2025-04-12 –, Pandora
In this talk, we'll take a visual and educational journey to the stars. We'll follow the adventures of the spaceship BSD-NL 2025 (since NCC-1701 was already taken) on their voyage of exploration. From its humble beginnings at the space dock, we'll see how ZFS was integrated into the ships systems and how the chief storage engineer saved the crew numerous times during their encounters in (disk) space.
Come along for the ride and learn all about the cool features that ZFS provides. You may think this is all science-fiction technology, yet it is available right here and now, for free.
I've been teaching ZFS and its concepts for a number of years in a classic, text-heavy slide presentation style. While this was successful, I noticed that over the years, it was hard to keep the audience's attention over a longer period of time. With the availability of image generators, I thought I'd flip this around: creating a visually appealing presentation of these topics with the learning objectives woven into story of space exploration. The more and more images that were generated, the more ideas I got, sparking my creativity like never before. This resulted in the presentation you're going to see. Basic concepts of ZFS (pools, datasets, RAID-levels, compression, snapshots) are presented in a visual style, both appealing to the audience and getting the points across at the same time.
With this talk, I hope I can motivate others to abandon text-heavy slide presentations and move towards a visual style of demonstrating their topic. The story driven approach helps the audience see the benefits of ZFS (in this case) and allows them to learn the basics in a way that is fun and interesting.
Benedict joined the FreeBSD Project in 2009 as a documentation committer. He has since served on the Board of Directors of the FreeBSD Foundation and two terms on the FreeBSD core team. Benedict teaches a course called "Unix for Developers" since 2012 at his alma mater, the University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt, Germany. He has given numerous talks and tutorials at conferences around the world about Unix and BSD topics throughout the years. On the weekly BSDNow.tv podcast, Benedict is keeping himself and the world apprised about what's new in the BSD space.