July 26, 2018

I want to thank the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring my trip to BSDCan 2018, which took place in Ottawa, Canada. The conference was both my first BSD event outside of Europe and also my first trip to Canada.

Before the conference, I attended the FreeBSD Dev Summit, where I was able to meet other FreeBSD developers.

On the first day, I attend the “Clearing Deadwood” talk and took part in the discussions about drivers deprecation in the src tree. Later, I also attend the Warren Block presentation about OpenRC, one of the alternatives to the current RC system of FreeBSD, and saw the progress done by TrueOS to integrate it. After that, my wife and I joined other FreeBSD developers at the Smoque Shack for a dinner (the Poutine was amazing) and then went for BeaverTails. Finally, we reached the Hacker Lounge and saw an impromptu presentation by Devin Teske about the way she monitors disks health on her servers.

During the second day I attend the “secteam update” report, and the discussion about the FreeBSD 12 actions list. After lunch we took the “traditional” group picture in front of the Tabaret Hall. In the afternoon I attend the transport talks about the future changes in the FreeBSD network stack, and the addition of two new TCP stacks ( RACK and  BBR).

During BSDCan I had the opportunity to talk with Manu about some issues I found in the last RPI3 snapshots connecting serial devices, and with Romain about a side project I did involving the unexpected conflicts in ports,. It detects undeclared, and most of the time unexpected conflicts between ports who share the same files.

I also took the opportunity to advocate for the BSD Devroom at FOSDEM, and encourage BSDCan attendees to come to European conferences.

The trip to the BSDCan was excellent, and I came back with an extended to-do list. Again, I really appreciate the FreeBSD Foundation for helping make this possible.

–  Contributed by Rodrigo Osorio