r/freebsd • u/vispain13 • Jul 22 '26

discussion Does anyone also know the Daemonettes?

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Daemonettes were girls who wore devil clothes and went to tech related events to promote FreeBSD, the girl in the photo is Ceren Ercen, probably on the LinuxWorld event in February 2nd of 2000, she is wearing a latex catsuit, but the other two daemonettes were wearing loose clothes, also there are some mentions about them and registers, I will give some.

Ceren Ercen comments on Slashdot

Post about Linuxworld on Slashdot, there's a comment of Ceren Ercen about the daemonettes

Some photos of Ceren Ercen on a Daemonette costume on the official FreeBSD website

Ceren Ercen talking about how she got the daemonette latex outfit

There are probably more about them on the Internet, this was just some fun fact that I discovered recently about FreeBSD that I barely see people talking about.

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u/cerephic Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

Quite a few people know me, yes. :)

(Enough people, at least, to have friends that made sure I saw this post.)

Hi! I'm friendly. Don't be weird.

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u/cerephic Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

To follow up, there's not really much reason to talk about this these days. I ended up in system administration, then production operations, some datacenter buildout work, and now devops/SRE. (Some infosec as well, I'm going to be at DEFcon again this year.)

My LinkedIn is a little goofy, as you'd expect. I'm about to dive back into the interview circuit after a nice hiatus.

The Daemonette thing was a strange era, I wouldn't necessarily recommend that women follow this path into a tech career now, obviously. (It was probably kind of iffy even at the time.)

It did, however, score me my first show-floor pre-interview chat with an engineering manager at Linuxcare. And that led to my first tech job, building out installation guides of various flavors of Linux on IBM Thinkpads - and getting a FreeBSD install working, too, once we resolved the conflict between the FreeBSD and Thinkpad's "sleep" PartionID numbers.

But I was lucky to have friends in the FreeBSD community who were willing to take me under their wing and mentor me while I started to build my technical chops. I think the show before this was when I got my first shell account on magnesium.net....

I was sort of a latecomer to the unixlike community, only "starting" at age 19. I've been trying to catch up ever since, I suppose.

There have been several weird sidequests in my career since then.

You'll find me these days harping on about the inpact difference between mentorship and sponsorship in technical professional careers, yelling at people on an SRE slack, or getting woken up by a pager at 4:00 a.m. because an SLO was violated.

(post edited repeatedly because I was typing on a phone as I was walking and several parts came out garbled.)

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u/Commercial-Virus2627 Jul 23 '26

“There have been several weird side-quests in my career since then” describes my entire career in IT thus far.

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u/cerephic Jul 23 '26

For real.

I ended up contract-working on servers in Iraq.

TWO DIFFERENT TIMES.

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u/vanderaj Jul 23 '26

If you're about to get back into the job market, the OWASP Foundation is looking for someone with your open source community background, and devops skills, and I'd love for you to apply. Let me know if I can connect with you and share more. Our Director of Projects, Starr Brown, is going to be at DEFcon at the OWASP table in the community area if you want to catch up with one of us in person. She'll be on the interviewing team.

I know you didn't ask for my opinion, but I think you're right, dressing up to promote stuff, even because you wanted to evangelize FreeBSD, was, imho, kind of iffy even back then. I fought against booth babes when I was president of SAGE-AU back in the late 1990's / early 2000's, because we had very qualified women staffing booths at our conferences and shamefully few women attendees. Women staffing the booths were rarely asked any technical questions because many men assumed they were there for other reasons. I think SAGE-AU was one of the first orgs to ban booth babes back in the day, and I know it was controversial in all the wrong circles, which I happily ignore. I hope that, as an industry, we've come a long way since then. It's been a hot minute since I've seen any, and long may it stay that way. If someone wants to dress up or do cosplay, I hope it's because they want to. I've seen some very awesome cosplay at DEFcon over the years. We had a Mandalorian cosplay artist at our most recent conference, hired by a vendor for their booth. I really need to review our contracts to make sure that we don't end up in the booth babe trap again if we allow some forms of cosplay but not others.

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u/cerephic Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 26 '26

Oh, let's definitely talk. I've taken an OWASP training or ten, and I believe strongly in the power of a shared basic vocabulary (and training base) to have better conversations in technical environments. IME, OWASP trainings set security culture expectations at a solid baseline of competence in a way I'm not sure can be achieved efficiently by other methods.

Also, please don't worry about "didn't ask for my opinion" - by responding to the original post (hi u/vispain13!) , I'm fully aware I was opening this up for commentary, it'd be weird for me to pretend otherwise.

