Tomorrow I will be making my making my maiden talk at EclipseCon in Santa Clara. I’ve been at the conference all week manning the Microsoft booth and sneaking along to sessions when possible. I have to say that I’ve really enjoyed my week here. The conference has a very “un-conference” feel and the calibre of attendees is incredibly high. I’ve learnt a lot just by joining in hallway conversations and it has been a surreal experience at times chatting with some of the folks that contributed parts of the code that I use on a daily basis or folks that have fixed up and committed the patches that I have submitted. The Birds of a Feather sessions have also been fantastic.
Many people have done a double-take at the company name on my badge this week – especially when I start bemoaning the difficulties of doing a headless PDE build or paging tables of data containing thousands of rows in an efficient manner via SWT virtual tables. People are generally pleasantly surprised but intrigued and also pleased that Microsoft has developers using and developing for Eclipse.
So, tomorrow afternoon I’ll be giving my personal view on “The Life and Times of an Eclipse Developer at Microsoft Corporation”. I have to admit that I’m a little nervous about my talk. Usually when I’m talking I’m discussing the intricacies of Team Foundation Server or best practices in software development – topics that I’m comfortable with. When it comes to Eclipse I’m clearly just an average developer and not the expert in the room. Heck, I’m not even an expert with-in my own team. I guess I have the advantage of being the only Eclipse developer in the room that works for Microsoft so at least the title of the talk helps :-)
Wish me luck. If you are at EclipseCon then drop by the booth before or after the session to give me abuse and I’ll give you a pack of planning poker cards or some interoperability mints (gotta love conference schwag).
