Ten things I wish I'd known as young committer

On Monday afternoon, I'm giving a short talk at EclipseCon entitled Eclipse Top Ten. My presentation will discuss the important lessons I've learned while interacting with the Eclipse community. Release engineers build SDKs but along the way I've learned about building community as well.

I prepared the slides with the help of the excellent book Presentation Zen that that my Eclipse colleague Lars Vogel recommended.  One of the suggestions in the book is to present interesting pictures with as little text as possible.  This is to encourage the audience to listen and interact with the speaker, instead of spending time reading text heavy slides.

Photo credit Gábor Shajda http://www.sxc.hu/photo/21223

If you look closely, you will notice the billiard balls are scratched, and a bit worse for wear.  I think that's fitting, because as a long time Eclipse committers, some of us are in a similar condition. The steady stream of bugzillas that has rained down upon us for years does leave some scar tissue:-)

For the draft of this talk, I wrote down a list of 50 different things I've learned working in our open source community.  I had to do a lot work to condense it down to ten.  Given the material I had, I could have had a completely different talk. The end result is a candid and humourous look at the Eclipse community, and how you can get involved to make it better.

What have you learned from open source?  The talk is from my perspective, but I'm sure others have much to contribute to this discussion. I look forward to speaking with you at EclipseCon.