Who is Scott Hawkins?

I'm a computer geek. I've been fascinated with computers since my Dad bought me my first one at the age of 12 (it was a Commodore VIC-20 with a whopping 2 Kilobytes of RAM). I studied computer science in college, taught it to bored freshmen for a couple of years, then started working in industry.

At various times I've worked as a programmer, a web developer, Unix administrator, and technical writer. I started my industry career as a C/Unix programmer, then gradually got more interested in the systems administration side of the business.

I began writing technical books mostly because I'm also a frustrated novelist. In 1999 I was trying, without much success, to find a publisher for a novel I'd written--sending out query letters to publishers and so forth. (For those of you not familiar with the publishing world, this is roughly the same thing as a community theater actor from Des Moines knocking on the door at MGM and asking if he can star in the next Die Hard movie.)

Then, one day, I was on the Informix web site and I saw a little blurb saying "Writers Wanted." At first I thought it was some sort of cruel joke, but it turned out that Informix had a deal with Prentice-Hall and was looking for somebody who both a) knew how to string together a sentence and b) was reasonably competent with Informix. That particular book idea never panned out, but I ended up writing the Linux Desk Reference instead. It was successful, and things went from there.

At the moment I'm working as a a Unix / Web administrator at a small company in Atlanta, GA.


How long have you been working with Apache, and how did you get interested in it?

I've been working with Apache and Apache-like servers since about 1994-1995. At the time I was working for a small company that was trying to distribute information via an intranet. (We invested a couple of months setting up NCSA httpd to do document distribution.)

I've been working with Apache both professionally and personally since it was first released.

In your opinion, where does Apache need the most development at the moment?

There are still a number of modules that haven't been ported from Apache 1.3 to Apache 2.x. Getting out the biggies like mod_php and mod_jk for 2.x was a big step, but a lot of environments also rely on more obscure modules in addition to the big names. The less-than-complete state of module porting is still a strong disincentive to make the switch.

What was it like writing "Essential Apache for Web Professionals"? How long did it take? Any major difficulties?