Interview with Paulo Cesar Pereira de Andrade, new Mandriva X.org developer

Mandriva recently hired Paulo Cesar Pereira de Andrade (pcpa) to work on X.org development and maintenance. Paulo is an old hand in the X development community, and formerly worked at Conectiva (before the Mandrake / Conectiva merger) as an XFree86 maintainer. To welcome Paulo to the company and introduce him to our users, we thought we'd do a little interview. Thanks to Paulo for his time in answering these questions, and I'm sure everyone joins me in welcoming him to the Mandriva team.

What are some of the projects and companies you have worked with in the past?

I worked for 5 years in a software company developing DOS and later Windows software. Initially I wrote code to talk to a X.25 network; wrote code that would scan the hardware for modems and 'autoconfigure' the hardware, talk to the serial port, a terminal emulator. Later I wrote versions for TCP/IP, and versions that would use either method. The company offered an online service long before the 'Internet' become popular/accessible in Brasil. I also worked as a sysadmin, initially we used SCO Unix, for some time Linux and later almost only FreeBSD (my preference ^^)

I left that job to join Conectiva, where I worked for another 5 years.

Some personal projects that took some time include a complete game engine I wrote around 1993; It consisted of a "paint like program", an animation editor (basically was a file with offsets and image changes, sounds using pc speaker, time before changing images, etc), a level editor (used tiled patterns to fill most of the game screen, but also allowed different images at random places in the screen), and a program that would generate a pseudo virtual file system, and store all data in a single file.

I did several other personal projects since then, but very few that took more than like 3 months of work. But I did several other personal projects, most that were only used my me, including virtual machines, windowing systems, different language interpreters and compilers, game mods, kernel hacking, X hacking, etc.

How did you come to join Mandriva?

(Wanderlei) Cavassin contacted me and said there was a job available. I have not been much active in Open Source Projects lately, and the few ones I participated I did not use the 'pcpa' name.

What will you be working on at Mandriva?

I started at Conectiva as a XFree86 package maintainer, due to my collaborations with the XFree86 project and my activity on the mailing lists since around 1997-1998. I believe my main occupation should be to work with Xorg.

What cool things do you hope to be able to add to future Mandriva products?

I hope to first help in having things stable. I am somewhat old school, don't use either Kde or Gnome, I am not really an innovator, but in the past, I worked on things that were necessary, like the vesa driver, a significant portion of the XFree86 configuration internals and programs, Conectiva was the first distro to use grub as the standard boot loader; I did not make big collaborations to grub itself, but I was already somewhat familiar with it as I installed several Hurd versions in my older computers and watched it evolve, but did not actively collaborate with the project other than lurking and installing it from time to time.