source generally, as well as the background in testing. Testing isn't "Thou Shall Not Pass (without my rubber stamp and my green ticks)" - it's asking questions, exploring possibilities and flagging risks. That's what I've been doing in Council for the last year, asking the developers in the room about edge cases, thinking about the perspectives of classes of user, and generally raising annoying questions that could help to refine a XEP and make it the best it can be.

I hope it's been useful, and I'd love to continue, if you'll have me.