Post AsZ65WDFnY9cLuKuvI by alanc@fosstodon.org
 (DIR) More posts by alanc@fosstodon.org
 (DIR) Post #AsZ65US4LUogtHFijo by alanc@fosstodon.org
       2025-03-30T00:25:04Z
       
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       26 years ago today was my first day as a student intern in the Sun Desktop Software Release Engineering team (then called "Power Client Software" to distinguish it from the Thin Client orgs handling Java Stations and Sun Rays).I became a full-time employee 6 months later, after graduating at the end of summer semester.6 months after that, aka 25 years ago now, I moved from the release engineering team into the X11 development team.
       
 (DIR) Post #AsZ65VTAYtI62ym75k by adilarif@mastodon.world
       2025-03-30T00:32:52Z
       
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       @alanc With your deep experience in X11, how do you feel about Wayland?
       
 (DIR) Post #AsZ65WDFnY9cLuKuvI by alanc@fosstodon.org
       2025-03-30T01:16:01Z
       
       1 likes, 0 repeats
       
       @adilarif I believe Wayland is better designed for the requirements of the 21st century, instead of the 1980's era requirements X11 tried to meet, but since I primarily work on an OS that can only run X11 and not Wayland, I've never dug too deeply into it.  (Which is why I also still do a lot of maintenance work on X11 stuff, since that's what we use and ship at work.)
       
 (DIR) Post #AsZ65btcfS13ylCK9o by alanc@fosstodon.org
       2025-03-30T00:43:37Z
       
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       That also means it's been 25 years since the last time I applied for a job and went through the interview process, when I applied for the opening in the X11 engineering team. I've been re-orged through 7 managers since then, and my job description has evolved along the way, to where I am today as a Senior Software Architect working across all of Solaris, reporting directly to the VP of Solaris Engineering.
       
 (DIR) Post #AsZ65iBvGKDfVFo1Vw by alanc@fosstodon.org
       2025-03-30T01:00:44Z
       
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       In the release engineering team I worked on X11, CDE, and OpenWindows stuff, all of which made me learn to build with Imake.I also worked on tools to help automate builds and adding web versions of CLI tools, like a early web viewer for our SCCS/TeamWare source code history.Of course, since this was 1999, that was mostly done in perl.
       
 (DIR) Post #AsZ65oSnwTHwxLkaf2 by alanc@fosstodon.org
       2025-03-30T01:03:41Z
       
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       One of the first bugs I tackled was described as "This bug is currently very annoying to the X release engineers since the version of psroff installed in /usr/dist prints by default, causing many wasted pages of printouts everytime a full build is done."This turned out to be due to the Imake config files using the wrong commands to convert the troff documents to PostScript files, and picking up flags to print them instead.I filed https://illumos.org/opensolaris/bugdb/bug.html#!4227466 to fix that, one week into the job.