Semi-retirement, or, really, changing my relationship with the BSDs

Summary

academic, developer, with an eye towards a brighter techno-social life [next] 2026-03-22Semi-retirement, or, really, changing my relationship with the BSDs January 7, 2013, at around 4:30 PM New York time. My first commit to OpenBSD. 2,404 commits later, and I remain as wanting to make sure OpenBSD is the best operating system it can be as I was at my first commit. That desire has stayed true even as life has made it impossible to commit at the breakneck pace I did when I was in my mid-20s and only had to worry about grad school. Now I am a professor, and have been for quite some time. I have my own teams of undergraduate and graduate students who are looking for research opportunities to bolster their resumes and help them achieve their personal and professional goals. And at least part of the time, I have been able to turn to the BSDs for ideas and projects for my students. It is the win-win that I did not know I would have access to all those years ago. I want to spend this blog post talking about one of my recent publications with some of those grad students, and how it has made me rethink my relationship to the technology and—equally as important—the people. To make something the best I would like to believe that those of us who get to be part of the development team for any of the BSDs do so because we want to make these things the best they can be. And I am sure I am not alone among the developer groups when I say what started as a technical pursuit turned into a personal one. I am still just as proud to be an OpenBSD developer. And I have made great friends along the way. I have gotten to know very wonderful people that I would not have ever met otherwise. I often think that the pursuit to make something the best has a reflexive effect that makes us grow to be our best. Those are undoubtedly good things. You have to examine it In 2019, OpenBSD developer Todd Mortimer (mortimer@) published a paper at AsiaBSDCon 2019 in which he describes a number of mitigatio...