BSDCan 2015 Trip Report: Steven Douglas

With the Foundation's help, I was able to meet and network with new people. Where I live, there are only a handful of people that even know what BSD is, let alone can talk at a high level about it. That was one of my favorite things, being around like minded people. I made many new contacts, most notably Peter Toth. Peter is working on iocage, which is a modern jail management utility with some very impressive features. In speaking with Peter, I met Sean Chittenden from Groupon. Sean is looking to perhaps implement iocage in conjunction with a new orchestration software that he is testing. Other than the social aspect, I also got some much needed help with my GSOC project.

At the conference, there were opportunities to learn every hour of every day. An expert in a field is never more than arm's reach away. It is very helpful to have questions that can be answered by the people who wrote the code. All of the talks I went to were absolutely fantastic, and I can't wait to watch the ones I missed when they are posted. My favorite talks were Steven Bourne's talk about his past, Matt Ahren's talk about code flow between our community and OpenZFS, and Multipath TCP by Nigel Williams. The speaker's all did fantastic jobs, and I hope that I am able to speak in the future.

This was my first BSDCan, and first BSD conference. I enjoyed every minute of it, and it happened so quickly. I hope to be back to BSDCan next year, and hope to make it VBSDCon and EuroBSDCon. Thank you to the Foundation for the financial assistance to help get me there!

Steven Douglas