About

My name is Sumner, and I live in Denver, Colorado. I am a Software Engineer at Automattic working on Beeper and I run a business called Nevarro which is dedicated to building and self-hosting open source software and providing educational services such as computer science and mathematics tutoring. I’m also a 4th Degree Black Belt and certified instructor in ATA Taekwondo and a Colorado School of Mines alum (bachelor’s in CS, 2018; masters in CS, 2019).

I believe that free speech is essential to a functioning democratic system. I believe that guaranteeing free speech in the digital space is essential. I believe that the best way to guarantee free speech is to ensure that every individual controls their own data, rather than having it be owned by Big Tech. Thus, I’m passionate about making data ownership accessible to the masses. I believe that decentralized and federated systems are essential to providing this accessibility. Right now, the best federated chat system is Matrix, and so most of my effort is currently going towards furthering Matrix in various forms.

In my job at Beeper (acquired by Automattic), I am a member of the Platform Team which is responsible for building Matrix bridges and developing our Go client SDK. I’m particularly proud of the work that I’ve done to bring support for key backup and interactive verification to maturix-go. I also have helped build and maintain the wide set of bridges that Beeper maintains, and I started and was a core member of the Hungryserv project which enabled us to scale from hundreds to tens of thousands of users.

Outside of my job, I run my own Matrix homeserver and bridges. I also write and host a few Matrix bots. I have written about the technical and community aspects of Matrix on my blog, and I’ve given a few talks related to Matrix at conferences (Matrix Cryptographic Key Infrastructure, Hungryserv: A Homeserver Optimized for Unfederated Use-Cases, What is Beeper Working on?). I was recently elected to the Matrix Governing Board as an individual member. My goal is to represent the interests of the community to the Foundation. You can read my platform which lays out the most important issues that the Foundation has to address moving forward. My DMs are open if you are a member of the Matrix community and have questions or concerns about the Foundation or what we as the Governing Board are doing.

When I’m not programming, I enjoy training in ATA Taekwondo under Chief Master Corina Black where I am a 4th Degree Black Belt and certified Level 3 Certified Legacy Instructor. I also enjoy playing soccer, volleyball, and racquetball when I have the chance. During high school, I won the FRCCA Soccer State Championship with Denver Eagles my senior year. I have also won multiple state titles in Taekwondo.