Moving to Mozilla

Eclipse family: March 23 will be my last day at IBM. I'm happy to announce that I'll be joining the Mozilla Release Engineering team in April. 

Image ©flod, http://www.flickr.com/photos/flod/2221300134/sizes/l/in/photostream/ licensed under Creative Commons by-nc-sa 2.0

We all wear many hats during our lives.  I've always been fiercely proud of the privilege of calling myself an Eclipse committer.  We've accomplished amazing things together.  I look forward to seeing the continued growth and success of the Eclipse community. 

At Mozilla, I'll have the opportunity to work with a completely new software stack, and learn many new skills while working with very talented people. Best of all, my job will involve contributing to an open source community.  This is what I love to do.  The Mozilla goals of making the web better, and teaching a new generation to make content, instead of just consuming it, really resonate with me. Running builds on 1200+ machines raises some interesting scalability issues which I'm eager to learn more about.  It will be challenging work, and I'm honoured to have the opportunity to work at Mozilla.  I'll be working from my home in Ottawa. 

Where there are new challenges ahead for me, at the same time it has been a difficult decision to let my contribution to Eclipse wane.  I'd like to continue contribute to Eclipse in some way but on a part-time or occasional basis.

My IBM colleagues, my fellow committers and the Eclipse foundation staff:  you are all extraordinary.  It has been a privilege to work with you and learn so much.  To those in the larger Eclipse community, you inspire me.  To the people on the Eclipse SDK and Equinox teams, I have never had the opportunity to work with such a wonderful group of people.  Not only are you creative and technically brilliant, but you are all so dedicated to doing the right thing and getting things done.   You're all genuinely nice people, without ego, who are eager to share your knowledge with others.   It's not often that software project ships on time every year for ten years and continues to delight its user community.  It is a testament to the team behind it that this continues to be the case.  

In the process of working on Eclipse, I've met some fantastic people, many who have become great friends.  I'll miss the seeing your faces every day and discussing the finer points of Git migration strategies, but I'll still be on IRC, Twitter, Linkedln, G+ etc.  If you live in the Ottawa area, I'm always up for lunch :-) 

It has been a great run. Thank you all

Note #1:  I'll continue to write on this blog. The name still applies :-)
Note #2: I was going to call this post "Firefox-y Lady".  Then I read the lyrics to the Hendrix song "Foxy Lady" and decided maybe not.

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2011 by the numbers

2011 was an exciting year in the Eclipse community.  From my corner of the Eclipse universe, he's what it looked like:


One book chapter, many thanks

I contributed a chapter on Eclipse to the Architecture of Open Source Applications in 2010 and the book was published in May 2011.  Thanks to Amy Brown and Greg Wilson, for their long hours editing and providing feedback to the authors of this book.  It's a great read!  When Greg first approached me about writing this chapter, my immediate thought was "How hard could it be? I live and breathe Eclipse all day".  It was much more difficult that I imagined but in the process I learned a tremendous amount and am a better committer for the experience.  Many thanks to DJ Houghton and John Arthorne for reviewing my drafts and providing valuable feedback. A special thanks to Jeff McAffer who I interviewed about the decision to switch to OSGi in 3.0 and Steve Northover for his suggestions to make the SWT section into something more pixel perfect.  Merci Olivier Thomann for answering my many compiler questions,  and Boris Bokowski and Paul Webster for their thorough discussions with me regarding the modelled workbench and dependency injection in 4.x.  Also, thanks to Mike Wilson to allow me the flexibility in my job to spend some time at work working on this chapter.  I'm excited to see that Amy and Greg are now editing a second volume of this book.

Six milestones, many release candidates, two service releases, and one coordinated release, four streams, thousands of builds, millions of tests
No rest for the committers.

143 bug fixes
I closed about 143 bugs in the releng bucket in the past year.  That doesn't seem like much really.  I'd have liked to solve more.  The largest issues implemented from a releng perspective were shared licenses, code coverage, and the largest work item, the Git migration.

