Katie’s post OSAF 2.0 Team seems like a good opportunity to introduce myself in this space. When I first joined OSAF I was asked to do this by Pieter Hartsook but a combination of a bad memory and busy schedule has kept this task triaged Later.

I’m originally from a small town about 45 minutes outside of Portland, Maine. My first brush with software development came during the summer of 2006 when, alongside a 6 day-a-week summer camp job, I participated in Google’s inaugural Summer of Code program. My project for the summer found me working with the GNOME Project implementing an experimental “panel extension” system.

I found Chandler while looking for a Linux calendaring client during my senior year at Williams College and after an internship on the Desktop team working on a project to better integrate the Twisted IMAP server into Chandler I was hired full-time as a server/ web front-end developer.

Most of my work since then has straddled HTTP, working mostly at the protocol level on the server and client side, with occasional forays down into the depths of our database layer and up to the shallow waters of user interface implementation. Most recently I’ve been updating our JavaScript code to use the 1.0 release of the Dojo toolkit.

A second project I’ve worked on recently (alluded to in the title of this post) is the first of what I hope to be a series of interesting hacks designed to expand Chandler into the maze of nooks and crannies that is contemporary personal information management. One of the more important lessons I’ve learned while working in this space is that everyone has a different system for tracking and managing the various things they want to accomplish both in work and in life. While semi-standard systems like Chandler’s Triage Workflow and David Allen’s GTD can help, even the most hard-core practitioners will make adjustments to work with their own personal circumstances. As developers of software designed to “serve the way people actually work, independently and together“, I believe it is our job to lead the way in bringing our ecosystem to people’s real needs.

So without further ado, let me introduce chandler.el, a module for interacting with Chandler Server using Emacs, a popular text editing environment. Instructions for installing and using it can be found at the link above. The current implementation is decidedly rough, but is ready for some real world use and feedback.

This offering is definitely on the techie side, but I hope it serves as a proof of concept for a general class of lightweight applications that have the potential to bring Chandler to the system you currently use to track your life. There is currently a discussion on chandler-users@osafoundation.org in which I’ve solicited ideas for more applications like this, please feel free to chime in there or in the comments to this post with yours!

In the future, updates about chandler.el will be posted mainly on my personal blog occident.us alongside information about whatever I happen to be working on or thinking about at the time. If you’re interested in what I do, do check out that space.