BSDCan Trip Report: Giovanni Trematerra

The next trip report is from Giovanni Trematerra:

First off, a huge thank you to the FreeBSD Foundation. Without your help I couldn't afford the travel. I was very happy to use my vacation days to attend the Developer Summit and BSDCan 2012.

I arrived in Ottawa at 8th of May in the evening and went to Royal Oak where I met a lot of FreeBSD developers--they are very nice and smart guys. We had a good time together. The first day I attended the ports working group at the Developer Summit. It was nice to see that we are close to having an external toolchain to build ports and the new packing system looks very good and promising. There were very good ideas for a new infrastructure of the ports system.

The second day I joined the virtualization working group. That was something new to me and helped me to discover a new world with a lot of challenging problems to solve. In the evening we had reports from the other groups and then a brainstorming session for the upcoming FreeBSD 10 version.

The first day of BSDCan I followed the talk of Kirk McKusick about locking in the FreeBSD kernel. The topic is too hard and complex to be understood inside a talk but Kirk gave a very clean overview of how things work in general. Then I went to MRT 256 room where some FreeBSD developers gave an overview of their current work on the project. The last day was spent attending some talks in the morning and the closing session in the evening.

After dinner we usually met at the hacking lounge, a room at ground floor of "90 University" residence to hack around together. That was a great time for me. I had the opportunity to talk in person with the other developers and show them the project I am working on. I received feedback and different points of view that helped me to better understand how I can improve things. I had the opportunity to work with Attilio Rao to make a detailed and concrete plan to get things done. Florian Smeets offered his help to test and benchmark the changes when they are ready.

In the end, it was a great experience for me, very inspiring. I really hope I'll be able to return back next year.