Dave Cridland Email & Phone Number

Everywhere Open Standard Messaging Is Needed

This is an elected voluntary position running the Foundation, which is principally a Standards Development Organisation focused on maintaining and developing XMPP, the leading open standard instant messaging protocol.I'm focusing on ensuring that process documentation is accurate, and also making the tea.

In A Corner Of A Field In Camarthenshire

Strategic and Project specific software engineering, including quite a lot of XMPP-related projects, as well as operational engineering.I'm usually quite busy, but if you need an expert in XMPP with experience of military/government/healthcare, or indeed a dab hand at monitoring and performance tracing, give me a shout.

Within The Interwebs

Doing strategic engineering on a very reasonable day rate, so I can be picky about the next role.I went straight into work directly after leaving Peppy, with multiple previous employers asking about availability. They're all great companies, but I'm looking for a permanent place for the long term, doing something new. Like my previous places, I want to work with a team that's professional and generous. And as before, I want to work on things that are meaningful, interesting, and challenging.If you think that's sounding like you, and you're looking to hire someone versatile, focused on backend work (I can't do the pretty stuff), but with an eye across the whole technical estate, then my DMs are open (and not just because I don't know the settings).

A Corner Of A Field In West Wales

Nobody tell them, but I'm still writing code.As Staff Engineer, poked my nose into much more at a high level, though often not as deep. However I have personally:* Designed, implemented, and deployed a fine-grained onboarding eligibility check for our users.* Redesigned, implemented, and then redesigned again, filtering for our content.* Implemented session recording in our internal web app.* Designed and implemented heuristic detection for InfoSec policy infractions to aid in compliance evidence.* Still quite funny on Slack.

A Corner Of A Field In West Wales

Turning copious mugs of tea into clear and maintainable code, providing a stable and reliable service.During this period:* Designed and lead implementation of our migration from a UK-only single-tier system into a multi-national, multi-regional, multi-tiered service. This involved balancing regulatory requirements with business needs, delivering to shifting deadlines and agile requirements. All with virtually no downtime.* Redesigned security entirely on a running system from trivial roles to a full hybrid authorization system, based on clearances/labels generated using ABAC-style bespoke code, without any downtime.* Implemented performance telemetry and error reporting via Sentry across most of the estate (and encouraged the mobile team into doing the same).* Devised alerting and monitoring to flag problem for Engineering, InfoSec, and Customer Success.* Quite funny on Slack.

Armour Communications provides cryptographically secure messaging, communications, and collaboration systems operating on everyday devices to companies and organisations which have high security needs.I provide messaging expertise and some of the foremost tea-making abilities in the industry.

Everywhere

It's a challenging time for international organisations on many fronts, and I'm pleased to have been elected into a position where I can help steer the XMPP Standards Foundation through to face these challenges, alongside some very capable colleagues.

Stood for, and was elected to, the XMPP Council.The Council acts as both the approving body for the XSF's technical specifications, and also provides technical leadership.

It's an honour to serve both on the functional management and technical leadership of the XSF simultaneously; I'm hoping to continue the fine work of the previous Board in taking advantage of the raised interest in XMPP as a secure interoperable platform for chat and much more, to help promote our amazing technology base to a wider audience.

London, United Kingdom

Possibly slightly too excited to work at Pando (previously Forward Health) as "That Guy Who Knows Messaging", where I join an excellent team working to make clinical messaging in the NHS and beyond more intelligent, more secure, and just all-round better. Great fun to work in an industry I can actually talk about, too, so feel free to ask more!During my time here our clinical messaging product was used extensively by those in the NHS and DMS, including many in the front-line of the pandemic. During one month alone, this drove usage growth in excess of 700%, and I helped our team scale the service by working on efficiency at the SQL, API, and even the Mobile App UX. By the time we were exiting the initial phase of the pandemic, the service used less resource than on entry, supported several times the numbers of users, and had significantly less downtime than many other common messaging tools. New feature development pace did not slow down.

Retained at Surevine for consultancy relating to Tactical Chat, Security Labelling and Cross Domain systems, related to Openfire, Metre, Spiffing, and more.

(Remote)

Surevine design, build and deliver secure digital workplaces for UK Central Government and organisations with equally demanding security requirements, to harness the power of internal expertise in a safe, trusted environment; allowing people to work smarter in organisations that participate, collaborate and innovate.

Using my skills in mission-critical chat communications, I worked with an incredibly skilled team in Threads to apply these same skills to the world of chat commerce.

Openfire (formerly Wildfire and Jive Messenger) was first published in (or around) 2002, making it one of the oldest-developed XMPP servers still in active use, as well as one of the most popular servers within enterprise, government, and military.I came into the project to help manage the recent upsurge in development, in the run-up to the 4.0.0 release.

Elected to the Board for another stint, November 2013.The XSF an independent, nonprofit standards development organization whose primary mission is to define open protocols for presence, instant messaging, and real-time communication and collaboration on top of the IETF's Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).

(Remote)

Responsible for the mail protocol stack of Inky.

(Remote)

Responsible for Isode Ltd's XMPP products, including both Isode M-Link and Isode's variant of Swift, and management of the excellent team that works on them. I remained (or tried to remain) active in development, mostly in terms of M-Link itself.

(Remote)

Designing, implementing and testing aspects of M-Box, M-Link, M-Vault, and M-Switch.

Elected to the Board, November 2011.The XSF an independent, nonprofit standards development organization whose primary mission is to define open protocols for presence, instant messaging, and real-time communication and collaboration on top of the IETF's Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP).Unlike most instant messaging protocols, XMPP is an open standard. Like e-mail, anyone who has a domain name and a suitable Internet connection can run their own XMPP server and talk to users on other servers. XMPP is the protocol behind services such as Google's Gtalk and LiveJournal's LJ Talk.

Elected as an XMPP Council member, to handle the standardization side of the XSF. Resigned when pressures of time sadly forced me to.

Inventure Systems did two things: First, we helped small business and home users get the most from their computers. Second, we used the revenue we gain from that to reinvest into development.

Founded Clues along with Steve and Martin, as a general IT consultancy at the height of an IT recession. Consistently made a profit.

Fleps, as it was affectionately known, was a company providing billing systems to telcos, enterprise intranet portals to banks, and all manner of information management systems to all manner of customers - a couple of which went bust at the wrong moment, effectively killing the company.As a senior developer, I worked on both the JScript/ASP frontend systems and the C++ backend systems, on the lower level object database and the high-level presentation layer. I also brought new recruits up to speed on UML, C++, SQL, JScript, and all the other technologies we used. Finally, I particularly enjoyed having C3P0 come into the office every other week and take us all out for a chinese meal.

Back in the Dark Days of Dialup, Cerbernet were proud to be one of the few independent ISPs providing high speed, always-on connectivity to everyone from art galleries to the film industry. I developed the network as part of a fantastic, enthusiastic and talented team.

Engineering

Engineering

Education record