Hi,
So, sorry for the long delay, I’ve just had to move flats and the number of problems never seems to stop growing, and then the DNS on my private cloud went down!!
I’ve been working on a CV and am still waiting on some feedback, but I can send that to you shortly if you want to discuss further via e.g. email. To summarise a bit about me, I’m a mature (25) student, so whilst I don’t yet have time in industry under my belt, I’m not a new programmer either; in fact I first learnt to program for real with darkwyrm’s tutorial series as a teenager back in 2009-10, and I have been doing a bit of everything in my own time since then - at some point I’d really like to finish off a number of projects on my disks and upload to github as I’ve probably dabbled in a lot as and when needed like most people, but not managed to tidy up once the job was done :D! I had been dual-booting Haiku day-to-day, back in the R1A1 years, before I moved from XP to linux, and so I’ve used the Be API to make a few demo apps from those tutorials as I was learning C++. I can remember the basics and would hope to get up to speed over a bit of time. I’ve stuck with C++ since then, moving onto Qt for graphical projects under Linux, but doing plenty of theory and terminal work, and I did like ot learn the language inside-out as much as possible. The most significant project I think I undertook was a draft proposal paper, along with implementation, for the standards committee; one thing about me is I am a perfectionist, anddo fixate on the details, so when the way I had designed my coursework for college when I was 19 required something beyond the scope of the language, I carried that forward from there. I had to shelve this hwen I started my degree and haven’t ever really ofund enough time, but it should be on github.
Totally understand regarding value when spending other people’s donated money, you need good results from me or anyone else.
I’m happy to be flexible around how payment would work, or hourly rates, etc. At the very least it’s not a problem in theory - the whole reason I’m looking for some work at the moment is I’m trying to apply for a (small) mortgage, so I need to work out in more detail things like how much I’d need to be earning overall each year, but the main sticking point is having some income that ticks all the boxes the banks will require - as a full-time student, without a job ATM, nearly all the money I have coming in won’t be taken into account. So, the actual pay will probably be less important for me than the flexibility and being able to work remotely whenever in the week I am able to, as I also have PTSD and am trying to work through that at the moment, which means life can be sporadic, and I can focus in bursts a few days at a time - good for programming, less so for office jobs!!!
And as I’d mentioned, I do fixate on the details, I’d hope with developing something like an OS this would be an attractive trait, but I’m cautious about straddling a line between billing by features that need doing and running myself into the ground if this takes me forever to implement, versus simply billing for the number of hours and finding I’ve done some thing in lots of detail but not covered enough ground in general for what you were wanting - I’m happy to hear any input from anyone regarding this.
So yeah, if you’re still interested, hopefully we can work with something, and like you say, something short-term to start with definitely sounds a good idea to me - even if for mortgage purposes I’d need some other more fixed form of employment to evidence, there would be no harm tryin this out on the side to start off with whilst I get some more info and continued looking on that front. And from your end, if you understandably need a ceertain amount of return, I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be possible to shift the pricing structure to ensure that I’m inline with that - if you would get a certain amount of code/results/whatever per hour from a full-time and professionally-employed developer, then I’m happy to adjust things to match that ratio, given the circumstances, if that makes sense, and at the very least, for a couple of weeks whilst I can work out exactly what the banks will be looking for, how much time I’ll realistically have each week, etc. etc. It wouldn’t exactly be a bad thing to have on my CV, to say I complted even a modest amount of work on the OS I discovered and tinkered with when I was 14! Plus I can take an Operatng Systems course the year afer next so if I end up learning things beforehand, may be a free 20 credits for later
Regarding some preparation work, that’s absolutely fine. I’m already a little bowled-over you’re open to considering, I can imagine several projects where they might not even think of employing someone until they had a good 6 months of pull requests and the such on a voluntary basis. In an ideal world, I’d have loved to have done this already, but other projects have been on my list, so as you say, I don’t mind getting up to speed for free before you can consiuder anything else, and I’ll definitely browse through trac and see what looks like a good starting point, unless anyone has some specific recommendations. A couple have stood out and I’ve noted them down. It’ll take a bit of a while to get a decent development environment set up and I can try some small PRs just to get comfortable with the workflow in e.g. Paladin.
The main thing for me is I’ve been working towards a fully virtualised system using illumos for some time now, and in fact part of the motivation was to spin up alternative OSs like Haiku much more easily, and this would make getting a development box up and running much more organised. I was aiming to knock together a build script for official releases (alpha/beta) and nightlies in order to contribute some images for Haiku upstream that can just be started off the bat, also hoping some solaris folks might wonder and be tempted to give Haiku a whirl.
I’ve been trying to clear some hard drive space this last week, to get this set up on metal finally and start having a proper play with it, so is it alright if I continue with this in the meantime and see how I go, along with unboxing my stuff and some other errands, and then will look to close a couple of tickets and RTFM on style and other housekeeping? The solaris learning curve has been quite steep, but I’m hoping it will pay off in the end, and it should run much faster than my current libvirt under Ubuntu.
But thanks very much, being able to email later in more detail would be brilliant! I’ll continue to get on with what I’ve mentioned, does it make sense to leave this thread open in the meantime so anyone else may comment if they want to add anything or any comments, and then if it suits I’ll email you with some updates in a week or so, depending how this hypervisor stuff goes, and get looped in to discuss?
Thanks very much