[talk] Aug 7: Brian Callahan "Once again, I've done something no one asked for"

[George Rosamond]

 "Once again, I've done something no one asked for": New (and old!)
C/C++ compilers for your next *BSD adventure: a tale of advocacy: and a
sub-sub-subtitle to drum up intrigue, Brian Callahan

2024-08-07 @ 18:45 EDT (22:45 UTC) - NYU Tandon Engineering Building
(new), 370 Jay St, 7th Floor kitchen area, Brooklyn

RSVP: Those ethier considering or wishing to attend, a guest list is
required by the venue. Please RVSP to rsvp at lists dot nycbug dot org
no later than noon localtime, day-of; an acknowledgement will be sent
and the email address will be used solely for the purpose of attendance
to this meeting's venue.

Remote participation: Plans are to stream via NYC*BUG website. Q&A will
be via IRC on libera.chat channel #nycbug - please preface your
questions with '[Q]'.

At NYCBSDCon 2007, a talk titled "BSD is Dying" took the world by storm.
Two years later at DCBSDCon 2009, we got the follow-up "BSD is (Still)
Dying." A year later, "BSD Needs Books" was presented at NYCBSDCon 2010,
followed up with "BSD Breaking Barriers" at NYCBSDCon 2014.

These excellent presentations fall into what I call "BSD advocacy for
everyone" talks. That is, talks that can get anyone excited about
joining the *BSD community and fully bringing themselves and their
skills and gifts to our little piece of human history. But the most
recent of the talks above is a decade old at this point. What should a
"BSD advocacy for everyone" talk look like in 2024? How ought we
communicate the value of the software and ourselves to the broader world
today?

Come with me on an exciting journey on how I wrangled the proprietary
Oracle Developer Studio and Intel oneAPI DPC++/C++ compilers to run on
FreeBSD and NetBSD and output native binaries for those operating
systems. This journey is interesting to our question of "*BSD advocacy
for everyone" by highlighting the power of the BSDs, the flexibility to
undertake and excel at any task you might throw at them, and how many of
the perceived problems those on the outside might feel "hold us back"
are social, not technical, in nature, and how we can lead in turning the
tide on outsiders' thinking in myriads of easy and small, large, and
in-between ways.

This talk will leave you with more than a few laughs, insights on
"porting" proprietary software to the BSDs, and energized to be a *BSD
advocate in your communities.

Brian has been around the BSD community since 2005, NYCBUG since 2010,
and got his OpenBSD account in 2013; he primarily works on OpenBSD
ports. In 2014, he moved to Troy, NY, where he has lived ever since. He
still does not appreciate the harsh upstate NY winters. Brian is the
Graduate Program Director for and a Senior Lecturer in the Information
Technology & Web Science program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,
and the Founder and Director of the Rensselaer Cybersecurity
Collaboratory, the cybersecurity research lab and nationally leading CTF
team at RPI.