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This week on BSDNow, Allen is away in the UK (For BSDCam), but we still have a full episode for you! Don’t miss our interview with

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My two year journey to becoming an OS Developer

• A blog post by Ryan Zezeski about how he ended doing OS Development instead of working on application
• We have featured his posts before, including The illumos SYSCALL Handler

It started in the summer of 2014: I had just left Basho after 3.5 years of working on Riak, when I decided I wanted to become an OS developer. I purchased Solaris Internals, cloned illumos-gate, fired up cscope, and got to work. I hardly knew any C, x86 might as well have been Brainfuck, and, frankly, I knew shit about operating systems. But I was determined.
I’ve always learned best by beating my head against something until it makes sense. I’m not a fast learner; I’m persistent. What others have in ability I make up for in effort. And when it comes to OS internals it’s all about work ethic. The more you look, the more you realize it’s just another program. The main difference being: it’s the program all the other programs run on.
My strategy: to pick something, anything, that looked interesting, and write a post describing how it works. I wrote several of these posts in 2014 and 2015. More important, it put me in touch with Roger Faulkner: the creator of truss(1), the Solaris process model, and the real /proc filesystem. At the time I didn’t like my interaction with Roger. He explained, in what I would later find out to be his typical gruff manner, that I was wrong; so I concluded he is a prick. But over the years I realized that I was being a brat—he was trying to teach me something and I let my ego get in the way. I’ve come to view that interaction as a blessing. I interacted with one of the greats, a mentor of my mentor’s mentor (a Great Great Mentor).
A couple of weeks later something even more surreal happened, at illumos Day 2014. Bryan Cantrill was the last speaker of the day. One of my mentors and someone I admire greatly. He was there to regale us with the story of Joyent’s resurrection of lx-branded zones: Linux system call emulation on top of the illumos kernel. But before he would do that he decided to speak about me! I couldn’t believe it. I was so overwhelmed that I don’t remember most of what he said. I was too busy flipping shit—Bryan Cantrill is on stage, in front of other kernel developers I look up to, saying my name. I was in a dream. It turns out, unknown to me at the time, that he wrote the POSIX queue code for both Solaris and QNX, which I wrote about. He compared me to the great expository technical writers Elliott Organick and Richard Stevens. And it was at this moment that I knew I could do this: I could become an OS developer.
Never underestimate the effect kind words can have on someone that looks up to you.

• There is a lot more to the story, and it is definitely worth the read
• The story then goes on to talk about his recent run in with Bryan Cantrill > A week from now my two year journey to become an OS developer comes to an end; and a new chapter begins. I don’t know what specific things I’m going to work on, but I’m sure it will push me to the limit. I look fo