April 9, 2018
FOSSASIA is possibly the largest open source event in Asia. The FreeBSD Foundation sponsored the conference and covered part of my travel expenses.
Our booth had a constant stream of traffic over the weekend and we handed out hundreds of FreeBSD stickers, pens and flyers. Many attendees of FOSSASIA had never heard of FreeBSD before and are now keen to start exploring and perhaps even contributing. By the end of the conference, there were FreeBSD stickers everywhere!
The conference had hundreds of hours of presentations but unfortunately, I was not able to 
attend any of them. I was handing out swag and encouraging new developers to join the project at our booth instead. Happily, I did find some time to present “Modern network servers” in the Kernel & Platform track on Friday afternoon. The presentation was well-attended and I got some interesting questions.
Most conference sessions were recorded so I look forward to spending several hours watching all the presentations I missed. I also had many good hallway-track conversations with existing FreeBSD users and even managed to have dinner with some contributors. One particular hallway-track conversation led to an invitation to present FreeBSD at a “Women Who Code” evening in Kuala Lumpur on Thursday 29th March. That will be a great way to spend my time between flights usefully!
I spent the days after the conference meeting companies who use (or want to use) FreeBSD in Singapore.
I can barely wait for next year’s FOSSASIA! Thanks to Hong Phuc and Mario and their amazing team of volunteers for running this awesome conference.
— contributed by Philip Paeps