42 Git repos 
The Equinox and Eclipse projects migrated all their repos to Git.  We now have about 42 Git repos.  This involved a tremendous amount of work on the part of the Eclipse team as a whole.  There were many whiteboard drawings and detailed discussions about the migration process with John, Paul and a Mr. Gheorghe.  There was no Ringo.  Thank you Paul for all the huge amount of testing, script writing, and migration of all the ui and e4 repos. Thanks John for your work many sage suggestions on our Git migration, as well as your suggestion to implement the git flow method to simplify our development and build processes.  Thanks Andrew Niefer for migrating many of the Equinox and PDE repos, Bogdan Gheorghe for your work with SWT, and Oliver Thomann for testing JDT Core repos.  Thanks Tom Watson for your Git advice, having already climbed the Git learning curve while working on the OSGi Alliance repositories.  To Dani Megert and Markus Keller, your always fine attention to detail and pointing out areas that could be improved is appreciated. Paul is giving a talk about our migration at EclipseCon 2012 called Let's Git this Party Started.  I'm sure it will be insightful and entertaining.

One EclipseCon, two talks, one castle, many great people
I was privileged to attend EclipseCon Europe in Ludwidsberg this past November and present two talks.  I thoroughly enjoyed preparing these talks, and even more presenting them.  On the Wednesday morning, I talked about our Git Migration, and that evening I gave a talk with John Kellerman about history of Eclipse over the past 10 years.  After the second talk, a few people came up to me and said that the talk was so good that it should have been a keynote.  That was very fantastic to hear because we really put a huge amount of effort into that presentation.  I also had a lot of fun talking to people at our booth where we had posted many pictures of the Eclipse family from over the years. The Saturday after the conference Simon Kaegi, Eric Moffatt and I visited Heidelberg castle.  Canada scores very low on the castle index so this was a treat.   

You can't buy Eclipse magazines or giant pretzels at train stations in Canada either. I was impressed.

19 blog posts
I didn't have much time to write blogs posts this year.  The most popular one I wrote this year was about smashing open source stereotypes.

I'm never sure how popular a blog post will when I write them. It's always a surprise.  The comparison of Mozilla and Eclipse build infrastructure I wrote last year still holds the record for most popular (it ended up on reddit).


One marathon, many kilometers of training
How is running related to release engineering?  Running keeps me sane when release engineering gets crazy :-)  Preparing for the Ottawa marathon in May means that you have to start training at the end of January.  Running through snow, ice, wind and rain teaches you there isn't really anything you can't do when you are willing put in a lot of hard work to reach your goal.  And when you reach that goal, there's a lot of joy, because you know that you have conquered all the obstacles in your path and emerged victorious.

My sneakers after a 19K training run through deep slush

Open source is really a huge team effort and I had a lot of fun in the Eclipse community in 2011.

Who knows what 2012 will bring?

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We're the face of open source

I had some interesting discussions on Twitter this afternoon.  

Wayne replied:

Miles said:

One of the great things about the Eclipse community: that we cooperate on open source projects yet compete on commercial products.  This slide from the Eclipse 10 years talk  that John Kellerman and I  recently gave shows the diversity of the CDT project by company.

Here's another slide where we talked about the fact that there weren't originally enough non-IBM committers on the Eclipse project.  I called this "Too much blue in the Eclipse rainbow".

Image ©darrentunnicliff, http://www.flickr.com/photos/darrentunnicliff/4510834607/  licensed under Creative Commons by-nc-sa 2.0

I'd like see a more diverse community at Eclipse and in open source in general.  To spread the word that it's a rewarding career and we have a wonderful community.  Also, I'd like to find more people to fix bugs :-)

Occupy Open Source: We are the 1%

I don't know if the percentage of women at Eclipse is really 1% but it's pretty low.*

Ian later tweeted

My response was that it would be interesting to focus on the person, where they had come from and what they work and work the technology into the discussion.  Show a picture of the person, what their educational background is, how they got involved in open source, and what they work on.  I think computer science and open source have an image problem.  People think that we software isn't a social endeavour.  And yet it is.  Hello GitHub.  That the work we do doesn't change the world and make people's lives better.  No again.

