Bringing up 802.11ac on FreeBSD

I used to work with wireless driver guys. Some of them had no degrees (including one who worked at Lucent on Apple's Airport). Just started out doing small stuff and worked their way up. Others had EE backgrounds. One of the things about wireless is that the salient concepts are more EE than CS, even if you're on the software side. A specialized EE course on wireless communications will teach you a lot of the underlying concepts you need to understand.

Yes, it's learning on the job.

In the specific case of 802.11 (different from 'Wi-Fi' which is a marketing term from the Wi-Fi consortium), you'll also need to be familiar with the IEEE 802.11 specifications. You can do this by putting aside a block of time to read parts of the actual specs [1], supplemented by the O'Reilly 802.11 books by Matthew Gast [2] which I found to be really helpful during my time working with various 802.11 modules.

[1] [ http://standards.ieee.org/about/get/802/802.11.html ]

[2] [ http://www.oreilly.com/pub/au/692 ]

Adrian could speak for himself but my guess is from what he has written in the past that he got his start by being mentored by one of the FreeBSD developers. FreeBSD is big on assigning mentors to those interested in developing for it. So if you have an interest in getting all up in the underwear of an Unix OS you might consider developing for FreeBSD. I'm sure they would love be to have another developer join their ranks!

hi! you can totally ask me that! (I'm adrian)

TL;DR is - I learnt on the job and as a hobby, and I came to it having some idea of kernels and networking already.

You join or start an open source project.

Long ago, Adrian got taken under the wing of a well-know FreeBSD developer.

Apprentice in system programming? Never seen one.

As most other things it comes to passion. If you literally write C in your dreams and spend every waking hour hacking OS kernels you'll get to be very good.

you find something that really bothers you and dig deep. REALLY deep.

do it enough times, and you too will write blog posts like these.

I think in this case this is mostly having access to the right specs, and preferrably having spent time working on the controller firmware...

By doing it. If you look at enough code, ask specific questions on IRC or mailing lists, and follow through on the references, you'll eventually learn.