Six Days and Seven Nights

Copyright © 1999 Chris Coleman

Of sheer technologic delight. Or several days of utterly incomprehensible technical babble, depending on whether you were an attendee or one of the bellhops at the hotel trying to be of service to the assemblage of terminally dependent computer addicts. Upon arriving, it took me a few minutes to determine to which category I belonged.

After the initial shock of realizing I wasn't a bellhop and all this luggage was really my own, I noticed that I was at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference in Monterey, California. It was an event that I had been drooling over since the day I realized that I was a Daemon News Editor and should probably go. I had quit my job and moved half-way across the country to find a new one in order to attend this conference.

Well, since I am sure you are wondering, I'll explain: My previous employer found out I was thinking about moving and decided they couldn't fund the conference after all, so I had to move a few months ahead of schedule to be able to attend. I did give two weeks notice. I found a better paying job that I enjoy just a few days before the conference.

I found my way to the registration tables and checked in. They gave me a registration packet, complete with conference itinerary, proceedings books, and a name tag that still had my previous residence listed on it. Tucked inside one of the folders, next to the name tag, was a ribbon that said "Press". I felt vindicated. It was real, I was here. I started jumping up and down, but had so much luggage attached to me that no one noticed.

After I got my luggage checked into the hotel, I began looking around. A new feeling crept over me. I didn't know anyone. Having never met another BSD user that I hadn't introduced to BSD I didn't know what to expect. I began wandering around looking at peoples name tags trying to recognize someone's name from the BSD mailing lists. My plane had arrived quite early, so I had several hours to kill wandering around the conference area.

At long last, I recognized a person. Even before I saw his name tag, I recognized Greg Lehey from the pictures he posted on his web site. He has written two books: "The Complete FreeBSD" and "Porting UNIX Software". I have the one he says no one ever buys, "Porting UNIX Software". I was surprised. I like it. I have always looked up to him. Since the my first days as a FreeBSD user, I have wanted to write a FreeBSD book. It's interesting to meet people you respect, and nice when you still respect them afterwards. We had lunch and I learned quite a bit from our conversations.

I set about the rest of the conference intent on meeting as many people from the BSD community as possible. I wasn't disappointed at all.

I met Jordan Hubbard of the FreeBSD project, Douglas Urner from BSDI, Charles Hannum of the NetBSD project, and Theo DeRaadt of OpenBSD. It did help that I attended most of their Birds of a Feather (BoF) meetings and stopped by their booths during the exhibitors portion of the conference. I also managed to attend the FreeBSD dinner and sneak into a FreeBSD committers meeting without being thrown out.

The USENIX Annual Technical conference consists of three days of tutorials and three days of presentations and other events. Most of us were not signed up for the tutorials. The presentations were divided up into three sections that ran concurrently, so you always had three choices of where you wanted to go. There was a Freenix track that had speakers and presenters from all the Free UNIX-like Operating Systems, invited talks and refereed papers. There was also an Extreme Linux track that had limited seating and was sold out. The Extreme Linux track must have taken up most of the Linux speakers, cause the Freenix Track was almost entirely filled with BSD speakers.

I had expected to see a more diverse collection of people and conversation, filled with talk about every available OS. But the crowd gave the impression that there were only two camps: BSD and Linux. The number of people belonging to each group seemed very much even. That comment came up several times in snatches of conversations I overheard while wandering through the conference hallways. People repeatedly commented that 'there seem to be as many BSD people here as Linux'. Some of the presenters who normally used Linux felt intimidated by the BSD presence and spoke at some length about their development status in BSD. "I had to mention FreeBSD", explained Miguel de Icaza to a bewildered Linux user immediately after his presentation on Gnome. Miguel is a Gnome developer, and during his presentation, made some very positive comments concerning Gnome working on FreeBSD. He went on to explain that the front rows were filled with BSD users that looked like they might hurt him if he didn't give BSD a fair shot in his presentation.

I was very pleased with how well the Daemon News was accepted at the conference. I met Gregory Sutter, the Production Editor for the Daemon News, at the keynote speech. We immediately set about scheming ways to get people at the conference to write articles for us. We made up signs in the terminal room and posted them everywhere. We scampered about the conference talking to everyone and trying to get the word out. It seems to have worked. We have an article in this issue reporting on the events and at least two more scheduled for next month from our efforts.

The presentations were given by people who were reporting on experience they had earned first hand, or projects they were developing. There was very little vendor hype during the technical sessions. It was a conference worth going to. I don't know that I would recommend quitting your job to go to it, but if the opportunity is there, you shouldn't pass it up.

Chris Coleman, chrisc@vmunix.com