One of the ways to combat stereotypes tell stories from the perspective of the person. How they came to work in open source. The interesting projects they work on.  Talks they presented at conferences.  What they do in their spare time outside work. Curtis writes code for PDE but he also likes to kayak.  Susan works on Orion but also runs an organic farm.  Andrew writes Linux tools but he also has interesting travel adventures.  Eric works on the next generation Eclipse UI and wins pool tournaments.  Tom works on that too, and he likes to ski and hike near his home in Innsbruck.  Ian lives in Victoria, works on p2 and plays hockey.  Introduce the person, then move on to talk about the technology they work on :-)

Yesterday, Syzmon asked me if me if could use our Eclipse 10 Years talk at a demo camp in Poland. I thought that was fantastic.  Our talk delivered in another country, in a different language.  Go Creative Commons.

Putting these too ideas together, I thought it would be interesting to have a common slide deck we as a community could use at schools or universities called "We're the face of open source".  I think it's important to showcase the different paths people take to get to their careers.  And kids need to to see something of themselves reflected in people who work in the industry.  It doesn't matter if you're a man or woman, your ethnicity,  where you live, if you're gay or straight, have five kids or three dogs. The important thing is that you have a story that you want to share to inspire a new generation to consider contributing to open source. 

Thoughts?

Notes
*1)This is not intended to be a statement for or against the Occupy movement.  I'm just trying to be funny. YMMV.
2) Standing out in the Crowd talk from OSCON 2009 has interesting numbers about open source diversity and the benefits it brings
3) I'm willing to help put the slide deck together in my spare time outside work.  We could use a Google Docs to allow multiple people to edit it. Maybe the slide deck could provide a list of Eclipse mentors that are willing to help out students fix their first bug, browse the source tree etc.  These are details.  Let me know if you are interested in contributing :-) 
4) This would make an interesting EclipseCon talk. Ten Eclipse committers/contributors you should know and why

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EclipseCon Europe presentations now available

My presentations from EclipseCon Europe are now available on slideshare.

The first one is the story of the Eclipse and Equinox team's migration from CVS to Git.

Migrating to Git: Rethinking the Commit

View more presentations from Kim Moir

There were a lot of great presentations on  Git migrations such as those by Steffen Pingel and Christian Campo.  One thing that I've learned is that the time to migrate is proportional to the size of your code base and history.  Someone asked me if we considered just starting in Git without our history. Well, no, but that would have solved a lot of problems. It was also interesting to talk to the EGit team, and meet some of the people working at GitHub. (Thanks for the octocat stickers Kevin!). In honour of Movember, this slide seems appropriate.

Image ©dealingwith, http://www.flickr.com/photos/dealingwith/4295488113/  licensed under Creative Commons by-nc-sa 2.0

The second talk I co-presented with John Kellerman. It's a look back at the last ten years of Eclipse history. I had several people come up to me after the talk and say they really enjoyed it. Thanks! It was fun to look back at Eclipse history and dig up funny pictures and bugs. I enjoyed presenting with John because he talked about the business side and I talked about the evolution of the Eclipse community from a down in the trenches commmiter perspective. A good balance. He has been involved in the Eclipse community since well before my time, lots of great stories!

Has it really been 10 years?

View more presentations from Kim Moir

You can also listen to the talk on FOSSLC website.  I love the fact that all the EclipseCon presentations were recorded. I plan to go back to and watch the sessions I missed!

A big thank you to the organizers of EclipseCon Europe for a fantastic conference. I've never attended one before, and was very impressed. Beautiful location, interesting talks, great running paths nearby and of course, the best people. It's great to be able to spend time with people who you work with but never get to see in person, like Ian Bull and Andrew Overholt. It was also great to meet new people at lunch and in the hallways.  I talked to some first time EclipseCon attendees who were very impressed with the caliber of talks at the conference so kudos to everyone who presented.

At the IBM booth, we pinned up many pictures of the Eclipse family over the past ten years. It was great to talk to people who visited the booth, especially those new the the Eclipse community.  I posted a link to them on my Google+ account. Looking back at them it's amazing to see so many smiling people.


It's hard to believe that it's been ten years. I had a number of people come up to me at the conference and say that they couldn't believe that I had been involved in the community for ten years. Well, I can't believe it either. It reminded me of the moment when I stood up on stage to receive my university diploma and I thought, how could these four years have gone so quickly?  I don't know but it's been a lot of fun.  By the way, here is a list of other committers who have been involved with Eclipse for ten years or more.

