October 26, 2018
I don’t believe it would be fair or honest to start writing this blog post without a huge thank you to the FreeBSD Foundation, to my company (cleverbridge AG), and to the local staff in Bucharest who organized and prepared everything for EuroBSDCon 2018. Without them I doubt this experience would of been possible. Thank you very much. 🙂
This is the third BSD-focused conference/event that I’ve attended, and it was amazing! The first one was one I organized myself in Fortaleza (Brazil), back in 2015, which was 12 years after the very first BSDCon had been held in Brazil. If you are asking yourself about the conference I organized, you can take a look at this episode of BSDNow – Spoiler? It was recorded in Canada.
Well, during my stay in Bucharest I also attended the DevSummits and Tutorials. Arriving one day before the conference was pretty easy. Since I now live in Germany, it didn’t take me 20 hours of travel, like the year I went to Ottawa for BSDCan (but it was worth every second). So, after taking the bus from the airport, to the subway station to take the metro, I thought it would be pretty straight forward to get my ticket by using the tickets machine in Romanian (without change the language settings). I was wrong! After finally buying a ticket I learned that red -somehow- means YES on those machines (it took me about 3 minutes to realize that). By the way, Emmanuel Vadot (manu@) was there waiting for me while I failed to buy those tickets – Sorry, Manu! 🙂
Conference day began! I was attending Tutorials like the ones presented by Benedict Reuschling (bcr@), Niclas Zeising (zeising@) and Peter Hessler (OpenBSD developer, and maintainer of the BSD.network). Although I have used all the tools that were presented on, I was seeking to share or absorb something new, and it worked just as expected. During the quick pauses for coffee or the long breaks for lunch I was getting to know more and more people AFK that I used to talk to only on IRC. It was great to see/meet or hangout with Marcelo Araujo (araujo@), Beat Gätzi (beat@), René Ladan (rene@), Baptiste Daroussin (bapt@), Rodrigo Osorio (rodrigo@), Mahdi Mokhtari (mmokhi@), Maxim Sobolev (sobomax@), Ion-Mihai Tetcu, Philipp Buehler, Philip Jocks, Sergiu Weisz, Stefan Grönke, and may others! // This is the risky part of writing it; I am sure I am forgetting to mention someone :'(
Outside the building of the `Universitatea Politehnica din București` where EuroBSDCon 2018 was held, we could sit in the grass and enjoy the sun. In-between one coffee cup and another I was also discussing things from the DevSummit rooms or sharing the work I’ve being doing for the TDP to support PET on the BSD ecosystem. It would be *IMPOSSIBLE* not to stop by the FreeBSD Foundation’s table to say `Hi` to Deb, Kirk, Loren, Sato and Benedict. Sadly I could not be at 4 different places at the same time so missed a few of the talks. It is really worth a mention that there was a great diversity of areas and systems being covered during the conference, also all the attendees and speakers were respectful and kind to each other no matter race, religion or gender.
In my perspective the social event was perfect; not only the food and drinks, but (again) everyone was interacting and enjoying the evening together with lots of fun and good mood. I didn’t hear or know about any complains during (or after) the conference days! The last day in Bucharest, once the conference ended, was also great; good weather and good talks too! I also took some time to talk to bcr@ and hrs@ about how the translation efforts are going on again with a great help from the FreeBSD Documentation Project Brazil (FreeBSD-DOC-BR) – more than 25 articles and 4 books translated in 1 month!
The closing session of EuroBSDCon 2018 announced Lillehammer (Norway) as the next location for EuroBSDCon 2019. I truly hope I can make it to Norway, and I also would love to meet even more than the 181 BSD-enthusiasts who attended this year’s conference! After the closing session some people needed to hurry to flights back home, and others (like me) went to grab some Meech; hehe! After few snacks and drinks I needed to get back home and rest to catch my flight back home; on the table were araujo@, beat@, manu@, rodrigo@, itetcu… but it was time to go! I just stopped by the speaker’s hotel for the very last beer and said goodbye to a few more BSD people like Kirk McKusick, Henning Brauer, Peter Hessler, and Ollivier Robert.
Cheers, and hope to see you *all* again as soon as possible!
– Vinícius Zavam