BSDCan2007 - Confirmed Schedule

BSDCan 2007
The Technical BSD Conference

Matt Olander

Matt is Chief Technology Officer at iXsystems which is a business-friendly way to say that he plays on server equipment and breaks software most of the day while trying to avoid meetings.

Prior to the alleged dotcom bomb, Matt was lucky enough to stumble into BSDi while doing CRM and ERP consulting. After implementing a sales automation tool and cobbling together a production scheduling system to assist in tracking server build statistics, Matt added himself to the payroll late one night when nobody was looking.

Barely surviving with a job intact after the Windriver buyout of BSDi's software division, Matt had become a fond supporter of the BSD projects, and in particular FreeBSD. The phones were ablaze with upset BSD/OS customers calling in to the remaining hardware division, which had renamed as iXsystems and luckily hadn't thought to get the dotcom domain beforehand and so remained well hidden. Migrating to FreeBSD became the obvious plan of choice for a large majority of the BSDi customer base when the writing was on the wall that BSD/OS was nearing the end of it's life cycle.

Matt managed to hang around long enough at iXsystems that eventually somebody mistakenly left the keys to the shop on a table while on their way out the door. With keys in hand, Matt huddled down with the few survivors still there and the monkeys have been running the zoo ever since and having a great time at it.

The first time Matt laid his eyes on PC-BSD and met Kris Moore, the project's founder, he knew that Kris shared the vision of helping other people try out a little taste of FreeBSD in an easy to swallow BSD-flavored pill with a bright red helpful daemon to chase it down with.