Last weekend, Dru, Kris, John, and Matt Olander went to Dulles, VA to attend vBSDCon. I had heard a lot of excited talk beforehand in anticipation of the event from our employees. Afterwards, I asked them for their thoughts and a rundown of their experience at the event.
The overall consensus is that the conference was a success! Everyone raved about how much fun they had and how well-organized it was. About a hundred people attended the main talks and there were a number of “Unconference” style sessions, also.
iXsystems was a gold sponsor for this event. Our table was well-stocked with a bit of everything: daemon horns, PC-BSD and FreeNAS discs, Beastie plushies, etc. Everyone at the booth was busy and Dru said that there were many opportunities to talk and connect with attendees.
Kris happily recalls, “I had a fellow tell me that the reason he came was because he saw Allan and I talking about it on BSD Now, so that was very cool.”
The talks were met with interest and good reviews. Both John and Kris had presentations at this event. John gave a talk about FreeNAS plugins and Kris talked about the automatic deployment of FreeBSD and PC-BSD. Jim Brown also presented a special video that showed a FreeBSD 1.0 system booting up.
Kris and John noted that social media was a huge part of this event. The vBSDCon organizers promoted the show via social media channels beforehand and thanked each speaker publicly after their presentation.
“The social aspect of this conference was very personal and I met a lot of interesting people and learned a lot of new things,” said John. “I’m hoping that Verisign continues to run this conference in the future and that I get to go!”
John and the rest of the iX team can rest easy knowing we’ll definitely be back when the show returns in two years. Kudos to Rick Miller and Glen Wiley from Verisign for putting together such an excellent show. This certainly is tradeshow season as the next show we’ll be at is almost at hand. If you’re in the DC area, stop by the iXsystems and FreeBSD booths at the LISA conference and say hi! In the meantime, we’ll be interviewing Luca Ferrari about PGDay.IT, a show that just concluded in Prato, Italy.
Annie Zhang
Marketing Assistant
