Thursday, February 15, 2007

Kicking this off

Well, since the front page of this blog is still empty, I think we need an opening exercise, and what better way to start than introductions?

In that vein:

My name is Travis Vachon, and I graduated in 2006. In April of my senior year I lined up an internship with the Open Source Application Foundation, a non-profit founded by the former CEO of Lotus, Mitch Kapor, and located in downtown San Francisco. During the summer I worked in Python on Chandler, a next generation personal information manager. In September I applied for a job within the company working on the server side companion to Chandler, Cosmo. In addition to supporting Chandler, Cosmo is also a general purpose calendaring server, supporting CalDAV, WebDAV and Atom. Our first major release (that is, intended to be used by people outside OSAF) is scheduled for April of this year, so we're currently working in heads-down mode to make sure we make that goal. Chandler and Cosmo are both open source under an Apache License, and we're currently looking for more contributers! We're also currently looking for interns for this coming summer. I'll post more about that here in a few days, but if you know anyone interested in open source software, this is an amazing opportunity.

Outside of work I'm an enthusiastic (if under-motivated) climber and hiker, and hope to explore more of the outdoor playgrounds available in and outside of the Bay Area.

On a Williams related note, I'm currently attending a conference in Austria with Professor Jim Teresco. Jim submitted a shorter version of my senior thesis work to the IASTED conference on Parallel and Distributed Computing and Networks and it was accepted. The nice thing about this particular conference is that Austria has some of the best skiing in the world, and we have not let that go to waste. To see a short description of our trip so far and some fantastic photos, you can check out my blog here and Jim's picture site here.

It would be great to hear introductions from other authors! Personally, I don't think this site needs to have a huge amount of content, but it would be a real shame to see it completely fizzle.