This year’s MeetBSD California Conference was a tremendous success. Nearly 200 people attended the conference, which was held at Western Digital’s San Jose office, over the course of both days. The conference was held in the “unConference” format, and featured breakout sessions and lightning talks, as well as full-length talks from renowned figures in the BSD Community.
Day One started with registration, coffee, and breakfast. After the attendees filtered in, James Nixon, Master of Ceremonies, kicked things off with the Introductions/Interactive Plenary.
Rick Reed of WhatsApp and Jordan Hubbard of iXsystems followed with their respective keynote talks, “WhatsApp: Half a Billion Unsuspecting FreeBSD Users” and “FreeBSD: The Next 10 Years”.
After a star-studded morning in the world of BSD, lunch was served. David Maxwell followed with the first full-length talk of the afternoon, “The UNIX Command Pipeline – using UNIX in the Renewable Energy Era”. Next was Alex Rosenberg, who discussed Sony’s use of BSD in “Meet PlayStation 4”. Josh Paetzel led an unforgettable demonstration, “FreeNAS & ZFS: The Indestructible Duo – Except for the Hard Drives”. ZFS, Embedded/ARM64, Networking, and Infiniband breakout sessions followed. Kirk McKusick closed out the first day with an engaging historical overview of BSD.
Later that evening, attendees congregated at the Four Points Sheraton for the MeetBSD social mixer. Food and beverages were served as attendees listened to 80s tunes spun by Senior FreeBSD Software Engineer John Hixson. Beastie also made an appearance to mingle with attendees and pose for pictures!
On the second day of the conference, Brendan Gregg kicked things off with a well-attended keynote on “Performance Analysis”.
Brendan was followed by “mystery speaker” Corey Vixie, who spoke about “Web Apps on Embedded BSD”. After lunch, Robert Ryan of WD delivered his talk, “At the Heart of the Digital Economy – Deep Storage Innovations for New World Datacenter”. Several lightning talks followed from prominent members of the BSD Community: Alfred Perlstein, “Inspiring the Youth”; Kip Macy, “iflib”, Allan Jude, “UCL Config”, and Scott Long, “Netflix Update”.
And who can forget the final, highly provocative talk of Day 2 — Claudia Yadathi, “Useability Raccoon – It Isn’t 2002”.
More breakout sessions followed, as well as a group photo. During the closing session, two raffles were held. During the first raffle, led by Deb Goodkin, the FreeBSD Foundation gave away two free subscriptions to the FreeBSD Journal.
During the second raffle, facilitated by WD employees Monet Huang and CarolAnn Hedemark, autographed books by Kirk McKusick (“The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System”) and Joseph Kong (“FreeBSD Device Drivers”) were raffled off, along with various other schwag items and two grand prizes. One lucky attendee won a Sony PlayStation 4, complete with game bundle, and another won a FreeNAS Mini!
We’d like to think this fourth biennial installation of MeetBSD California was the most successful to date. For those of you who missed, it, fear not — we’ll be back again in 2016!
Denise Ebery
Organizer, MeetBSD California 2014
