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Posts Tagged with “eclipsecon”

Reminder: EclipseCon 2011 Early-Bird Deadline

Hey guys, just as a reminder… the EclipseCon 2011 early submission deadline is coming up!

So what are you waiting for? Submit your proposal today and better your chances of getting your talk accepted! The Program Committee will select the “top five” of the early bird submissions in a couple weeks. The deadline for early-bird submissions is this Wednesday, November 17, 2010!

On a side note, please consider participating in the EclipseCon Audition if you want to have fun and talk about your technology in a interesting talk format. We are about half full for the event and have limited space available so don’t wait!

EclipseCon 2011 Audition Session

The EclipseCon Program Committee pleased to announce the EclipseCon Audition!

What’s EclipseCon Audition? Well, it’s your opportunity to do a quick presentation regarding what you want to talk about at EclipseCon in the fun Ignite-style format. If you have never seen an Ignite-style presentation before, I highly recommend you look at some of the ones available online.

In the end, take this as a chance to sell your idea to the Eclipse community and Program Committee as there is limited spots at EclipseCon. A winner will be chosen from the auditions and get a guaranteed speaking spot at EclipseCon based on their submission! On top of that, you’ll have the opportunity to demonstrate your idea or technology to the Eclipse community in the consumable format of 5 minutes. So make each minute count 🙂

If you have any questions, feel free to contact me.

CFP: OSGi DevCon 2011

The Call for Papers for OSGi DevCon 2011 has recently been opened!

The deadline for submissions is November 30th, 2010 (talks submitted before the 17th November have an extra chance of getting selected due to a contest). If you have never have submitted a talk to OSGi DevCon, I highly recommend you checking out the submission guidelines.

For those who don’t know, for the past 5 years OSGi DevCon has been co-located with EclipseCon. In my opinion, this partnership has been great for both communities as both have benefited from cross-pollination. Eclipse was one of the earliest adopters of OSGi and has shown that you can build an extensive platform and community by taking advantage of standard OSGi technology and modularity.

For submitters, it’s important to note that all talks about OSGi are welcome. A colleague recently pinged me if he could submit a talk on hacking Felix and of course I said yes! Just because the OSGi DevCon is co-located with EclipseCon doesn’t mean we’ll only take talks that involve Equinox. The program committee will select what it thinks are the best talks for attendees. So if you’re doing something cool with OSGi, from adopting or hacking it, please submit your talks soon!

EclipseCon 2011 Open for Submissions

The EclipseCon 2011 Program Committee is happy to announce that the Call for Papers is open!

In the same spirit of last year, we’ll have three main categories of talks:

  • Making with Eclipse – including technical commercial content, case studies, working groups, and vertically aligned projects
  • Making at Eclipse – technical content that’s highly relevant to Eclipse projects, such as state-of-the-nation talks, new tools and techniques, testing and so on
  • Making Community – including introspective topics and asking ourselves hard questions; how we are stewarding the longevity of Eclipse as a platform, as a community and as a Foundation

One thing different this year is that there will be no tags for you to worry about when submitting your talk, simply submit the best talks you can based on your passions (check out the submission guidelines). In terms of talk types, we’re getting rid of the lightning talks and making room for some more extended and standard talks. As a replacement to the lightning talks, we’re looking to do some “ignite-style” sessions which I’ll talk about in the future.

In the upcoming weeks, we’ll let you know about keynote speakers, some contests and new events at the upcoming EclipseCon. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to email me or any other members of the Program Committee.

EclipseCon 2011 Keynote Speaker Ideas

As I mentioned before, this year I want to be a bit more transparent about what the EclipseCon Program Committee is up to while we plan for EclipseCon 2011. One of the first actions we do as a committee is brainstorm ideas for keynote speakers.

In the upcoming weeks, we will finalize our list of keynote speakers. I know many of you that attend EclipseCon have attended many other conferences and have a wide variety of experiences with keynote speakers, if you have any suggestions the EclipseCon program committee will greatly appreciate it. We have already come with a preliminary list of our own but I would love to involve the Eclipse community in the process.

So, who would you like to see be a keynote speaker at EclipseCon? Or who would you NOT like to see? What do you like in a keynote speaker?

Your EclipseCon 2011 Program Committee

It’s great to see the Eclipse Summit Europe 2010 program out the door. As some of you may know, I have the dubious honor of being program chair for EclipseCon 2011. Today, we held our first program committee meeting where we introduced each other and some of our thoughts on what would make the next EclipseCon great. So, first let me introduce you the folks that will be responsible for making the EclipseCon 2011 program awesome:

We are still in the early stages of planning the conference, but we are looking to bring you the best EclipseCon program yet. As program chair, I’m committed this year to attracting new talks and being more transparent about conference planning than in previous years. In the end, I want everyone to know that the program committee door is open if people have any questions or suggestions. At the moment, we are currently looking at potential keynote ideas, if you have any ideas for good keynotes, please let us know…

Feel free to email me or your favorite program committee member if you have any ideas.

EclipseCon 2010 – Understanding Git at Eclipse

Yesterday, Shawn Pearce (Google), Robin Rosenberg (Dewire) and Matthias Sohn (SAP) and I gave a talk at Eclipse about Understanding and Using Git at Eclipse.

