2025-10-16 –, Lynn Conway
Take a trip back through time with me as we learn about how bridges happened. Why did we do it at all? Whose idea was it to hook up the then fledgling matrix.org network to the biggest IRC network? How many databases were shredded in the line of duty?
This talk features a journey back through time as we look at bridges and integrations that have been built on Matrix over the years, and what we can hope to learn from it. There will be laughter, there will be eyebrows raised, there will be content involving the infamous IRC bridges and there may be a tear or two. There is plenty to dig into here as we go behind the scenes on what it takes to maintain a bridge for the global Matrix community, as well as how the standards of appservices have evolved over the years
Half-Shot (or Will) was the lead maintainer of integrations on matrix.org for many years, and now is retired to simply doing all the other things instead. Famous for causing things such as the libera.chat IRC bridge, replacing everything with the Hookshot bridge, and the most cursed implementations of bridge encryption.
When he's not doing Matrix things, he is making terrible indie games, running somewhere, or possibly making a fuss of a dog!