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?