Pedro's FreeBSD activities, or a small account of them.
Email: <pfg AT SPAMFREE FreeBSD DOT 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.
Contents
FreeBSD Development
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.
Ports I Maintain
- 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
My Talks
Participating at conferences is a good way to get in touch with awesome people that change the world.
GSoC Mentor Summit 2016
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.
ApacheConEU 2016
I participated in ApacheCon EU 2016 - Seville, Spain, with a talk about the random numbers as implemented in Apache OpenOffice.
ApacheConEU 2014
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 ;).
BSDCan 2014
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.
ApacheConEU 2012
I participated in !ApacheConEU 2012 - Sinsheim, DE, with a talk about the IP cleanup and updates for the FreeBSD port of Apache OpenOffice.
EuroBSDCon 2008
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)