I originally posted this at http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/kca2009.
I'll be speaking about DTrace and kernel engineering at Kernel Conference Australia, 2009. It's in Brisbane from July 15th to 17th, and while seats are limited, at the time of this posting I hear some are still available.
In the US, there are many yearly conferences where people can hear from operating system and kernel engineers, and can also interact directly with them for difficult problems (I've made many customer visits since working here.) These are healthy interactions: customers can get a much better understanding of how technologies work, why they were designed in certain ways, and express which future developments are most important. engineers can learn what the customer pain points are, how well their technologies are working in the real world, and how well customers are understanding their documentation. After meeting with customers I often tune my todo list to better meet their needs.
KCA2009 is a rare opportunity in Australia to meet many of the experts in Solaris and Open Source kernel engineering, and I'm looking forward to returning to Australia to take part (although, not looking forward to the 14 hour flight. ;-) For the KCA2009 attendees - see you there!