August 12, 2019
One of our major goals this year is to increase FreeBSD awareness around the world. I’m excited about upcoming events, like the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit, where we are giving a talk on FreeBSD. But first, I wanted to highlight some of the events we’ve attended over the past few months. I have been pretty bad about writing event reports, so I’m summarizing some of them here. It’s a good thing our Marketing Director isn’t local, otherwise she would be camping in our office forcing me to write the reports.

FreeBSD Stand at FOSDEM 2019

As you know, we’ve been attending more non-BSD related conferences and giving FreeBSD workshops, presentations, and staffing tables to recruit new users and contributors. Earlier in the year we had a big presence at FOSDEM, Europe’s largest open source conference. During the event, we helped staff the table, provided swag, and gave a talk in the BSD DevRoom. Following that conference, Roller Angel and I went to SCALEx17 in Southern California, where we not only had a FreeBSD table, but ran a full day Getting Started with FreeBSD workshop, to a full room. Board member, Philip Paeps, attended and gave tutorials and workshops at SANOG33 in Thimphu, Bhutan, Apricot 2019 in South Korea, and FOSSASIA in Singapore.

In June, Ed Maste and I flew to Austria for a FreeBSD Hackathon, where I learned how to update the FreeBSD website. I used those new skills to better understand the onboarding process, and how we can improve that by addressing some of the issues I ran into! I also added all the June – October events on the website.

We then flew to Dusseldorf to meet with a couple of commercial users and attended a well attended BSD Meetup hosted at Trivago, with pizza generously donated by Netzkommune. Finally, we flew to Berlin to meet with Bally Wulff, a big user of FreeBSD on their gaming machines. They also hosted a FreeBSD hackathon at their office the following weekend. I continued working on submitting documentation during the hackathon. Having these intimate face-to-face meetings allows for sharing knowledge and ideas, answering questions, and braining storming ideas on how to implement certain functionality.

A few days after returning back to Colorado, I gave a FreeBSD talk at the Comcast Labs Open Source Conference, held in Denver. This was a new conference for us, and it was exciting to meet others from the open source community and share information about FreeBSD and why people should use FreeBSD and/or contribute to the Project.

FreeBSD Foundation booth at OSCON 2019

In July, Ed and I flew to Portland to attend OSCON. We staffed a table with Adam Strohl, who is a fantastic FreeBSD evangelist. Scott Long also helped out. We had a good representation of FreeBSD people, which helped with all the traffic that stopped at our table.

I’m excited about presenting FreeBSD talks at other conferences new for us, such as the Open Source Summit North America in August and Open Source Summit Europe . You can go to our website to see the rest of the events we are attending in 2019. If you know of a conference we should be at, let us know at marketing@freebsdfoundation.org! We aren’t able to be at all of them, but we can help get local people to advocate for FreeBSD at the ones we can’t attend.