“I can report that my company receives 70% plus of our site traffic from organic sources, and our documentation generates more than half of our overall site traffic. Furthermore, over half of our lead generation is driven by our documentation.”

While the article specifically mentions commercial software, I think the lesson of having solid and findable documentation apply to the open source realm. I mean, when’s the last time you’ve come across an open source project that you praised their documentation efforts? I can maybe count two total in my lifetime. As open source developers and project leads, we tend to put documentation last and our expectation is that users would pitch in to help. As users, we just want good documentation and don’t believe it’s our responsibility to help out necessarily…

So next time you’re working on that feature, weigh it versus taking some time to document things for your users. If you’re in Eclipse land, feel free to take a look at our documentation guidelines and some examples on how to crowdsource your documentation efforts a bit.

It was nice to catch up with some local folks and introduce people to some new Eclipse technology. In the end, we kind of got sidetracked and there was some good discussion about source control in the corporate environment versus what is going on in open source communities. Unfortunately, it seems Subversion has a stronghold in a lot of companies still. I hope our work in JGit to make a liberally licensed Git library that runs everywhere will start swaying the tide…

I’m always a fan of doing relay races so I was ready to conquer the 197 miles. I started out with Leg 5 which wasn’t that bad…

…besides the hill climb in the end… but I ended up running it in 43:00 which isn’t that bad. After that, Leg 17 was up  which was nice and flat 5.69 miles… it was a night run and I cruised in at 38:46 feeling pretty good.

A bit sore, but still good. My last leg was 29 and it was 6.11 miles full of terrible…

… the first 3.5 miles were essentially up hill with a nice steep grade climb to finish things off. After that, the downhill was probably the most enjoyable running I had the whole relay… I felt like I was floating. On average, I ran about a 7 minute mile pace the whole relay which isn’t bad given the status of my injured ankle. I think once my ankle recovers I’ll be back to my 6 minute mile pace. In the end, my team ended up finishing in 26 hours and 11 minutes (faster than last year!) which put is at 181th out of 1023 teams and in the 54th Open Men’s division.

‘Til next year where sub 26 hours should be in our future!

Eclipse participated this year and I’m not sure how all of our projects did, but I can at least tell you how things went with the project I was involved with. I and the rest of the EGit team (mostly Matthias Sohn) mentored Dariusz Luksza in providing some much needed enhancements to the EGit project. Dariusz started out with some smaller items such as adding tagging support but eventually moved on to more complicated endeavors like implementing support for the synchronize view. All I can say is that the project went really well and I recently was proud to nominate Dariusz as a committer.

In the past, there have been other successful transitions from GSOC alumni to committer. It’s even helped some people get jobs! For example, Remy Suen had to endure my mentorship four years ago or so and now he’s having fun working at IBM hacking on Eclipse 4.0 amongst other things. I’m sure there are other examples out there that aren’t coming to my mind at the moment.

In the future, it would be good to see more projects at Eclipse.org involved in GSOC and mentoring students. Just a little of your time can have a positive effect on a student and the open source community as a whole. In my opinion, working with potential contributors and more importantly students, is one of the best things we can do for ourselves within the Eclipse community to keep things vibrant.

The best way I can describe the course is that it was freakn’ hot outside… it was about 105F during the day and cooled down a bit in the evening… but it was definitely toasty. I also sprained my ankle pretty bad about half way through the course which wasn’t that fun… this is me smiling just about before it got dark and my ankle slipped on some rocks…

I initially planned to do the full 60km but settled for 30km after spraining my ankle and due to the heat. I finished in about 3:25 which is slow for me… I normally would have finished under 3 hours but hey, you don’t always have your best days. This week, I’m looking to heal up and get ready for next weekend’s XTerra half marathon trail race!

I recall meeting Mario Bernhart in Vienna about a year ago at a Eclipse DemoCamp suggesting that they move the ReviewClipse project to Eclipse.org to build a developer community and get some more attention. It looks like we are finally at that stage and I hope they consider shipping a incubation release as part of the Indigo simultaneous release. If you’re looking for more information about code reviews, Mario gave a presentation at Agile 2010 recently…

Since the Mylyn Reviews project is new, feel free to take it for a spin if you want to give feedback and help shape the projects future (this is the beauty of open source when getting involved with a project early). On a side note, I’m looking forward to enabling code reviews in Git land through git-notes and Mylyn Reviews.

I highly recommend attending and submitting a talk if you haven’t already. I’m excited and looking forward to the conference. The timing will coincide close with the EGit and JGit 1.0 release so we should have some potential milestone builds for people to try by then. My hope is that we are in position to have the majority of the Eclipse.org community move to Git by the end of the year.

On a side note, EclipseCon 2011 planning is starting up so I plan on announcing the Program Committee in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for details!

It’s easy to install solutions from within Eclipse (Help -> Eclipse Marketplace…), for example, if you need Git support… simply use ‘git’ as a search term…

If you’re an Eclipse.org project, I highly recommend listing a release of your project if you want to make it easier for users to find your work. I’m a lazy user so anything that can be done to not have to enter a URL is a plus in my humble opinion.

So what’s missing? Well, I would like to see the marketplace work with other Eclipse plug-in distributors out there. I know that the marketplace supports pluggable marketplace providers as the folks at EclipseSource are taking advantage of this functionality via the Yoxos Market. However, I’m more looking at the folks within the IBM Lotus community who are doing cool things by having plug-ins for Symphony available via the web. I think both communities would benefit by having more cross-pollination with the plug-ins that would work in both environments. On top of that, I would like to see “appstore” like functionality at the marketplace in the future so people could offer their wares for sale if they wanted to. I know this isn’t easy due to the complications of selling goods in various countries and the tax laws that accompany that but we could start with a few pilot countries.

In the end, I think the marketplace makes it a lot easier to find Eclipse-related stuff and opens a lot of possibilities to make Eclipse more consumable for folks.

The EGit project is implementing Eclipse tooling on top of JGit, the Java implementation of Git. Both EGit and JGit moved to Eclipse in May 2009 and shipped 0.8 with Helios. The EGit and JGit teams are busily working towards 0.9 which is targeted for Helios SR1 (September 2010). This webinar will give an update on the project progress and more detailed information about the design and features. A demo will illustrate how it’s used in its own development process. It will also show how Gerrit Code Review, a JGit based review system developed for the needs of the Android community, can help to further improve development processes.

Please register if you want to attend and learn more about Git and Eclipse.

On a side note, there will be a free GitTogether event October 25-27th at Google HQ. Git contributors and users alike are welcome to attend. If you’re interested in Git and in the bay area, please consider attending.

Thirty or so people showed up and there was a lot of good presentations..

1. Elliott Baron, Path-Sensitive Static Analysis for C/C++
2. John Bossons, Wizards to make JPA value objects thread-safe
3. Jason van Zyl, m2eclipse and tycho
4. Chris Aniszczyk, Understanding and Using Git at Eclipse
5. Ian Bull, Managing your eclipse installs
6. Kenn Hussey, b3 Aggregator
7. Charley Wang, C/C++ function call visualizations
8. Andrew Overholt, Eclipse Linux Tools project

I talked about Git and demoed EGit a bit…

Afterwards, we headed to the Rose and Crown pub for drinks and food!

Overall, it was fun and thank you Eclipse Foundation for sponsoring the event!