NYCBSDCon 2014 Recap

This past weekend, the NYCBUG held a one day conference in downtown Manhattan. This was the fifth NYCBSDCon conference organized by the user group in the past 10 years.
The venue was at the same location where NYCBUG holds their monthly meetings. The layout was ideal for the size of the audience (~100) as it allowed everyone, including those manning booths in the expo area, to see all of the presentations and to mingle between presentations. Since the venue was a bar which was dedicated to the conference for the day, food and drinks were well taken care of, giving attendees plenty of time to meet and catch up with other attendees.
The audience itself represented a who’s who of BSD talent in the (mostly) US NorthEast. It included release engineers from the NetBSD and DragonFly projects and a former release engineer from the FreeBSD project, several dozen committers from all 4 BSD projects, at least three book authors, BSDTalk, and BSDNow. The theme of “The BSDs in Production” definitely matched the audience as most, if not all, attendees use BSD in a production environment.
Dru Lavigne from iXsystems gave the opening presentation: ZFS Management Tools in FreeNAS and PC-BSD and the audience seemed impressed by the ease-of-use of these utilities, in particular the ability to easily restore earlier versions of files using Life Preserver.
The other presentations provided a good mix, with all of the BSDs getting coverage. The presentations were live streamed, courtesy of ScaleEngine, and will be available at the NYCBSDCon website when they become available.
In addition to the presentations there was an expose area during the lunch break. Jim Brown from the BSD Certification Group had a demo of the lab environment for the upcoming BSDP exam. If all goes well, the beta of the BSDP lab exam will launch at BSDCan in May.
The FreeBSD Journal was launched this weekend and NYCBSDCon attendees were lucky recipients of the first issue in printed format. This new journal is dedicated to providing high-quality, technical articles about FreeBSD and is available at Amazon apps, the Apple app store, and Google Play.
We gave out plenty of swag at the FreeBSD booth and raised $130 for the FreeBSD Foundation.