## Interview

For this issue, Florian@ accepted to reply to my questions for a short interview.

Solène: Hello, could you briefly introduce yourself to the readers?

Florian: I'm in my mid forties, living with my partner and two cats in the Netherlands. During the day I work as a sysadmin for the RIPE NCC running k.root-servers.net. So that's mostly DNS and BGP. My favorite hobby is being outdoors, I suppose. Hiking, camping, bicycle touring, that kind of thing.

Solène: How did you join the project, and when?

Florian: I was working at a hosting company and we were rolling out IPv6 and I chased down all the bugs, missing features and so on. We were using OpenBSD on routers and firewalls and one missing feature was IPv6 support in pflow(4). In my youthful carelessness, I figured "how hard can it be?" and started hacking on the kernel. And what can I say, it didn't panic *that* often. And here we are: 10 years later, still wrangling IPv6. Maybe I should have just sent a feature request to misc@ back in the day?

Solène: To my knowledge, you mostly work on IPv6 and DNS on OpenBSD. How did you get your hands into these network fields?

Florian: I think my taste is more eclectic than that. I have to poke at things that don't work quite correctly. And suddenly the whole house comes crashing down on you and you have to dig yourself out. I think this is true for most OpenBSD developers. And we come back for seconds... About DNS, in my experience that's one of those things that is taken for granted. It only turns into a catastrophe when it stops working, because it's fundamental to the working of the Internet. So of course I have to poke at it when it's not working correctly. But everybody else is too scared to touch it. Suddenly I'm the DNS expert.

Solène: In your opinion, what is your greatest contribution to the project?

Florian: What I'm most proud of is that I deleted more lines of code than added. Not sure if that's my greatest contribution. sysupgrade(8) is pretty neat.

Solène: How do you use OpenBSD outside of the development scope?

Florian: I run my own mail and DNS infrastructure, as well as a nextclown [sic] installation (Thanks Gonzalo! It just works.) among other things, all on OpenBSD. And of course my main workstation is an OpenBSD laptop, I do all the things on there, browse the web, read email, play music, videos, plan hiking / cycling trips and so on.

Many thanks to Florian for playing the interview game and talking about himself and his work!