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 did some work in mechanical engineering/production settings in design or quality control roles but eventually, and thanks in great part to FreeBSD, I also became involved in software development.

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 contributed a quite many ports (more than 200 PRs) in the early days 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.

I am still mentoring a GSoC project in 2025, related to journaling in FreeBSD's ext2fs, but I am mostly done improving FreeBSD, after noticing that the system is quite stable without me poking into it :).

Contents

  1. Pedro's FreeBSD activities, or a small account of them.
    1. FreeBSD Development
    2. Ports I Maintained
    3. My Talks
      1. GSoC Mentor Summit 2016
      2. ApacheConEU 2016
      3. ApacheConEU 2014
      4. BSDCan 2014
      5. ApacheConEU 2012
      6. EuroBSDCon 2008

FreeBSD Development

I was heavily involved in ports since 1997, specialized in the areas of Math, Science, and CAD. I still do maintainance for some packages that I just can't leave behind.

I am a FreeBSD committer (src) since 2011/12/01, according to committers-src.dot, and my mentor was John Baldwin. Some things I have done are:

Ports I Maintained

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)

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PedroGiffuni (last edited 2025-07-15T00:44:13+0000 by PedroGiffuni)