Meetings and Events

Teaching Operating Systems with FreeBSD and DTrace, George Neville-Neil
2016-09-07 @ 19:45 EDT (23:45 UTC) - Woolworth Building, 233 Broadway, 21st Floor
Notice: Location Change

For the past two years George Neville-Neil and Robert Watson have been developing courseware for students studying Operating Systems at the Graduate, Undergraduate and Post Graduate (practitioner) level. These courses have been taught at the University of Cambridge, the University of Darmstadt and various BSD related conferences. The material is all available under an open source license at http://teachbsd.org and github (https://github.com/orgs/teachbsd/dashboard). We've been using DTrace extensively as a way to give students insight into the complex workings of the operating system and we believe that this leads to a more broad understanding of the material presented. In this talk I'll present an overview of our work and discuss our experiences in teaching this material. Our goal is to get more people to teach with our materials and to promulgate both the teaching methods as well as knowledge of FreeBSD in particular and the BSDs in general.

George is the author of two leading books on operating systems, the latest co-authored with Marshall Kirk McKusick and Robert N. M. Watson of The Design and implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System 2nd Ed.

For over ten years he has been the columnist better known as Kode Vicious, producing the most widely read column in both of ACM's premier flagship magazines, "Queue" and "Communications of the ACM". More recently he was tapped to chair the ACM Practitioner Board, which is dedicated to bridging the gap between research and industry, where he helped create the ACM Applicative conference.

George has been a FreeBSD committer for over 10 years, and currently serves on the elected Core team which helps manage the overall project. Since 2012 he has been on the Board of Directors of the FreeBSD Foundation, the US 501c3 organization that helps to support the FreeBSD Project.

He is an avid bicyclist and traveler who speaks several languages and has lived and worked in Amsterdam and Tokyo. He currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.