July 26, 2018
I arrived in Ottawa the afternoon of June 5. First thing I had to do was find change to pay the bus fare. To do so, I searched the airport for a gift, knowing I needed exactly $3.50 to pay the bus to the Ottawa University. Finally, I headed to the bus stop.
To get to the bus I had to ask for directions: “what bus to take?” and “how would I know when I arrived at the University?”. A kind man informed me to take Bus 97 and stop at the Laurier station. He made it sound easy.
Then I noticed someone with a BSDCan T-shirt holding a $20 bill (that I knew wouldn’t be accepted) and I asked if he had change. Luckily I had more coins. Inside the bus, the man didn’t accept our money. When the bus arrived, the same man that gave me instructions on how to go the University, paid our bus ticket and gave us the receipt. Welcome to Canada.
Once I made it to the University, I checked in at the desk and asked for directions to find the Royal Oak and the DMS building. The receptionist gave me a map and with a highlighter pen she marked where I was and how to get to each of the buildings. At this point I was already wanting to live in Canada.
The first stop was Royal Oak, where I met Dan Langille, joined a table and met other people including Baptiste Daroussin.
The next day the DevSummit began.
I attended the entire day of talks before joining the OpenRC working group with Warren Block and group from iXSystems.
On the second day of DevSummit I met Dru Lavigne who informed me there was another Brazilian there, William Grzybowsk (wg). Willian has worked with FreeBSD for a long time and lives in a city near where I live. Later I met other Brazilians, Luiz Souza (loos) and Renato Botelho, (garga) who was my mentor. We have always talked online and it was a pleasure to meet him and the others in person.
BSDCan started the following day with Benno Rice talking about “The Tragedy of systemd”. The talk did not focus on any negatives of systemd, but instead focused on sparking critical thinking around systemd: why many Linux distributions are using it, as well as the positives behind it. It was a very enjoyable and fun talk; a good way to start BSDCan 2018.
There were many other interesting talks such as Devin Teske’s, speaking about dwatch/DTrace. We got to watch her play with DTrace/dwatch/Gource to generate amazing videos about process tree, directly and live from a FreeBSD box.
Another great experience I had at BSDCan was in the Doc Lounge, listening to Warren Block share all his knowledge. This is why there is no doubt he is very important in the FreeBSD Documentation Project.
He gave us tips that I’ll never forget. Some of these tips included anticipating the users’ questions or how to write a good man page with three examples.
This was my first BSDCan. Thank you to the FreeBSD Foundation for the opportunity, and I hope to share with my community what I have learned.
Also, thanks to Michael W. Lucas for the “Newcomers orientation and mentorship”, a.k.a “The Newbie Session”. =) 6-2-1 rule.
– Contributed by Danilo G. Baio
