I’m running for the Matrix Governing Board as an Individual Member (see my Platform) and I am only eligible to vote as an individual member, but I would like to endorse a few Ecosystem Member candidates who are well qualified to represent the ecosystem. Kim Brose I endorse Kim Brose (HarHarLinks) representing Matrix Community Events as an Ecosystem Member candidate. I met Kim in Berlin at the first Community Matrix Summit and has been active in organizing many other Matrix community events including the 2023 and 2024 Matrix Community Meetups at FOSDEM. Read more...

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 that was acquired by Automattic last year. We are going to unify the products under the Beeper brand. Read more...

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. Read more...

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. Read more...

For the last six 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, reviewed all of them, and helped Ethan Richards with organizing the competition. Read more...

“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 or not 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 or not to continue on to get a computer science master’s degree. I want to be very clear, this post is my opinion only. Read more...

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! Read more...

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. Read more...

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. At Beeper, I primarily write Go, and I work extensively on Matrix bridges as well as other Matrix-related projects such as bots and homeservers. Read more...

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. Read more...