Brazilian born and raised in Fortaleza with roots in Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, instead of samba and soccer I was that kid playing with a TK 85 and learning different languages as hobby. During high school times I’ve got motivated by the use and benefits of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) — some of you might remember Debian Potato.
Since the past 5 years I’m working to get more Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PET) support working on BSD operating systems — as FreeBSD ports committer, most of the work is related to it. These efforts brought me to the TorBSD Diversity Project (TDP) and made me a Core Team member of the Tor Project as well. I’m also behind the reborn of the Brazilian OpenBSD Users Group (OpenBSD-BR).
Why not NetBSD or OpenBSD? What about DragonflyBSD? Today it’s still not easy to describe exactly what brought me to FreeBSD in one word. I can’t just pick one single feature and put it as the holy grail for everything - that would be unfair with other operating systems that I also run and support. I mean: there wasn’t one single time that running FreeBSD on my laptop or on any server that got me mad or disappointed about doing so — maybe worth it to say that I’m not a gamer. The operating system works rock solid, the project and its documentations are well maintained, the people care about the community and both are in touch with each other to get new features and hardware support working. Should I talk about the license, the great companies that adopted it, the researches/products/solutions it empowers, the standards it follows, the certifications it’s compliant to? Running it on my workstation and laptop is also an easy call for me as ports committer - working with Poudriere and the Ports Collection, or troubleshooting base’s stuff without the need of running a virtual machine is very handy.
When FreeBSD landed on hardware like RaspberryPi and BeagleBone I almost did not sleep those days, but had lots of fun. I remember that I presented an use case for a cross-compiling setup running FreeBSD and Poudriere together with QEMU support during one of the ‘Compilers 101’ classes at the tech institute where I graduated from (Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia do Ceará — IFCE) — there I also talked about KAME/IPv6 on FreeBSD and recommend the net/sysadmins to use it to handle routing and packet filtering. One of the official FreeBSD mirrors in Brazil was running thanks to IFCE — it was the only one in Brazil serving the /snapshots folder, by the way.
Time flew, I moved to Germany a while ago and now I work for a company that makes massive use of FreeBSD.
It was like yesterday when: I ran sysinstall for the first time and
upgraded my machines using cvsup, I was subscribed to the FreeBSD
Users Group Brazil (FUG-BR) mailing list answering
more than asking, I saw myself giving talks related to BSD operating systems,
facilitating tutorials and writing articles about them and getting people
to know their features and what they are capable of. Some time in between I
engaged in a great effort to translate the OpenBSD FAQ and the FreeBSD
Handbook to Portuguese, than I helped to review and update a book
chapter about network and Internet services powered by
FreeBSD.
One day in 2015 I woke up and I was organizing the very first
international BSD conference in
Brazil!
That’s all folks! RunBSD ]:-)
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