The past few weeks have been exciting for Beeper. We made Beeper available to everyone without a waitlist, launched a new Android app based on our own internally-built Matrix SDK written in Go, and were acquired by Automattic for $125M. As part of the acquisition, the Beeper team is merging with the Texts.com team that was acquired by Automattic last year. We are going to unify the products under the Beeper brand. All of this is only a few months on the heels of our Beeper Mini launch which brought fully end-to-end encrypted iMessage to Android devices.

I’m running for the Matrix Governing Board as an Individual Member. I work on bridges¹ and backend infrastructure² as a software engineer at Beeper. You may have met me at one of the Matrix meetups³ and possibly even seen me giving a presentation at one of them. I have been a user of Matrix since around 2018⁴ and I have been heavily involved in the community since around 2020⁵. I’ve contributed multiple spec clarifications⁶ and been involved in many MSCs both personally and through my position at Beeper⁷. I also have contributed to Synapse⁸ and the Matrix React SDK⁹.

I’m making my way across the pond once again, this time for a work retreat. I’m attending a team meetup in Porto, Portugal.

I ran the 2024 Mines High School Programming Competition on Saturday, and I had to be in Porto by Monday morning. Thus, I had to leave on an evening flight on Saturday in order to arrive in time. Unfortunately, the best flight I was able to get that left late enough on Saturday went through Munich with a 7 hour layover before the flight to Porto. My return flight goes through Frankfurt (it’s kinda annoying having to go out of the way to Germany to get to and from Portugal, but it is what it is).

For the last seven years, Mines ACM has hosted a High School Programming Competition (HSPC) modelled after the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). I wrote about the 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023 competitions on this blog. The problems from every year are new and written by Mines students and some Mines alum specifically for the competition. This year, I wrote two of the problems and helped Ethan Richards with organizing the competition.

I attended NixCon and SCaLE in Pasadena, California for the first time this year. I went with my friend Addison, and while I was there I also met up with some other friends, and made some new friends as well!

I flew out very early on Thursday morning from Denver to LAX. It was raining on the way out of Denver, and the approach into LAX was quite windy. It was the most turbulent flight I’ve been on in a very long time. Getting from LAX to Pasadena was quite a journey. I had to take the Metro Connector from LAX over to the Metro and then I took two metro lines up to Pasadena. It probably took an hour and a half just on the metro to get there.

“Master of Science in Computer Science”, it sounds so grand, doesn’t it? But is it worth it? I’m writing this post to give my perspective on whether getting a master’s degree is worth the effort and money. I’m assuming that you are currently in a computer science undergraduate program and are considering whether to continue on to get a computer science master’s degree. I want to be very clear, this post is my opinion only.

Today I went to Waterloo, the town which gave its name to the battle that saw Napoleon’s final defeat at the hands of the Seventh Coalition. Getting there was quite an adventure. To start, I woke up late again. After managing to get out of bed, I tried to take the tram over to a bus that went directly to the Waterloo city centre. I found the bus stop, and waited for a few minutes before the bus came, but then it just rolled right on past! I tried flagging it down, but it didn’t stop. So, I had to go with plan B which was to go over to Brussels Midi and take the regional train to Waterloo.

Today I went to Bruges, a beautiful city near the Belgian Atlantic coast. I woke up a bit late (I still haven’t really adjusted to the CEST timezone), but I managed to get to Bruges by around 11 in the morning. I enjoy trains, and I got to take the train from Bruxeles-Midi through Ghent and on to Bruges.

I’d skipped breakfast, so by the time I arrived in the city centre, I was hungry and went to a restaurant called De Beurze. It was a cosy place, with a little fireplace that I sat next to. I had a nice steak with salad and fries, all while having a great view of the main square. I really enjoy the way that they do service in Europe. Nobody comes to bug you while you’re eating, but they are attentive and you can easily flag the wait staff down if you need anything. I don’t like that you have to pay for the water, though. But it gives me an excuse to order sparkling water since it’s the same price as still. Additionally, since the US Dollar is so strong against the Euro right now, the prices are also very reasonable. I think it was 1.08 USD to 1 EUR while I was there.

The primary purpose of my trip was to attend FOSDEM, a Free and Open Source Software conference. I attended last year as well and enjoyed it, so I decided to make the trip to attend again. FOSDEM is the biggest meeting of people in the Matrix community every year, and there is also a sizeable Go presence at the conference as well.

This year, I once again travelled to Brussels for FOSDEM (see my post from last year). I took the Wednesday 13:30 flight out of Denver through Chicago O’Hare to Brussels, and arrived on Thursday morning. The connection through O’Hare was a bit tight. As scheduled, I only had 50 minutes, and then due to our incoming flight being vectored to the wrong runway on the first approach, we had to circle around to land at the correct runway. I was at the back of the plane, but luckily my gate was not very far away and I made it just fine.