More importantly, there are now over a thousand Eclipse committers today.  I'm honoured to work with you all :-)

Presentations on slideshare:
Migrating to Git: Rethinking the Commit
Slideshare: Has it really been 10 years?
FOSSLC recording: Has it really been 10 years?
If you look at the speakers notes, you can see the text of the talk.  Most of the slides are just pictures in "Presentation Zen" style.

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In open source, all you have is social capital

Over a month ago, I watched this keynote by David Eaves that he gave at DjangoCon. Yes, I'm way behind on the list of things I'd like to blog about. I blame Bugzilla :-) Also, quite a few people at EclipseCon Europe came up to me and mentioned that they really enjoyed reading my blog. Thanks - I enjoy writing!



David Eaves is a negotiation consultant. He helps people on opposite sides of an issue come to an agreement, and has clients in open data, government, industry, and open source communities. He has done work at Mozilla to help manage contributor engagement and implement measures to keep contributors working in the community.

He starts off by telling the story, that as part of of his work with Mozilla, he thinks that he should submit a bug. He submits his first Thunderbird bug and announces on Twitter or Facebook that he's excited to submit his first bug. To which he gets the reply "I bet it's a duplicate".  According to this presentation, 50% of all bugs are duplicates.  It may be a duplicate, but this response isn't the best approach to encouraging future participation from a new contributor.

He then says that most open source communities don't have financial capital.  They don't have money flowing in to influence people.  "All you have is social capital".  Social capital consists of the people that contribute to your community and make it successful.  In theory, in a corporation, human resources tracks how to retain and manage its people.  In open source, we spend very little time managing our social capital or even better, tracking  it.

He then continues that one of the mantras of open source is that it's a meritocracy and your coding skills are the key to success within the community.  But if you look at people who have spent a lot of time in an open source community and are considered leaders,  many of them spend a lot more time working with people and  managing their community as opposed to coding.  To which he says "We pull people in based on their coding skills, and we promote people based on their negotiation skills".  Also, he remarks that nobody tells us that, and that we all stress that technical skills trumpet negotiation skills despite the evidence to the contrary.

He then gives examples of funny or misunderstood Mozilla bugs.  He states how it's harder to communicate with people when only via the written word.  I find that myself.  I've met quite a few people at conferences who I've found to be rude in Bugzilla to only find that in person they seem like a totally different person.  Reasonable.  Friendly.  Helpful.  Anyways, since Bugzilla is a written medium he suggests that the best way to interact on it is to ask questions.  He states that often people just have a solution in mind as a bug fix and aggressively push their solution where in fact they should ask the user what they want to do in the first place.  Also, you should paraphrase and repeat what the user said to gain understanding, acknowledge the problem and advocate for a solution. All great advice!

The next section of the talk discusses the architecture of a community.  Fork used to be a four letter word in open source  But with the advent of GitHub, it's not, but rather a way to empower the user.  It also absolves you from seeking anyone's permission before contributing.  He says we need to design our communities to "Architect for cooperation and away from collaboration"  It's great if a new contributor can start fixing a problem without the transaction costs associated with interacting with a committer.  We can spend our time on other tasks.  He also states that we need to empower the lowest people on the stack, such as those triaging bugs.  He also remarks that immediately marking a bug as invalid without acknowledgement of the effort required to report it doesn't build community loyalty.

GitHub Octocat

Image ©sunfox, http://www.flickr.com/photos/sunfox/4365495446/  licensed under Creative Commons by-nc-sa 2.0

The final section of the talk described applying metrics to the show what is going on in a project.  To measure contributor patches from non-paid staff is a way to measure social capital.  To determine why people have stopped contributing.  To measure wait time for before a patch is submitted.  He also states that it would be interesting to have a repository API and once you attach a patch to a bug, it would update the bug with the anticipated  wait time, to set expectations for the reporter.  He states that Wikipedia segments users based on metrics and they applies actions, such as suggesting mentors for new contributors.

I think having metrics for new Eclipse contributors would be very interesting.  I rarely have people contributing patches to my bucket other than from other Eclipse or Equinox project committers, but I'm sure the metrics would be very interesting for other components.   It would also be valuable to determine the reason that people stop contributing, and implement measures to encourage people to continue to their involvement.

