In December 2025, FreeBSD 15.0 was released; but this was only the final and most public chapter of a story which started years earlier. In this talk, I will attempt to draw back the curtain on the FreeBSD release engineering process, provide context for everything which happens in the weeks, months, and even years leading up to a release, and explain why FreeBSD 15.0 was one of the most challenging releases since FreeBSD 5.0.
Along the way, I will discuss some of the technical and human challenges involved in the release, the ways that the FreeBSD release engineering process had to change in 15.0, and some "technical debt" which was left unresolved at the time of the release but needs to be fixed before FreeBSD 16.0.
No particular knowledge of FreeBSD internals or development processes is required; this talk is intended to be accessible to anyone with a basic familiarity with Unix-like systems.