BSDCan Trip Report: Baptiste Daroussin

The Foundation recently sponsored Baptiste Daroussin to attend BSDCan 2011. Here is his trip report:

This year I had the privilege to attend BSDCan 2011 thanks to the generous sponsorship of the Foundation. I was invited by Erwin Lansing to participate in the Ports Workgroup by presenting the project I am working on with Julien Laffaye: pkgng. That was really important to me because I was able to meet Julien face to face and have a real discussion with him about the future of pkgng. I delivered two presentations for pkgng, one during the Developer Summit (for the Ports Workgroup) and one during the BSDCan short talk. I have to confess that I wasn't really confident about the presentations as it was the first time I had to make a technical presentation in English (I now dread to watch the videos if any) and also the first time we publicly discussed pkgng.

The Ports Workgroup was really interesting and pkgng couldn't have beeen made public at a better time. It fits exactly the need for a better way to distribute packages and perform binary upgrades in the future. We received really good feedback from people concerning pkgng and the project gained a new member, Will Andrews, which brings in new views to further pkgng development. During BSDCan and since then Will has contributed a lot of good code to the project and it was a great pleasure to meet him.

BSDCan is not only technical but also human. I was privileged to meet and discuss with many people and put a face on login names. I was able to meet in person my mentor, Thomas Abthorpe, as well as Rene Ladan who had been my vacation mentor and with whom I have often worked. I have been able to discover the best place in Ottawa to get good Scottish whisky :).

BSDCan was not only about the good points as I was there to present a project that I was expecting to be quite controversial. But it was greatly accepted, and we now have a lot of work to finish it! But it seems that was not enough for some people as I was personally punished during BSDCan when the portmgrs forced me to become one of them! It's unfair :)