Twitter github

EclipseDay @ Google Recap

I have to say EclipseDay at the Googleplex was quite a success! Thank you to Robert, Mustafa and Leslie for putting things together!

The day started out with a talk about eBay’s usage of Eclipse by Michael Galpin. It was interesting to see how eBay turned Eclipse into its smorgasbord tooling platform to build applications for eBay’s website. When I asked if there was any issues or regrets in adopting Eclipse, Michael looked a bit stunned, paused for a bit and finally said no. I was surprised by the response 😉

I gave a talk about tips and tricks around plug-in development that I found useful through my experience of hacking plug-ins. It was cool to see the glee on people’s faces when they learned about things like Ctrl+3 and Plug-in Spy.

There was also a lot of CDT fans in the audience. One person was complaining how CDT4 wasn’t fast at indexing his ~20 million LOC product, which could be fair, however, I told him to try out CDT5 which is part of Ganymede. I know that the CDT team spent a lot of time improving the indexer for CDT5 to handle the most ridiculously sized projects out there. The interesting part of this discussion was the fact that he never bothered to ask about his problems on the CDT newsgroup or mailing list. If you don’t ask, how can you expect someone to help you? I wonder how we can better direct people to asking questions on the newsgroups… I wouldn’t want Eclipse adoption impeded by silly things like people not asking questions about their problems.

Overall, I enjoyed meeting everyone and especially some of the new faces I haven’t seen in person before (hi Mustafa). I hope Google does something like this in the future, maybe on the east coast this time, around their NYC offices ;)?

FYI: Friends get Ganymede Today

FYI, in case you didn’t know, Friends of Eclipse get Ganymede today.

So why not show you support by becoming a friend today?

EclipseDay is Today!

Just a gentle reminder, EclipseDay is today at the Googleplex. I’m busily ‘optimizing’ my slides this morning for the event while pounding coffee. I will be giving a presentation about Plug-in Development Tips and Tricks. It should be fun, I tried to organize a list of things I find useful during my own plug-in development escapades. I hope the audience is full of plug-in developers, we’ll see 😉

Oh, I also had a PDE interview go live over at InfoQ for those who are interested.

Congratulations Instantiations!

For the third year in a row, Instantiations has been named to Oregon’s Fastest Growing Private Companies Top 100 List. It’s good to see a company built around Eclipse technology doing well (even though I hear they have guys locked in the basement working on Smalltalk products ;p).

This is something that most people miss when they think of Eclipse. Eclipse is not just about free software, hippies and freetards, it’s about a ecosystem of major vendors, innovative start-ups, universities and individuals coming together to extend and support the Eclipse platform.


In the end, we all benefit from building the Eclipse platform even though we may have very different goals and motivations. Where else can you find such a diverse group of individuals and companies working together under one umbrella?

Cloud 9

As some of you have figured out due to LinkedIn spam, I have decided to team up with Jeff McAffer at Code9 to take things to the next level. Expect to see a formal announcement on Monday.

In the end, expect to see us still heavily involved at Eclipse. The both of us care deeply about Eclipse and want to move things forward. There’s a lot of exciting opportunities in the Eclipse ecosystem with technologies like p2 and the e4 project on the horizon. As for me, I will still remain committing on PDE pushing it in interesting directions and continue spreading the Eclipse love.

Cheers 😉

Ganymede Article

Just to let people know, my annual Eclipse train article is out:

Eclipse Ganymede at a Glance

Thanks to all the committers and project leads who helped me compose it with their fantastic quotes. I’m a big fan of hearing things from the source, so I’m sure the technical readership will appreciate it just as much as I do.

Eclipse Code Swarm

For those who had their fun with Wordle already, check out code swarm:

Code swarm visualizes the history of commits in a software project. What’s really neat is that one of the projects that code swarm profiled was Eclipse (SDK). So if you look at the code swarm visualization of the Eclipse SDK, you get to see some cool things. In the beginning, you can see DJ and John Arthorne battling to enter the CVS nexus first:

After that, a lot more people join the Eclipse party:

I’m a big fan of visualization so it’s always cool to come across things that try to give us any insight into the crazy world of open-source development. For more fun, you can look at the other visualizations on the code swarm site and compare them to the Eclipse one.

BBQ, Ganymede, DemoCamp

I am proud to announce that Austin will be hosting a DemoCamp for Ganymede. Why should you come? Well, first, Nokia will graciously be hosting the DemoCamp in their downtown offices (thank you!):

Why is this awesome? Because about two blocks from their offices is Stubbs BBQ:

This is where we will have lunch and drink (after the demos) in honor of the Ganymede release.

So please come and join us Austinites for BBQ, demos, beer and good times! Note, we have a limit of about 20-25 people for this event so put your name down early!

Where in the world is…!?

Oh my, I just had a flash back to Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. In case you guys haven’t seen this, the Eclipse Foundation is doing a cool contest for Ganymede that involves a cool map:

From the looks of it, Europeans love Ganymede more at the moment… I guess Ganymede is a better word than ‘Europa’ for them 🙂

As a committer, it’s nice to read reviews of Ganymede from community members as you get a feeling of like, “oh wow, someone actually appreciates the work we put into that feature.”

If you have a minute, please add yourself to the map. I personally plan to add myself once my sweet Ganymede article comes out next week.

Automated IP logs

One of the more challenging things in leading a project at Eclipse is dealing with the IP policy. However, this isn’t a bad thing though, a clean code base can ensure more adoption, especially from commercial adopters. A big part of this process is to come up with ip logs that represent the contributions to your project. This helps establish a code pedigree for your project, plus, it allows you to also easily recognize contributors if you wish. In the past, this was mostly a manual process that involved bugzilla queries and CSV files.

Well, thanks to the Eclipse Foundation and the committer representatives, we no longer have to do that. Check out this bug. The basic gist of things is that you tag your patches with the ‘iplog’ flag when you want to include a contribution in the iplog:

Cool huh? Now that we have a standard way of doing this, tools can be written to automatically generate the log and check for compliance. In my opinion, this should make the lives of project leads much easier so we have more time to focus on the technology instead of counting the amount of lines in a patch 🙂