Mini Interview - Scott McCreary

Written by Karl vom Dorff Friday, 27 May 2011 11:44

Scott McCreary recently won our April Thank You Award. Like all winners, we asked him a few questions with regards to his activity in the Haiku community:

Q1: How old are you and what do you do to pay the bills?

I'm 44 years old and I am currently a Test Engineer for a Solar Company, mostly programming with LabVIEW.

Q2: In your Thank You Award nomination, your contributions to Haiku were noted; i.e:

- Most prolific contributor to HaikuPorts

- Active advocate at LUG meetings

- LinuxWorld (twice)

- SCaLE conference

- OSCON conference

- LUGRadio Conference

- GSOC 2010 Mentor Summit

- Haiku admin of the GCI 2010 program

I was the 3rd person to join BePorts, which later changed into HaikuPorts, that was back in 2008. About that same time another local Bay Area Haiku fan, Jorge Mare, asked if I'd be interested in working the Haiku booth at the LUGRadio USA show in San Francisco. It was just a weekend show, but was fun, so we ended up doing some other California open source shows as you've listed. Working on ports for HaikuPorts involves looking at a lot of code from many different organizations and interacting with many developers from those other organizations. I've been lucky to have met a few of these developer's in person at some of the events I've attended. The next event I'll be at will probably be Picn*x 20, which will mark the 20th anniversary of Linux, but we'll also be marking the 10th anniversary of Haiku:

Picn*x 20 Website

We'll probably have a Haiku table again, just like in the past few years. So stop by and say hi if you are in the area that day.

Q3: What would you love to have that would make working on Haiku easier?

More free time...

Q4: What interesting book, band, TV show etc. would you like to recommend?

For those interested in programming on Haiku, I'd recommend they get a copy of Jon Yoder's 'Learning to Program with Haiku'. This book could almost be used as a textbook for a High School programming class. It breaks things down into easy to digest sections. As noted in the reviews this first book is mostly an intro to C++, but gets into Haiku specifics in the last third of the book. Looks like his follow up book with be more Haiku centered. You can read the lessons from this in Jon's blog.

-scottmc