Reflections on Teaching a Unix Class With FreeBSD

Benedict Reuschling <bcr@freebsd.org>

Lessons learned on both sides

I’ve been teaching an undergraduate “Unix for Software Developers” class at the University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt, Germany for a number of years now. The last three years of them in English to allow exchange students to participate as well. I am using FreeBSD in my class and the lab exercises. Topics of the class include an introduction to the Unix shell, editors, filesystems (with a big focus on ZFS), shell programming, grep/sed/awk and since 2017, I also added Ansible. In this talk, I want to reflect on what I learned interacting with the students of various (Unix) backgrounds. I also want to discuss with the audience how to improve the class with relevant topics so that the students get the most out of the class and for their later Unix careers. I’ll provide an insight into my labs and what we do there with FreeBSD, too.