Pedro's FreeBSD activities, or a small account of them.

Email: pfg@FreeBSD.org

My name is Pedro Giffuni. I was born in Bogotá (Colombia) but I am of Italian origin and I learned English since at a very young age.

I am a Mechanical Engineer with a M Sc. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Pittsburgh. I normally work in mechanical engineering/production settings in design or quality control roles.

My personal interest in the BSDs started by the code quality and free license, and eventually I just had a lot of fun with it. I have been using FreeBSD since 1997, while looking for free alternatives to do my professional work. I am particularly interested in engineering applications and anything that has relationship with getting more performance, even if it involves playing with low level stuff like toolchains, libraries or filesystems.

I have contributed a huge amount of ports (more than 200 PRs) mostly for the Math and CAD sections of FreeBSD's ports tree. Curiously I ended up becoming a src committer and not a ports committer in 2011. Lately I have been contributing to filesystems, particularly ext2fs sources and I also have some interest in security.

I was heavily involved in ports since 1997, specialiced in the areas of Math, Science, and CAD. I still do maintainance for some packages that I jusr can't leave behind.

I am a FreeBSD committer (src) since 2011/12/01 according tho committers-src.dot and my mentor was John Baldwin. Some things I have done are:

• Replacement of all the GPL'd headers from the sound system.

• Cleanup and enhancements to the BSD-licensed EXT2FS port.

• Updates to basic libraries like libedit and utilities like patch(1).

• Merged updates to DTrace from illumos.

• Revamp the native gcc port, add more warning levels, fixing bugs and bring in support for Apple's “blocks” (closures) support.

• Clean up memory leaks and other nasty bugs from the main C library (libc).
  These have a particular high effect on all the overall system.

• Extensive cleanups and enhancements, many of them using devel/coccinelle and Coverity.

• Initial sweep ot add SPDX tags all over the src tree.

• GSoC mentor for three years in a row and later a SoC admin for the project.

• cad/NASTRAN95
• cad/calculix
• cad/calculix-ccx
• devel/R-cran-praise
• devel/R-cran-vcd
• devel/jetbrains-phpstrom
• devel/ libarea
• graphics/R-cran-qcc
• graphics/py-pivy-devel
• lang/bsh
• math/R-cran-BsMD
• math/R-cran-DoE.base
• math/R-cran-FrF2
• math/R-cran-Rsolnp
• math/R-cran-combinat
• math/R-cran-conf.design
• math/R-cran-nortest
• math/R-cran-qualityTools
• math/R-cran-scatterplot3d
• math/R-cran-truncnorm
• math/reduce
• math/reduce-psl
• math/viennacl
• misc/fortune-mod-psalms

Participating at conferences is a good way to get in touch with awesome people that change the world.

I have attended this event a couple of times. The first time I attended I gave a short (3 min.) talk about FreeBSD and our interaction with other open source projects.

I participated in ApacheCon EU 2016 - Seville, Spain, with a talk about the random numbers as implemented in Apache OpenOffice.

I participated in ApacheCon EU 2014, Budapest Hungary, with a talk on Apache OpenOffice extensions, or the little I was able to figure out about them ;).

I participated at BSDCan 2014, Ottawa Canada, with a technical talk about the multiple enhancements in FreeBSD's ext2fs implementation. OpenBSD, and later NetBSD, adopted the read-only ext4 support, which made me very happy.

I participated in ApacheConEU 2012 - Sinsheim, DE, with a talk about the IP cleanup and updates for the FreeBSD port of Apache OpenOffice.

I participated in EuroBSDCon 2008 - Strasbourgh, FR, with an article about applications for mechanical/electrical engineering in FreeBSD ports framework.

EuroBSDCon 2008 - Engineering Applications on FreeBSD (Slides)

EuroBSDCon 2008 - Working with Engineering Applications on FreeBSD (Article)