Sunday, October 14, 2012

Coming up: EclipseCon Europe 2012

This years EclipseCon Europe conference is going to be awesome!!! It starts only a week from now in Ludwigsburg again and I am very much looking forward to it. Why? Well, let me explain why I am so excited about it... :-)

First of all, I am really looking forward to meet a lot of good friends and colleagues from the Eclipse community. I love all those amazingly prolific chats in the coffee breaks and around the sessions. You should go there as well and meet all the people who are working on your favorite Eclipse projects. Ask them questions, motivate them by giving them good and constructive feedback, and enjoy the time. I also very often use those meetings to also say "Thank You" to those who helped me on mailing lists, implemented bug fixes that I am benefiting from or helped me to fix issues on my own. Its a good chance to say "Thank You"... :-)

In addition to that I am also looking forward to the awesome program and some good BoF sessions, of course. Here are my favorite ones that I am going to watch:

  • The Future of Eclipse: Eclipse needs to continuously innovate and improve itself as a platform, as an IDE, and as an ecosystem. So looking ahead at the next challenges for Eclipse is important, and brainstorming about what might (need to) come up after the 4.x releases is at the heart of such a conference like EclipseCon and could be inspiring for all of us. 
  • Orion - a browser based tools integration platform: The Orion project at Eclipse is one of the most promising and inspiring projects at Eclipse, at least from my point of view. Looking at the browser as a runtime environment is one of the natural choices when doing software engineering today, and thinking about software development tools themselves as running in the browser it part of our all future, I think. Orion moves ahead into this direction.
  • A regular day as an Eclipse Committer: A look behind the scenes is always interesting, especially if you would like to get involved in the development of an existing project at Eclipse or maybe even think about proposing a new project. And I am sure Benjamin and Steffen will give a lively and interesting talk on how much fun working on Eclipse projects can be.
  • Tycho adoption: Lessons learned, tips and tricks from the 1st line of front: Tycho is becoming a standard for building Eclipse-based applications, p2 repositories, plugins, features, distributions, RCP apps, and whatever artifact you can think of. And adopting a new build system is not always as easy as you might think. So its definitely worth to listen to those experiences before doing it yourself. 
  • Eclipse Spykit - A Handy Tool for Startup Analysis: Analyzing performance, especially startup performance, is an important work to do. But it can be really painful to figure out what exactly is happening at startup - and why. I am looking forward to this talk on the Eclipse Spykit to help you with this.
  • Flight Club and Club ECE: Don't forget to have some fun with the Drones and the live music!

Last but not least I am excited to give a talk myself about "Embracing Eclipse Orion" - where I will talk about re-using Eclipse Orion and demo the "Scripted" project, a browser-based JavaScript editor that we released last week on GitHub: https://github.com/scripted-editor/scripted.

Looking forward to seeing you at EclipseCon Europe 2012!!!