I’ve been reminded recently about how long i have spent with IgniteRealtime.org community (a place for XMPP based projects and people using or developing it). So i have checked my forums profile and today is exactly the day i have joined 14 years ago (2005.01.24). This is a few months later than i started at my first job. And my first major task there was indeed to setup an internal communications solution (“like Skype, but for internal usage”). That’s how i’ve found JiveSoftware and then Jive Messenger (later renamed to Wildfire and now Openfire). Then Jive switched to other products and created IgniteRealtime to donate their older projects to the community. I have heard about Jabber (currently XMPP) before and i think have tried it a bit a few years before while studying at university. When i had my first internet line installed at home my ISP also had an internal chat system for its customers based on Jabber. So picking this technology was an easy choice for me. It also was flexible, as you could use any XMPP client and you could choose one better suiting your company’s needs. And it was free 🙂 At first i had a lot of questions, but after a few years i was mostly helping others to fix problems, configure things. It has become a natural daily routine to check forums and reply to a few posts, to pop in into real time chat with developers and users. In 2015 i’ve decided to step in and took over then abandoned Spark project (XMPP client). Although i’m not a developer, so it was mostly managing patches, filing bugs, doing releases and writing a few lines of code here and there. Spark is currently in a limbo with a few major issues blocking its next release and absence of experienced coders contributing to it also hurts, but it still moves forward slowly. Just fixed a few issues the other day. Although we have switched to Skype for Business at work i haven’t quit this community and still looking forward to participate and collaborate for many years onwards 🙂
A few stats throughout these years:
- Messages posted in the forums – 13617;
- Read forums topics / messages – 2115 / 20996;
- Given and received likes on posts – 471 / 482.
Also on GitHub (since joining it in 2014) i have 207 commits for various IR.org projects (mostly Spark, but also Openfire, some plugins and website) and a total of 939 contributions (commits, pull requests, issues). Although that includes occasional issues for some other projects, but mostly IR.org.