SCALE 13x Trip Report: Michael Dexter

The Foundation recently sponsored Michael Dexter to attend SCALE 13x. Michael provides the following trip report:

SCALE 13x was the 13th Southern California Linux Expo and took place February 19th through 20th in Los Angeles, California. Despite its name, this year's event demonstrated sincere outreach to the BSD community as demonstrated by two booths and several BSD-related talks. The first booth featured FreeBSD, the FreeBSD Foundation, FreeNAS, PC-BSD and pfSense while the second featured OpenBSD and NetBSD. Both booths were filled with familiar faces including Dru Lavigne, Denise Ebery, Matt Olander, James Nixon, David Maxwell, Brooke and Seth and two toddlers!

The FreeBSD Booth Crew -
Photo courtesy of iXsystems

The variety of booth visitors were very familiar for SCALE: a mix of students, consultants, open source developers and military/aerospace contractors. I heard lots of "I got started on FreeBSD" and "I use FreeNAS" plus the occasional "When can we have a military-certified BSD so we can stop using Linux?" The last one is something I have heard at every SCALE I have attended and is representative of the region. Hats off to the SCALE organizers for also attracting such a diverse
audience.

The BSD-related talk topics included David Maxwell's newly-released pipecut that he debuted at MeetBSD (https://code.google.com/p/pipecut/), Brooks Davis' talk on the BERI CPU that he is working on with Robert Watson, Dru Lavigne's talk on new FreeNAS 9.3 features and my talk on FreeBSD Virtualization Options. There were also many overlapping talks such as those on various system containers, embedded systems and of course Brendan Gregg's talk on systems performance. Brendan kindly updated the Netflix statistics that I was already going to address and both Bryan Smith and Randal Schwartz had great user questions. It truly was a pleasure to speak at SCALE and my sincerest thanks to Brendan for live Tweeting my talk.

Impressively, some SCALE speakers were in their teens and the overall outreach to kids was great including an evening kids-only event. The BSD Certification Group scheduled a BSDA exam but alas it was poorly attended. I humbly invite you to take the BSDA exam if you have not done so already and ask that you help spread the word whenever you get a chance.

In a community where we often preach to the converted, I find SCALE to be a very receptive venue for outreach and encourage you to attend and consider submitting a BSD-related talk to SCALE 14x. Special thanks to Gareth Greenaway for reaching out to the BSD community and for the great attitude demonstrated by his team of volunteers. Finally, I would like to thank the FreeBSD Foundation for covering my air travel and O'Reilly Media for allowing me to share a room with one of their amazing team members.