Haiku, Inc. is proud to announce that we have hired existing contributor waddlesplash to work on general Haiku improvement full-time. The contract was signed on Monday, August 23, 2021 and waddlesplash plans to start work tomorrow.
Working for Haiku is quite the dream job, I’m happy to be given this opportunity!
I imagine the community has all sorts of ideas for what I should work on now that I have a larger chunk of time and attention to devote to it. Hopefully I will not disappoint!
Great to see this officially announced! Might be time to increase my recurring donation amount. Looking forward to what is yet to come!
Just great!
What is your timetable, what are you doing with in code ?
Really excited to see waddlesplash dedicated working on Haiku!! Haiku, Inc. has been saving up your valuable donation funds for a long time to be able to do this.
As a side note, while Haiku, Inc. is monitoring waddlesplash’s work and tasks, the developers and community will be driving his pool of overall project priorities through Haiku, Inc. There’s a lot of room here for waddlesplash to work on what he enjoys, and also work on the “hard stuff” simultaneously.
A new “Hard Tasks” page was added to trac here: https://dev.haiku-os.org/wiki/HardTasks I think this is a good pool of “big tasks” for waddlesplash to think about. Most of the stuff on that page echos what the community has been suggesting over the last few years.
Welcome aboard waddlesplash!
This is really wonderful news. Godspeed, @waddlesplash.
FWIW, my personal priority wish would be resolving all R1 tickets and finally giving the project the stability and the release it deserved for a long time. Any of the other hard tasks could wait post-R1 I believe. It would also help with scaling the R2 goals along with those hard tasks.
Congratulations! I’m glad to see you got the job! I hope sometime in the future we can bring a few more of the long-timers on fulltime.
My goal is to work on whatever is needed to make Haiku a usable operating system. That may include things outside of the “R1” tickets, since we have a relatively strict definition of what “R1” means. Ultimately, when the system is ready and stable, it will become R1, and we will shunt all remaining tickets to a different milestone (as we have done with beta releases before.)
n,n maybe the hard but the dream on haiku for me are GPU drivers :3 it can be useful a lot especially on the machine learning developers.
The closest we have to a R1 feature list is:
https://dev.haiku-os.org/wiki/FutureHaiku/Features
It’s not on that list but If you got 3D hardware acceleration to work and nothing else I’d be happy.
I am personally against the 3d acceleration goal, I think there are enough smaller bugs to iron out first.
I never actually cared for 3d, not even on other os.
Did Haiku, Inc. provide a list of tasks to work on? What does the contract exactly entail? Although I share the sentiment of providing a usable system totally, the wording here is very vague. Some technical details would be very nice (pinging Inc. guys as well).
I’d love to see Haiku boot as fast as it did back in the days of Alpha 4. I just booted my Haiku A4 install last night looking for old sample code I wrote years ago. I had forgotten that it boots faster than the Beta versions.
Congrats @waddlesplash
It will be nice to declare exact goals of contract. “My goal is to work on whatever is needed to make Haiku a usable operating system.” is too vague.
That’s because the goals of the contract are left intentionally vague. The Inc. has the power to guide my work in certain directions, but overall, I’ve been a “generalist” so far in that I’ve worked on everything from device drivers to the userland stack to the ports system, and the contract is about all of that, not some specific part.
We decided to set this up as a contractor arrangement because for now it makes things a bit easier for Haiku, Inc. But as waddlesplash says this will be different than other previous contracts which were for specific things. The goal is to fill in the gaps for what our current volunteer developers are willing and able to work on.
Haiku seems to be moving too slowly for many people, a lot of our developers don’t want it to feel like a job, but many of us would like it to become a viable operating system. This is our way of trying to make that happen. We are trying something new, so let’s see how it goes.
It would be good if we could have regular updates too, whether that’s a section within PulkoMandy’s Activity Reports or a separate thing.
Yeah I talked to waddlesplash about that, he will probably post his own blog posts to keep the community updated.
Two blogs a month might be kind of annoying, it’s nice to have just one post per month to look at and read. So indeed, I could submit some kind of section for the existing reports, or work out some arrangement with @pulkomandy to trade duties on a more regular basis, if he is open to that possibility (I have written those reports now and again in his stead in the past.)