As part of my role at work I get to interact with various Open Source projects, and not all of them are Linux related. This week I’m on the beautiful, historic, sunny and warm island of Malta attending EuroBSDCon. As you can work out from the name, it is the European gathering of BSD developers and users covering all the BSD variants like FreeBSD/NetBSD/OpenBSD/PCBSD/Dragonfly. I’m giving a talk on ARMv8 and AArch64 on Sunday, so hopefully that will go well, I’m somewhat nervous as I finished my slides before I left which is somewhat unusual.
The 4 day event is split in two, with the first couple of days being dedicated to BSD developers; all of day 1 and day 2 is dedicated to FreeBSD, and half of day 2 is dedicated to NetBSD. These developer sessions are targetted at the core developers, the guys and girls that commit code into the BSD repositories, are part of the core teams like security/maintanence/etc., and is a great insight into the workings and planning of their distributions. It’s somewhat encouraging to see the BSD communities suffer from some of the same issues that afflict Linux, package name differences between distros being one. Having attended numerous distro related conferences (FUDCon/UDS/oSC), it was interesting to see how the FreeBSD camp do things - maybe useful to do something similar with oSC.
As with most conferences, the hall way track is priceless. I managed to catch up with a couple of the FreeBSD ARM developers and was enlightened to some interesting issues that they’re experienceing, and got a good first hand account on the status of the port.
There are about 150 attendees at the DevSummit, and it seems that the Dutch and Poles have invaded with a smattering of French (either they out number people or they’re just noisey buggers :-) ). Unfortunately the M/F ratio is pretty poor, with only 2% women. Regardless the BSD crowd are a fun and interesting bunch, and I’m looking forward to working with the BSD community more.
By the way, ARM are hiring! If your on the market for a job, have a look and if you apply just say I sent you ;-)