Another BSDCan 2004 Report

by Bosko Milekic <bmilekic@FreeBSD.org>

There are still a few conference attendees in town; some flying out early tomorrow. Christian S.J. Peron, a new FreeBSD Committer is still in town with his collegue and friend Yvan and they're planning to drop by a little later, at which point we'll probably go out somewhere for dinner and drinks.

I'm here until tomorrow night because I have an engagement at work (the place where I work has offices here). I'm tired from all the lecturing and socializing so in many ways I wish I was home, sleeping.

The first ever BSDCan was a success. The attendance numbers were solid, but even greater was the quality of the attendees: there were some genuinely cool people in Ottawa this weekend. Few can do justice to an event such as this with words, and I am certainly not one of those few. So I'll make it brief.

Thursday night was registration night. Dan cleverly took this to a roomey nearby pub, which for a conference of this size was a phenomenal idea. People socialize and get an opportunity to meet right from the very start, which seems to be a good way to foster good conversation throughout the rest of the conference. Although Robert Watson registered only the following morning, Poul-Henning made an appearence while I was still there, as did Tom Rhodus, Maxim Sobolev, Christian Peron, and many others, all of whom I was honoured to meet (many for the first time). Ironically, a sobering experience (despite its location).

Friday morning, 10:00AM, was my talk on FreeBSD Network Buffer allocation. For those who know me, you'll undoubtedly remark that this is unusually early for me, but I woke up and made it anyway. I think the talk went reasonably well and it felt good to finally explain, in words, some of what I've been doing (w.r.t. FreeBSD) in the past little while. The remaining talks were great and I attended a talk at each slot, also quite unusual for me. Poul-Henning's talk on GEOM was great and finally gave me a good perspective on that part of our tree.

Friday night was pub night. Dinner was OK, drinks were decent, location was nice, weather was good. Had quite a good time and finally ended up with Tom Rhodes, his girlfriend Carla, our security-officer Jacques Vidrine, Maxim Sobolev, and Daniel Harris (dannyboy@) back at my hotel room. We hung out for a while and laughed a great deal, eventually calling the infamous Alfred Perlstein to bug him for not having shown up. Alfred's been busy with work, it seems.

Yesterday featured another great talk lineup. I saw most of the pf talk, Robert's talk on MAC et al. (a very good talk with a significantly different approach from previous talks he gave on the subject -- at least that I have seen... in a very good way). The day ended with Theo's awesome speech on Exploit Mitigation techniques adopted in OpenBSD, which included a very good overview of the changes involved for accomodating OpenBSD's W^X page-mapping policy.

Dan's speech at the end was emotional and great. Dan and co. did a really good job here and we all really had a blast. Last night was spent partying, notably with George and other NYCBUGers, a couple of dutch guys, a german, a frenchman, ... (the list goes on).

I met so many incredible people here that it would be impossible to describe them all in a single article. Notably, David Rhodus from DragonFlyBSD showed up, and although he didn't manage to convince Matt Dillon or Jeff Hsu to come up with him, he himself was an indispensable addition to the conference, often providing me with alternative outlooks on our little open-source projects, sharing words and good ideas.

Next year's BSDCan promises to be, yet again, a great open-source event. Everyone is welcome: database people, OS people, Linux people, BSD people, etc. I look forward to seeing you there.