About Me

As a result of people taking notice of this project, I've had a few people ask me about myself, and what qualifies me to take on such a project.

I've written countless scripts/programs in my time, but only one was ever released and used by the general public, and that was an IRC services program called Shrike. I've been programming since I was 11, and I'm proficient in C, Python, Ruby, and PHP. I've dabbled in Perl and C++, and various other languages throughout the years. I've written a few moderately complex C programs, and a few minor things in Python and Ruby. This will be my largest project in Ruby, which is currently my favorite language.

I've been involved in IRC since before I was programming. I've run several channels, servers, and took a stab at running my own network. So, I definitely come to XMPP from IRC. I've been bored with IRC dev for some time. I worked on bots, and contributed code to several ircd projects. I've seen the light of XMPP, and so now I'm doing that.

My main goal in programming isn't to make a program, but to learn how something works. I spent so long programming IRC related stuff that I could probably recite RFC1459 off the top of my head. By writing something as vital as a server, I hope to understand all aspects of XMPP.

My (very) personal website is at ericw.org. There's not a whole lot there. The blog is pretty personal, about my job and that sort of thing and not of a whole lot of interest to this community. The rants are probably not all that interesting either, because I'm just complaining a lot. Many of you in the Ruby community may already know me from my "Ruby rant." I managed to piss off a lot of people with that, and a lot of people took it seriously and actually managed to make some good out of it. All in all, it didn't turn out so bad.

I hope you guys get something useful out of my projects, because that's far more than I ever intended by writing them.