EuroBSDCon 2018 travel report and obligatory pics

This was my first big BSD conference. We also planned - planned might be a big word - thought about doing a devsummit on Friday. Since the people who were in charge of that had a change of plans, I was sure it'd go horribly wrong.

The day before the devsummit and still in the wrong country, I mentioned the hours and venue on the wiki, and booked a reservation for a restaurant.

It turns out that everything was totally fine, and since the devsummit was at the conference venue (that was having tutorials that day), they even had signs pointing at the room we were given. Thanks EuroBSDCon conference organizers!

At the devsummit, we spent some time hacking. A few people came with "travel laptops" without access to anything, like Riastradh, so I gave him access to my own laptop. This didn't hold very long and I kinda forgot about it, but for a few moments he had access to a NetBSD source tree and an 8 thread, 16GB RAM machine with which to build things.

We had a short introduction and I suggested we take some pictures, so here's the ones we got. A few people were concerned about privacy, so they're not pictured. We had small team to hold the camera :-)

At the actual conference days, I stayed at the speaker hotel with the other speakers. I've attempted to make conversation with some visibly FreeBSD/OpenBSD people, but didn't have plans to talk about anything, so there was a lot of just following people silently.
Perhaps for the next conference I'll prepare a list of questions to random BSD people and then very obviously grab a piece of paper and ask, "what was...", read a bit from it, and say, "your latest kernel panic?", I'm sure it'll be a great conversation starter.

At the conference itself, was pretty cool to have folks like Kirk McKusick give first person accounts of some past events (Kirk gave a talk about governance at FreeBSD), or the second keynote by Ron Broersma.

My own talk was hastily prepared, it was difficult to bring the topic together into a coherent talk. Nevertheless, I managed to talk about stuff for a while 40 minutes, though usually I skip over so many details that I have trouble putting together a sufficiently long talk.

I mentioned some of my coolest bugs to solve (I should probably make a separate article about some!). A few people asked for the slides after the talk, so I guess it wasn't totally incoherent.

It was really fun to meet some of my favourite NetBSD people. I got to show off my now fairly well working laptop (it took a lot of work by all of us!).

After the conference I came back with a conference cold, and it took a few days to recover from it. Hopefully I didn't infect too many people on the way back.