I just realized I completely forgot to write anything about the main goal of my trip to Canada: BSDCan, the yearly BSD conference organized by Dan Langille in Ottawa. Several people have been recommending it for the last couple of years, so I decided to have a look for myself. The two days up to the conference, there was another FreeBSD developer summit, the largest so far with over 50 people attending. Two days packed with information from 9am to 8pm with 5-10 minute breaks. Wow, that was good! I was happy to see quite a lot of vendors turned up. Usually, they just stick whatever version and part of FreeBSD in their product and noone ever knows and everybody is happy, but it seems they are looking for more cooperation in both ways.
The DevSummit was large enough to be split in two tracks for some of the time, and it seemed that the other track was much more interesting, so not many people turned up for my portmgr status report talk. Luckily, Kirk McKusick was there so there at least were some questions.
After so much information during the DevSummit, my brain was pretty much overloaded, so I didn’t see too much of the real conference. I won’t mention all the talks I saw, but let me mention Wietse Venema, author of a.o. postfix, did a quite amuzing recap of a couple of security issues spread over time, giving a good overview on how security work has changed over the last 10-15 years. Also, the upcoming SD/MMC cards Warner Losh talked about promise some nice new gadgets in the near future.
A big thanks to Dan for putting together such a well-organized conference in a relaxing atmosphere. I for one will certainly try to be there again next year!