Hey, I'm Travis

[turt2live]

Hey all 👋

I'm Travis (he/him), sometimes called TravisR to avoid name conflicts, and I'm based out of Alberta, Canada. I wear a number of hats in my professional life, most of which revolve around working on the Matrix.org protocol (a fully decentralized protocol for communication, supporting end-to-end encryption, VoIP, IoT, and everyday messaging).

At the Matrix.org Foundation, I'm Director of Standards Development, one of ten Spec Core Team (SCT) members, and one of two elected SCT representatives to the Foundation's Governing Board. All of these roles largely coalesce around ensuring the specification for the protocol continues moving forward in an open, safe, secure, featureful, and efficient way. On the Governing Board, I participate in the T&S Committee, Finance/Fundraising Committee, and Governance Committee. With my Element hat, I am Tech Lead for T&S and a Senior Software Developer fully allocated to the Foundation's operations.

Aside from my Matrix-shaped hats, I'm also the elected Secretary/Treasurer for my local non-profit makerspace and assist operational teams for regional shows and events where I can (mostly doing line/crowd control).

My background is heavily centered around protocol development, non-profit governance, and open source software development. The vast majority of my work is publicly accessible here on GitHub, for better or worse, and covers a range of web apps, backend services, bridges/protocol converters, documentation and specification, and a few random hobby projects.

I'm not overly experienced with running LLMs/AI in general, but do have a moderate amount of experience in using them either in an IDE for tab completion (I try to avoid the "write this" prompts) or in a chat window to assist with learning something new or to get ideas on where to start a project. I'm still figuring out where my precise objections to the technology reside, but generally I'm supportive of it taking a supportive role itself.

I expect to be a regular visitor to the RMC office hours, especially as Matrix explores gpt-oss-safeguard for use in our policy server, and I'm looking forward to meeting folks working in similar spaces to share experiences and knowledge about running (or understanding, in my case 😅) the various safety models available.