TALKING TO THE DEVELOPER
Lead developer Andreas helped us fill in some technical details about how SerenityOS works, but we were interested to find out how the community came together and how the development of the OS has affected him personally.
Q. Were you surprised how popular your YouTube videos have turned out to be? Definitely! I originally started making videos to help with some personal insecurities, and hoped that maybe someone would find them interesting. I never expected to find an audience in the tens of thousands!
Q. What have been some of the great moments during development in the SerenityOS project? We’re talking about the emotional milestones. Pinging a server on the outside world? Booting to a desktop?
Those were both great milestones! Hearing sound for the first time was also cool. And compiling a C++ program! Later, porting classic games like Doom and Diablo. And the first time I did a Google search with our own browser. Most recently, taking the browser out of SerenityOS and making it run on other systems has been very fulfilling!
Q. The community around SerenityOS is impressive. What has been the formula for success there? Do you have any tips for other developers who want to build a supportive and productive community around their project?
I can’t pretend to understand exactly why it’s become so successful, but I do have three things in particular to offer as tips:
1. Create content! I’ve been putting out a steady stream of content about the project in the form of videos, streams, tweets, blogs and so on. Content is great at attracting new people, and makes the project feel alive.
2. Make a place to meet and collaborate! Communities are people, and people like to chat with each other. We used IRC up to 150 users, and then moved to Discord, where we now have over 7,000 users. Our spaces are highly focused on development, with designated areas for off-topic conversation.
3. Keep high standards! By holding ourselves to a high standard for code, version control, continuous integration and so on, we’ve scaled the project from one developer to hundreds while steadily increasing overall quality.
Q. When we looked at Haiku, we were impressed with the ports of applications like LibreOffice and Krita. If you could choose a couple of big-name apps to port to SerenityOS, what might they be?
To be honest, I’m much more interested in building our own applications instead of porting existing ones. If I had to choose something, it would be fun to have a digital audio workstation like Reason or Ableton Live, and also get Steam working so I could play Dark Souls on SerenityOS.