2018 Recap

Jan. 9, 2019, 10:02 p.m.

Throughout December I took a break from writing blog posts, but New Year is a good moment to get back to it. Today will be a very personal post in which I will tell you a summary of my accomplishments over the previous year. I think I was quite productive. Do you?

Fudo Security
No worries I didn't change my job, the company changed for me :) This year my company changed the name from Wheel Systems to Fudo Security. For some crazy reasons I also got promoted to the managing position and now I manage two departments: the QA and Development. We continue to work on the most advanced PAM solution!

FreeBSD
Unfortunately I didn’t spend as much time as I wanted doing stuff for FreeBSD, but it also wasn’t tragic. I did some commits which meant I placed 28th out of 218 active FreeBSD commiters this year. This year I also did my 200th commit!

BSD-PL
Together with my friends we started a Polish BSD User Group. I already mentioned the group on this blog, for example here. Our first meeting took place in May. From that day we have monthly meetings. In 2019, nothing changed, and we still continue to organize meetings. What is amazing is we have plans/speakers until April. Every meeting has between 20 and 30 people attending. I am really proud that the group functions after 6-months and the prospective for it is very good :) If you are considering starting a User Group in your city/country, do it! You need to put some work into it but it's really rewarding.

I would also love to invite you to our next meeting in January :)

Blogging
2 months later after starting Polish BSD User Group I also started to blog. I was trying to post weekly but I wasn’t able to keep to my schedule. At the end of the year I wrote 13 posts of the 24 planned, with month-long break. In total the blog had 14k readers. I’m really surprised but I really enjoyed blogging and I will try to keep it up in 2019 :)

The five most popular posts were:

  1. Capsicum
  2. Games on FreeBSD
  3. Better looking assertions in C
  4. How does the process title works?
  5. FreeBSD lockless algorithm - seq

The Capsicum post was the most popular because it landed on the main page of Hacker News.

I’m also very proud my blog post was mentioned in many BSDNow episodes:


Conferences & Articles
This year I also had the chance to speak at conferences. I think I should work a little bit more in this area and maybe give some more talks this year.

I started the year visiting Japan and giving a talk on AsiaBSDCon about building security appliances based on FreeBSD. Next I gave a talk on first BSD-PL meeting. My 15-minute talk was about checkpoints in ZFS. I also presented at Security BSIDEs about reproducible builds. At the end of the year I attended MeetBSD conference in California, at which I shared my experience with Capsicum. The last conference which I attended was PozSec, in which I was giving a talk about ZFS.

I also wrote two articles, both for the FreeBSD Journal, a great magazine about FreeBSD which I really recommend you subscribe. The first article was about Capsicum, and it was also a summary of how to apply Capsicum in your applications. The second one was with my co-workers, Jaroslaw Zurek and Michal Borysiak, about YubiKey and using it with FreeBSD.

Summary
My year was quite busy in many different aspects. I already made some plans for 2019, and I hope it will be at least as productive as the previous year. What about you?