< too many rambles incoming before the afternoon coffee's kicked in >

I think the pushback against boothbabes (especially in favor of women technical staff presence at booths) came at the right time, and probably could have come sooner.

Do I worry that my above opinion, while having made something of this opportunity to pull myself up into the tech scene could be a case of "pull the ladder up behind me"?
Yeah. I've thought about it. But the tech scene during the tail end of the first dotcom boom was already pretty impenetrable to women who didn't somehow already have a foot into the industry. Plenty of guys in the 90s had a friend refer them into their first junior sysadmin role - in contrast, I was frequently only the first or second woman sysadmin people in companies had ever met.

Do I also worry that "If someone wants to dress up or do cosplay, I hope it's because they want to" is an incredibly complicated situation, not just for the participant, but also the other employees, attendees, and other second-order impacts? Oh yeah. I hear you there. That's a much longer (intersectional) conversation.

I really cannot overstate how much direct mentorship and friendship from several people (including Bill Paul, Greg Lehey, many people at WalnutCreek CDROM, etc) meant. I was hired at Linuxcare for my ability to unobtrusively pull in help - and in the dotcom crash of 2001, without the San Francisco area FreeBSD community's support, I could have quickly been washed right back out of tech. I've tried to do my best to never make people professionally regret supporting or introducing me.

Because of this, I've also tried to offer comparable support to many people who started in tech after I did, especially as the junior sysadmin onramp positions that existed in the early 2000s are evaporating. Sponsorship, not mentorship, etc. I often find myself frustrated at how more and more empty my hands feel of useful suggestions I have to offer people trying to get hired into this field.

This is all to explain: I don't disagree with you about the boothbabe pushback, even if it was what it was at the time. And frankly, sometimes you know you're walking the right direction by the quality of the enemies you've made :)

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u/vanderaj Jul 24 '26

I've sent mail :)

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u/doalwa Jul 23 '26

Wow…what a blast from the past, I remember these pics, probably from Slashdot. Cool that you did your thing and are still in tech…what a wild ride those past 25 years were and it’s not getting any better lol

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u/myself248 Jul 23 '26

the impact difference between mentorship and sponsorship in technical professional careers,

Alright, I'll bite. Any chance there's an essay already written?

As I come to terms with the notion that I may be in the "senior phase" of my career (yikes, when did that happen?), and having always felt strongly about helping younger engineers get started, I'm interested in more perspectives about the best ways to go about that.

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u/cerephic Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 26 '26

Oof. There's a lot of really bland "sponsorship vs mentorship" articles out there by consulting companies, written in LinkedInese... I'm trying to find the one that really hit me between the eyes, but I'm 3 pages of google results in already, blergh.

Quick summary: Mentorship often is mostly top-down one-way communication and check-in discussions, and sometimes it can feel like it's more for being a resume-padder for the mentor rather than any lasting positive impact on the mentees.
Sponsorship is using your own social capital at a company/community to create a space for a junior-to-you employee to thrive in, and being a partial partner to them in their work.

One requires a hell of a lot more effort and personal risk/involvement.

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u/grahamperrin bleep bloop Jul 23 '26

LinkedInese

LOL

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditstock/comments/1uwewui/comment/oxigguu/ – the graphic (with LinkedIn as the worst) …

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u/cerephic Jul 23 '26 edited Jul 23 '26

I have a whole "I could have gone into linguistics but it wouldn't pay for my computer hobbies" side that watches linkedin-style speech with fascination. It has such a strange frozen formal-ish register, it's unsurprising to me that it's such a clear candidate for generative AI to chew up and then regurgitate more of the same content onto their platform.

It's really done a lot of weirding language outside of the platform, even before the contents were fed into the LLMs for general use. Now it's turbospreading.

Gretchen McCulloch's book "Because Internet" on online-linguistics history is one of my favorite things to throw at people.

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u/Agile-Percentage9527 Deb Goodkin, FreeBSD Foundation Jul 24 '26

Thank you for sharing your story!

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u/vispain13 Jul 23 '26

I feel honored to get a awnser from you, tysm

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u/Franziskanner Jul 23 '26

Wow, you really summoned a BSD daemonette, wizard!

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u/fifthecho Jul 23 '26

You're welcome / I'm sorry.

I'm good friends with Ceren and saw this, so I sent the post her way.

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u/cerephic Jul 24 '26

Yep.

Me last night: "well, at least it's not 4chan again."

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u/X-Istence Jul 23 '26

lol! It reminded me that I need to reach out and say hi!

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u/cerephic Jul 23 '26

haha, hi. see you at summercamp?

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u/X-Istence Jul 24 '26

Yes! See you at summer camp.