The fourth annual Sharkfest was held last week. If you missed it, don’t worry. We are busy uploading all of the presentations to sharkfest.wireshark.org.

The conference started with a keynote by Dr. Steve McCanne, CTO of Riverbed. He described the history of BPF and how its optimizing compiler works. It was interesting to see all of the problems he ran into and the solutions he found. The presentation was easy to follow despite its technical level. (Steve created BPF, and co-wrote tcpdump and libpcap.)

The keynote set the tone for the rest of the conference, which featured a lot of talented speakers. Jeff Carrell’s IPv6 was so popular it had be repeated several times over the course of the conference. Lara Chappell, Hansang Bae, and Betty Dubois drew their usual huge crowds. The other presenters did great jobs as well.

People have great ideas for improving Wireshark. Plenty of these ideas and suggestions were heaped our way throughout the conference, especially during the last two sessions. I hope to spend some time this summer implementing some of them.

Wireshark is very much a community-owned project. It is where it is today because of the developer and user communities. Steve stressed this fact during his keynote and it was readily apparent throughout the conference. On behalf of the developer team, the Sharkfest organizers, and Riverbed I extend my heartfelt thanks to the Wireshark community. This continues to be an amazing adventure and I can’t wait to see what the future has in store.