BSDCan Trip Report: Florian Smeets

The next trip report is from Florian Smeets. He writes:

I arrived in Ottawa on Tuesday afternoon. In the evening I went to the Royal Oak to meet other fellow developers.

Wednesday was the first day of the Devsummit. The day started with a presentation about the FreeBSD.org security incident and about how Netflix is using FreeBSD for their CDN.

In the afternoon I attended the ports session where we saw presentations about features that were added to the ports tree in the last year and also about stuff that people will be working on during the next year.

On Thursday I went to the VM I/O Concurrency and Virtualization sessions. In the first session, we talked about all the performance work that is currently happening that should be in the 10.0 release. In the second session, there was a lot of talk about Bhyve and we saw a demo of Linux running in Bhyve.

In the evening I attended the Vendor summit, which I find quite interesting, as you get a picture of the needs of other people and also what they are working on.

Friday was the first day of the actual conference. After talks about dtrace and git, I attended a talk about benchmarking FreeBSD. One of the slides even showed results I posted some time ago.

The next talk I saw was switching from Linux to FreeBSD, which gave some interesting insights into the differences of the two systems from someone else. Which was quite interesting as I’ve been working for a Linux based company for the last 6 months.

After the FreeBSD Birth to Death talk, I attended the Mozilla on OpenBSD talk. Landry, the OpenBSD Mozilla maintainer, is an OpenBSD and Mozilla committer. He helped us in committing a lot of our patches upstream. At the social event in the evening, I finally had a chance to meet him in person. We talked for a long time and made plans. Now, 4 weeks after the conference, we have a mozilla-central buildbot running in a Bhyve, so we will be informed about breakages automatically from now on. This will be a huge help, as we can try to fix those kind of things before the releases and fix them with our own patches in the ports tree.

On the last day of the conference I attended a talk about using Puppet to manage FreeBSD and about the FreeBSD.org cluster refit. In the afternoon I didn’t attend talks, but took the time and sat down with some other developers to discuss future projects.

As my flight was only leaving on Sunday evening, I went into town with a couple of other developers to do some sightseeing. In the evening, the long journey back home started and an eventful and exhaustive week came to an end.