Dave Chinner has an advanced case of Filesystem Developer Syndrome (FDS). Symptoms first developed back in 2002 when employed by SGI to work on NFS. After a confusing diagnosis including NFS, gigabit ethernet driver and TCP/IP stack hacking on Irix, he was discovered in a delirious state, not knowing where he was or what he was doing. Editors with open XFS source code files were found on his workstation, and the diagnosis was clear: it was another case of FDS.

Soon after this initial diagnosis was made, he started to regain his sanity while working on XFS on Linux. His symptoms of FDS stabilised over the next few years as he became more familiar with XFS and he spent less time in a dazed and confused state. After leaving SGI in mid-2008, he spent time working for storage startups of one sort or another, never far removed from XFS. His case of FDS went slowly went into remission as he tackled other problems outside XFS, but it was never far from the surface.

In early 2010, Dave was employed by Red Hat to once again work full time on XFS. It was at this time he suffered from a total relapse of his FDS symptoms, culminating in feverish dreams of solutions to the XFS metadata scalability problems. While he is now mostly coherent and stable again (the way he likes his filesystems) he still flinches at the mention of ponies.