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Long time lurker here. Sorry for the lack of intelligible paragraphs and for all the abbreviations. I had to fit it under 2000 characters. A more reader-friend

Long time lurker here. Sorry for the lack of intelligible paragraphs and for all the abbreviations. I had to fit it under 2000 characters. A more reader-friendly version is at http://stackoverflow.com/cv/amagnasco http://stackoverflow.com/cv/amagnasco

skissane 10y ago
You write in your CV "Want to learn C to build device drivers so my computers work like they should". Why do you want to write your own device drivers? Because there is hardware you want to use (e.g. under Linux) for which adequate free device drivers don't exist? (What hardware?) Because existing device drivers have bugs or limitations that no one has fixed? (Can you give an example?) If I was doing hiring, the way you worded that would make me suspicious that you don't really have a good understanding of the reasons why in practice people develop device drivers. You could avoid that impression if you were more specific about a device you want to write a driver for (e.g. "I bought a Thingymabob9000, but I can't use it under Linux because only Windows drivers are available for it"). Since the vast majority of IT jobs don't actually involve device driver development, any limitations of your understanding in this area are probably irrelevant; but it is better you avoid inducing a negative impression in others even if it is irrelevant to the job (unconciously we tend to still consider things even if we know consciously they are irrelevant.) Or you could just avoid mentioning the topic of writing device drivers altogether-better to not bring up a topic on which your knowledge might have some gaps than bring it up only for the hiring manager to get the impression that you have a poor understanding of it.
- amagnasco 10y ago
  Sorry about not being more specific in there, you're absolutely right. I wouldn't mention it in an actual CV or cover letter, I just wanted to put it on here so you can see my long-term interest in CS, that it's not just to pay the bills. As a general issue my hardware is mostly old and crappy, while most of it does have foss linux drivers the specific configuration for some is quite impossible to manage. I've been trying to figure it out with a lot of AL experts on the forums for some years now. So my interest in that would be learning how drivers work so I can actually configure them properly, helping rewrite the documentation, and maybe helping rewrite the drivers themselves if necessary. Probably the first step would be learning how to get a working Gentoo system up, as I spend a lot of time reading their documentation anyway. For example, the 2011 MacBook Pro has two video cards: an integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000, and a discrete AMD Radeon HD 6750M. It works like * even on OSX (it literally froze up on me for 15 minutes while I was writing this post), but on Arch I can't even get it to run so I just use single-user mode and do everything from bash. Unfortunately as fun as Mutt and Elinks are, I can't apply to jobs using that so I'm forced to run OSX. As a specific interest there's a lot of areas that intrigue me in the realm of FOSS development for ARM (and HURD!).

skissane 10y ago

You write in your CV "Want to learn C to build device drivers so my computers work like they should". Why do you want to write your own device drivers? Because there is hardware you want to use (e.g. under Linux) for which adequate free device drivers don't exist? (What hardware?) Because existing device drivers have bugs or limitations that no one has fixed? (Can you give an example?) If I was doing hiring, the way you worded that would make me suspicious that you don't really have a good understanding of the reasons why in practice people develop device drivers. You could avoid that impression if you were more specific about a device you want to write a driver for (e.g. "I bought a Thingymabob9000, but I can't use it under Linux because only Windows drivers are available for it"). Since the vast majority of IT jobs don't actually involve device driver development, any limitations of your understanding in this area are probably irrelevant; but it is better you avoid inducing a negative impression in others even if it is irrelevant to the job (unconciously we tend to still consider things even if we know consciously they are irrelevant.) Or you could just avoid mentioning the topic of writing device drivers altogether-better to not bring up a topic on which your knowledge might have some gaps than bring it up only for the hiring manager to get the impression that you have a poor understanding of it.

amagnasco 10y ago
Sorry about not being more specific in there, you're absolutely right. I wouldn't mention it in an actual CV or cover letter, I just wanted to put it on here so you can see my long-term interest in CS, that it's not just to pay the bills. As a general issue my hardware is mostly old and crappy, while most of it does have foss linux drivers the specific configuration for some is quite impossible to manage. I've been trying to figure it out with a lot of AL experts on the forums for some years now. So my interest in that would be learning how drivers work so I can actually configure them properly, helping rewrite the documentation, and maybe helping rewrite the drivers themselves if necessary. Probably the first step would be learning how to get a working Gentoo system up, as I spend a lot of time reading their documentation anyway. For example, the 2011 MacBook Pro has two video cards: an integrated Intel HD Graphics 3000, and a discrete AMD Radeon HD 6750M. It works like * even on OSX (it literally froze up on me for 15 minutes while I was writing this post), but on Arch I can't even get it to run so I just use single-user mode and do everything from bash. Unfortunately as fun as Mutt and Elinks are, I can't apply to jobs using that so I'm forced to run OSX. As a specific interest there's a lot of areas that intrigue me in the realm of FOSS development for ARM (and HURD!).