July 1, 2019
This is my trip report from BSDCan 2019 in Ottawa, Canada:
From May 15-16, I attended the FreeBSD Developer Summit and then attended BSDCan from May 17-18.
On the first day, we had presentations from The FreeBSD Foundation, Intel and NetApp. NetApp’s presentation was about their experience with Continuous Integration (CI) and Testing, it was a very nice talk and brought enlightenment to everyone who attended. I believe that the DevSummit presentations will be soon available on YouTube, and it is worth watching them.
In the afternoon I attended two working groups: Development Web Services and Testing and CI, both organized by Li-Wen Hsu. We now have a better understanding of the FreeBSD infrastructure and talk about future improvements, like single sign onto our Web Services, or on how to improve tests in the FreeBSD project.
On the second day we had a presentation from the Core Team, where we viewed the results of the Community Survey we had taken. The presentation can be seen on the FreeBSD Wiki. They also brought a new process to FreeBSD: the creation of Working Groups. These groups will gather people in an area to dig into a subject, such as working groups for Docs Modernization and for Git.
In the afternoon we (Edson Brandi, Charlie[Guangyuan Yang] and me) presented a DevSummit’s working group about Documentation Translation. We showed our experience in translating the FreeBSD Documentation to Brazilian Portuguese through a web tool called Zanata, which was created by RedHat and is open source.
After 9 months of work, we translated 35 articles and 5 books to pt_BR, including the FreeBSD Handbook which is the biggest document we have, and we gathered ~40 contributors. Having a web tool for translations, a good workflow, automatic builds, etc., can benefit the FreeBSD project in several ways, and will also bring far more contributors in this area than we had in the last years. People from Doceng, Clusteradm and Core attended this presentation and in the end we agreed on opening a new working group to document all ideas/information, in parallel deploy a test environment, and after approval, push this forward.
This presentation can be seen at: https://wiki.freebsd.org/DevSummit/201905/Zanata .
During the following days, I attended several more presentations at the conference, highlights including: Twenty Years in Jail, Netflix and FreeBSD, Testing Firewalls and all ZFS related talks.
The Doc Lounge was also nice. It’s always good to absorb more knowledge from people there, like Warren Block.
And thank you FreeBSD Foundation for the support that made this trip possible for me.
Contributed by Danilo G. Baio (dbaio)