Great turnout this morning with 17 people joining the group. I just know that tomorrow we will break through and have more than 20 people. With all the out of office emails I received from the reminder I mailed yesterday I now have lots of emergency cell phone numbers to dial to get the crowd out :-)
We broke new trail today for EclipseCon exercise. We did a radical switch and turned right on the creek trail instead of the traditional left. Mixing things up is good and it provided a nice change in scenery and even a few more hills.
At the conference yesterday, I really enjoyed the content of the sessions starting with the keynote "The Social Mind: Designing Like Groups Matter" by Clay Shirky and Jeff Atwood. A deep dive on the nuances of success and failure in the social software space from both a research perspective and practical experience as shown by stackoverflow.com
Some of the key points I gleaned from the talk:
- Life is the world's biggest MMORPH - embrace the game-like aspects of your career
- Only resource that scales with your users is your users
- Bad stuff happens - that is OK as long as the community can deal with it
- Need to achieve that it is easier to defend the system than to attack it
- Start small and good and then grow. Big and bad will not improve over time
I then sat in on Erich Gamma and Jean-Michel Lemiuex 's talk on Jazz. I enjoy seeing demos of products I work on and this did not disappoint. I think we can all agree that creating and delivering software is a complicated and difficult process. A great quote from Phillipe Mulet (fomer Eclipse PMC lead) : Shipping software on time: It is like a duck quietly advancing on the pond but no one realizes that he is paddling like crazy underwater.
Jazz was built to provide tooling to help address some of the common challenges we have seen in the years of developing Eclipse as a globally distributed team:
- customization of team process
- team growth over time
- malleable and live plans
- isolation and then integration of component work
- the end game...when are we done and good as gold
Then it was e4 time. Lots has been happening in this space since last year and I cannot do it justice here. Improved resource model, styling and work to overcome Eclipse structural limitations, allow mutation of the Eclipse platform into a service provider, and then the promise/curse of Bespin. All with the goal of ensuring Eclipse stays relevant and interesting to its current user base but at the same time allowing entirely new usecases for the technology to emerge with the additional flair and flexibility. Everyone should keep their eye on the e4 space as things are really starting to pick up speed.I hit other talks and BOFs to fill up the day and even squeezed in a evening run.
Overall a great day of learning and networking.
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