He finishes by stating that there needs to be a social infrastructure for the community, not just code.  Also, in some cases, you many need to remove people from the community to reduce negative social capital.  A great talk, I highly recommend  it - extremely informative and funny. 


Notes:
 
David Eaves also blogs at http://www.eaves.ca on open data, open source and other interesting topics.
His keynote is here http://blip.tv/djangocon/keynote-david-eaves-5571777

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Excited about EclipseCon Europe

Ten years ago, we were burning the midnight oil getting Eclipse 1.0 ready to release.  I offer you proof

Me stuck behind server rack. Yes, I'm wearing COWS shirt.  Please don't judge me.

Today, we're working hard to polish our presentations as we celebrate ten years of  Eclipse at EclipseCon Europe.  I'm excited to have the opportunity to attend EclipseCon Europe, this will be my first time :-) 

I've been preparing two presentations over the past few weeks.  The first one is called Migrating to Git: Rethinking the Commit.  Here, I'll talk about the process we used to convert our large and historic CVS reposository to Git, the problems we encountered, how our development processes changed, and what advice we can offer other teams that are contemplating this migration.

Image ©venegas, http://www.flickr.com/photos/venegas/5549123/ licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Image ©spool32, http://www.flickr.com/photos/spool32/5045502202/ licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) 



The second talk is a light-hearted look back at the past ten years.  I received an email from EclipseCon Europe this morning that stated.  "After the Stammtisch, a couple of long-time Eclipse enthusiasts present Has it Really Been 10 Years?."  Long-time enthusiasts?  Okay, that made me feel old.  Anyways, in this talk John Kellerman and I look back at the the last ten years and discuss what what we expected when Eclipse was released as open source, the response we received, what mistakes were made, what surprised us.  Fair warning: I have uncovered some embarrassing pictures from our past Eclipse family.  I'll be using this occasion to showcase them.  If you have any interesting pictures to share, email me and I'd be happy to include them :-)   My understanding is that a Stammtisch involves beer so I think people will be in the right mood when they walk into the talk.

Last but not least, I invite you for to go for a run or walk each morning at 7am.  We'll meet in the lobby of the Nestor hotel.  Sign up for EclipseCon exercise here! 

See you soon!

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A history of lizard wrangling and other software stories

I've been thinking a lot lately about open source history.  I'm in the midst of preparing material for a presentation that John Kellerman and I will be giving at EclipseCon Europe about the history of Eclipse. Last week an interesting video crossed my twitter feed.  It was a talk by Mitchell Baker on the history of Mozilla.  Mitchell is the Chair of the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation and has been involved in this community for many years.  Her title is Chief Lizard Wrangler.  That's the best job title I have ever heard.  Well, being called an astronaut would be fun too but you get the idea.  According to Wikipedia, she's a also skilled trapeze artist.  I like learning about people with interesting hobbies.




In the video, she talks about the history of  Mozilla, which started in 1998. She describes the tension between Netscape the corporation and Mozilla the community.  For instance, the belief in the Mozilla community that commit rights should be earned and voted on by your peers, not just assigned based on your employer.  It's a really interesting to learn about the conflict in those early years at Mozilla and how they worked so hard with very few resources to be where they are today.

One of my favourite lines from the talk is that "Technology alone does not change people's lives.  Our opportunity in the browser is to have a product that touches people." Also, she states that the problem with a lot of open source projects is that they are irrelevant to the marketplace and don't treat their users very well.  For instance, calling a user stupid isn't going to make their life better.  "You need to make a product that is elegant and beautiful and powerful under the covers but that people love."  Mozilla has a bit of a different outlook that the Eclipse community because their flagship product Firebox is used by everyday consumers.  Eclipse components are consumed by developers in the form of open source packages that the coordinated release provides, but at the same time many people consume components in commercial products that build upon our open source offerings.

Some other memorable lines "UI is always the most contentious issue".  Well, at Eclipse we never argue about UI.  Wait....hmm..maybe...this bug has a few contentious comments.....

This talk really resonated with me.  Eclipse and Mozilla are two well known open source communities with different histories but ultimately both are very successful.  I highly recommend taking the time to listen to it.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day from Ottawa!

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