I believe the tutorial was well received. Our goal was to introduce people to Git, JGit and EGit. We also talked about why Eclipse is moving to Git in the future. I believe we accomplished that on top of the message that there’s no free lunch to moving to Git at Eclipse. Heck, I don’t only want Eclipse to move to Git, I want other open source projects to do it. The license of JGit is liberal enough that other projects like Netbeans can embed it. Git simply empowers contributors in a way that’s not possible with centralized version control systems.

It will take time to get the tooling right and understand how much a distributed version control system like Git is the perfect fit for Eclipse. On top of that, we explained how the EGit and JGit projects leverage Gerrit to facilitate contributions and code reviews.

It’s my hope by the next Eclipse simultaneous release, we have a good amount of projects moved to Git and the tooling is top notch. The only way this will happen is if we admit to ourselves there’s no free lunch and provide feedback. I’m already impressed with what happened after the tutorial… we have people filing bugs and providing patches. This is what open source is all about.

If you still don’t get it, watch Linus’ tech talk about Git and read the Pro Git book.

Planning for EclipseCon 2011

The cat is out of the bag! I have the unique honor of being Program Chair for EclipseCon 2011.

I think Oisin Hurley did a great job chairing EclipseCon 2010, I have some big shoes to fill. I have some awesome ideas brewing on how to make things even better next year and will be selecting a Program Committee (I prefer to call it a Circle of Caring) soon. If you have any ideas on how to make EclipseCon better, please feel free to let me know. Don’t be afraid to give your honest feedback, I feed off the criticism 🙂

You can email me or track me down in person before EclipseCon 2010 finishes.

Eclipse, NASA and Rocket Science and the Republic

I don’t know about you but I was blown away by Jeff Norris‘ keynote this morning at EclipseCon 2010. As a matter of fact, I can’t think of any other software industry related keynote that has impressed me as much. As Eclipse committers, it’s very humbling and rewarding to see your software being used by NASA to explore Mars, aid in planning astronaut’s schedules on the International Space Station and other things.

He also has no fear for Murphy’s Law given the amount of live demos he did, from remotely controlling the ATHLETE rover to do some moves for us to controlling a robotic Socrates head.

Space is hard. NASA develops complex systems to explore the universe. You can’t develop crap and run something like the Mars rover missions with brittle and poorly designed software. It’s my personal belief that community, open source and modularity act as enablers for building better software. Eclipse and OSGi exposes modularity and puts people on the path on building better software. Of course it’s not easy, but Eclipse helps.

At the end of the talk, he cleverly used the method of Socratic dialogue to drive some points home. I completely agree with his points about the importance of foundations, frameworks and architectures. I managed to record a poor video from the end of the talk, but here’s a snippet from the dialogue:

Jeff Norris: As software systems grow more  and more complicated, they are going to start taking on the properties we have seen in other industries like rocket science and building buildings. Where the level of complexity begins to demand this division of labor on a scale perhaps we haven’t seen before.

Robotic Socrates: To see the future of the software industry one could perhaps study the past of others. As space exploration demands the combined efforts of specialists with limited understanding of each others trades software developers must similarly diversify to meet the growing demands of their field.

Robotic Socrates: As software projects grow to the scale of skyscrapers, developers will specialize further in order to cope with the complexity of the systems they build.

Jeff Norris: Well, that sounds pretty risky… thousands of developers working on a system and not really understanding what each other are doing… doesn’t sound like a safe thing to do. How are we going to make it possible for those people to collaborate effectively without stepping on each other?

Robotic Socrates: Using the same principles employed in skyscrapers… foundations, frameworks and architectures. Do these terms sound familiar to you?

Jeff Norris: Indeed they do. This is what I think Eclipse is all about… So to conclude, I feel what Eclipse is enabling here is for people like me… to build systems that are appraoching unforseen levels of complexity without them falling apart. I’m really looking forward to what this community is building now and how we are going to use it to explore the universe in the future.

Thank you Jeff and NASA for a great keynote. I expect great things in the future from NASA.

OSGi DevCon 2010: OSGi Best and Worst Practices

Yesterday, Martin Lippert, Jeff McAffer and Paul Vanderlei gave a talk on OSGi Best and Worst Practices.

I really enjoyed the talk because between the four of us, we have a unique and pragmatic perspective on OSGi. I come mostly from a tooling OSGi background but have dabbled in runtime. Martin has been working with enterprise clients deploying OSGi technology for a long time. Paul focuses on embedding OSGi in crazy places. Jeff is just wise OSGi sage, helped Eclipse move to OSGi and has just been doing this forever.

We decided to go the presentation zen approach and it seemed to be received well by the audience. We were a little hesitant at first because deeply technical audiences don’t seem to take the zen style well from my experience, but looks like people enjoyed it. I guess anytime you characterize Peter Kriens as tinkerbell sprinkling OSGi dust everywhere people get a kick out of it.

On top of that, we had a good debate on Require-Bundle versus Import-Package.

I think the devil in the picture above looks more productive, right :)?

In the end, I hope you benefited from our experiences and learned something along the way.