SCALE19X Conference Report

On July 28th, I joined many in the FreeBSD community and headed to Los Angeles, California for SCALE19X. Being the first in-person conference that the Foundation had attended since the pandemic, we were excited to advocate for FreeBSD face-to-face.

We kicked off the event with an all-day workshop: “Getting Started With FreeBSD” taught by Roller Angel. The workshop was prefaced by a brief presentation that I gave on FreeBSD, the Foundation, and some of our history. Turnout for the workshop was great, and many people who had never experienced FreeBSD before left with a virtual FreeBSD machine set up and configured on their own devices. The workshop started with a from-scratch installation of FreeBSD on virtualbox, covered configuration of a basic desktop environment, and then dove into more advanced setup using Poudriere and Ansible. A text version of the workshop can be found online for anyone who wants to try out the workshop themselves.

The Foundation also had a table at the SCALE19X expo hall, with plenty of FreeBSD swag to hand out. I had some great conversations with the people who had attended the workshop and were interested in finding out more about FreeBSD. I met a professor who was talking about introducing FreeBSD to his students (who mainly worked on Linux machines) to give them a better understanding of the differences between operating systems. In addition to FreeBSD newbies, a lot of the attendees were long-time FreeBSD users and it was fascinating to talk to them about their experiences with early FreeBSD and Unix systems when they had first started. 

SCALE continues to be a fantastic conference to advocate for FreeBSD and encourage people to both use and contribute to FreeBSD. We’re so excited to be attending in-person conferences again and meeting even more members of the FreeBSD community around the world!