Interview with Daniel Sieger

From NetBSD Wiki

This interview was taken by Zafer Aydogan on the 15th of August 2007.

ZA: Hello Daniel!
DS: Hi Zafer.

ZA: How old are you ?
DS: I'm currently 25 years old.

ZA: How did you get in touch with NetBSD and when was this ?
DS: I first got in touch with NetBSD at university. One of my lecturers
was a NetBSD user and we spoke about it one or two times. I read the
project's website and found their goals to be very appealing. So, I
gave it a try, and I liked the system quite a lot. Finally, I got
stuck with it.

ZA: Where you do live and what is your current profession ?
DS: I currently live in Bielefeld, Germany. I'm doing a course
of studies called "Computer Science in the Natural Sciences" at
the Bielefeld University. I'm also a member of our Artificial Intelligence
Group.

ZA: Are you married and do you have kids ?
DS: No, neither nor.

ZA: Daniel, you have recently redesigned the NetBSD website. What was the main reason for doing it ?
DS: There were several reasons. The main motivation was to bring the
documentation into a more consistent state. Quite a number of
documents were not yet converted to XML. Furthermore, the directory
structure was somewhat inconsistent as well. The visual redesign was
more than overdue. Finally, I wanted the site to be more easy to
navigate for both newcomers and returning visitors.

ZA: As you just mentioned, you are also working on the documentation. It is a known fact that NetBSD docs are out of date. What are you going to do to fix the current documentation problems ?
DS: Sorry, but I think this is not fully correct. At least from my
experience the NetBSD documentation is one of the best ones out
there. Of course there are some documents which need to be updated,
and this is a problem we need to attack better sooner than later. But
it is a rather difficult problem involving many aspects like, for
example, man-power, technical infrastructure as well as the existence
and enforcement of clear policies and guidelines. Right now, I'm not
yet sure how to solve these issues best. But be sure we're working on
it.

ZA: How did you become a NetBSD developer ?
DS: At the end of 2006 I started to work on the NetBSD kernel's thread
scheduler as a part of my course of studies. During the course of the
project I was asked if I'd like to join the developer community and
I agreed.

ZA: When did you start coding in C and what would you advise NetBSD newcomers (for starting in coding in c) ?
DS: Heh, good question. I don't remember exactly when I got started with C. I guess it was at the end of school, probably around 1999 or something.
As far as advice on getting started with C is concerned, I'd probably
recommend pretty much the same as many others do. Get a good book on C
(such as Kernighan & Ritchie's "The C Programming Language") and work
your way through it. Write some smaller programs on your own. Read
good code, try to understand it and extend its functionality. Probably
get involved with an Open Source project you find interesting.

ZA: Looking back to the last 3 years, how do you evaluate NetBSD's popularity? Do you see NetBSD's status declined or getting more popular among users and developers ?
DS: Difficult questions. As there's no objective measurement for things like these, this is highly subjective.
First of all, NetBSD never has been as popular as other players in the
field, that's for sure. Personally, I don't think it's popularity has
changed too much at all in recent years.
Of course there has been quite some talk about NetBSD declining etc.
in the recent past. But if you take a closer look at what's currently
going on, we're far from it. Still, I think there are a couple of
areas that could be improved, both technically as well as
organizational.

ZA: Tell us more about the scheduler framework and its significance.
DS: First and foremost, the framework lays way for further improvement. We
now have a well defined API that makes it rather easy to implement a
new scheduler. I'm quite confident that we'll see a new thread
scheduler that better supports SMP and real-time computing
capabilities in the near future.

ZA: Your favourite movie ?
DS: There are too many good movies to pick a single one.

ZA: Your favourite food ?
DS: Mmmh, vegetable lasagne.

ZA: Your favourite shell ?
DS: tcsh

ZA: Do you have hobbies beside NetBSD, like sports or music ?
DS: Oh yeah. I'm somewhat passionate about martial arts; mostly Kendo, Aikido and the traditional Japanese schools (Koryu). I also do some
cycling, swimming, running and hiking from time to time. There are
a lot of other things I enjoy beside NetBSD.

ZA: Danke.
DS: Ich danke auch.