[announce] NYC*BUG Wed Sept 7: Teaching OSs with FreeBSD & DTrace

[NYC*BUG Announcements]

Wednesday, September 7
Teaching Operating Systems with FreeBSD and DTrace, George Neville-Neil
18:45, TBA!

Note we will NOT be at Stone Creek for the September meeting and are
working out details on an alternate spot.  Watch for an update on
announce@ or talk@ lists.

Abstract

For the past two years George Neville-Neil and Robert Watson have been
developing courseware for students studying Operating Systems at the
Graduate, Undergraduate and Post Graduate (practitioner) level. These
courses have been taught at the University of Cambridge, the University
of Darmstadt and various BSD related conferences. The material is all
available under an open source license at http://teachbsd.org and github
(https://github.com/orgs/teachbsd/dashboard). We've been using DTrace
extensively as a way to give students insight into the complex workings
of the operating system and we believe that this leads to a more broad
understanding of the material presented. In this talk I'll present an
overview of our work and discuss our experiences in teaching this
material. Our goal is to get more people to teach with our materials and
to promulgate both the teaching methods as well as knowledge of FreeBSD
in particular and the BSDs in general.

Speaker Bio

George is the author of two leading books on operating systems, the
latest co-authored with Marshall Kirk McKusick and Robert N. M. Watson
of The Design and implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System 2nd Ed.

For over ten years he has been the columnist better known as Kode
Vicious, producing the most widely read column in both of ACM's premier
flagship magazines, "Queue" and "Communications of the ACM". More
recently he was tapped to chair the ACM Practitioner Board, which is
dedicated to bridging the gap between research and industry, where he
helped create the ACM Applicative conference.

George has been a FreeBSD committer for over 10 years, and currently
serves on the elected Core team which helps manage the overall project.
Since 2012 he has been on the Board of Directors of the FreeBSD
Foundation, the US 501c3 organization that helps to support the FreeBSD
Project.

He is an avid bicyclist and traveler who speaks several languages and
has lived and worked in Amsterdam and Tokyo. He currently lives in
Brooklyn, New York.