Chris Aniszczyk's (zx) diatribe

Yesterday, Shawn Pearce (Google), Robin Rosenberg (Dewire) and Matthias Sohn (SAP) and I gave a talk at Eclipse about Understanding and Using Git at Eclipse.

I believe the tutorial was well received. Our goal was to introduce people to Git, JGit and EGit. We also talked about why Eclipse is moving to Git in the future. I believe we accomplished that on top of the message that there’s no free lunch to moving to Git at Eclipse. Heck, I don’t only want Eclipse to move to Git, I want other open source projects to do it. The license of JGit is liberal enough that other projects like Netbeans can embed it. Git simply empowers contributors in a way that’s not possible with centralized version control systems.

It will take time to get the tooling right and understand how much a distributed version control system like Git is the perfect fit for Eclipse. On top of that, we explained how the EGit and JGit projects leverage Gerrit to facilitate contributions and code reviews.

It’s my hope by the next Eclipse simultaneous release, we have a good amount of projects moved to Git and the tooling is top notch. The only way this will happen is if we admit to ourselves there’s no free lunch and provide feedback. I’m already impressed with what happened after the tutorial… we have people filing bugs and providing patches. This is what open source is all about.

If you still don’t get it, watch Linus’ tech talk about Git and read the Pro Git book.

The cat is out of the bag! I have the unique honor of being Program Chair for EclipseCon 2011.

I think Oisin Hurley did a great job chairing EclipseCon 2010, I have some big shoes to fill. I have some awesome ideas brewing on how to make things even better next year and will be selecting a Program Committee (I prefer to call it a Circle of Caring) soon. If you have any ideas on how to make EclipseCon better, please feel free to let me know. Don’t be afraid to give your honest feedback, I feed off the criticism

You can email me or track me down in person before EclipseCon 2010 finishes.

I don’t know about you but I was blown away by Jeff Norris‘ keynote this morning at EclipseCon 2010. As a matter of fact, I can’t think of any other software industry related keynote that has impressed me as much. As Eclipse committers, it’s very humbling and rewarding to see your software being used by NASA to explore Mars, aid in planning astronaut’s schedules on the International Space Station and other things.

He also has no fear for Murphy’s Law given the amount of live demos he did, from remotely controlling the ATHLETE rover to do some moves for us to controlling a robotic Socrates head.

Space is hard. NASA develops complex systems to explore the universe. You can’t develop crap and run something like the Mars rover missions with brittle and poorly designed software. It’s my personal belief that community, open source and modularity act as enablers for building better software. Eclipse and OSGi exposes modularity and puts people on the path on building better software. Of course it’s not easy, but Eclipse helps.

At the end of the talk, he cleverly used the method of Socratic dialogue to drive some points home. I completely agree with his points about the importance of foundations, frameworks and architectures. I managed to record a poor video from the end of the talk, but here’s a snippet from the dialogue:

Jeff Norris: As software systems grow more  and more complicated, they are going to start taking on the properties we have seen in other industries like rocket science and building buildings. Where the level of complexity begins to demand this division of labor on a scale perhaps we haven’t seen before.

Robotic Socrates: To see the future of the software industry one could perhaps study the past of others. As space exploration demands the combined efforts of specialists with limited understanding of each others trades software developers must similarly diversify to meet the growing demands of their field.

…

Robotic Socrates: As software projects grow to the scale of skyscrapers, developers will specialize further in order to cope with the complexity of the systems they build.

Jeff Norris: Well, that sounds pretty risky… thousands of developers working on a system and not really understanding what each other are doing… doesn’t sound like a safe thing to do. How are we going to make it possible for those people to collaborate effectively without stepping on each other?

Robotic Socrates: Using the same principles employed in skyscrapers… foundations, frameworks and architectures. Do these terms sound familiar to you?

Jeff Norris: Indeed they do. This is what I think Eclipse is all about… So to conclude, I feel what Eclipse is enabling here is for people like me… to build systems that are appraoching unforseen levels of complexity without them falling apart. I’m really looking forward to what this community is building now and how we are going to use it to explore the universe in the future.

Thank you Jeff and NASA for a great keynote. I expect great things in the future from NASA.

Yesterday, Martin Lippert, Jeff McAffer and Paul Vanderlei gave a talk on OSGi Best and Worst Practices.

I really enjoyed the talk because between the four of us, we have a unique and pragmatic perspective on OSGi. I come mostly from a tooling OSGi background but have dabbled in runtime. Martin has been working with enterprise clients deploying OSGi technology for a long time. Paul focuses on embedding OSGi in crazy places. Jeff is just wise OSGi sage, helped Eclipse move to OSGi and has just been doing this forever.

We decided to go the presentation zen approach and it seemed to be received well by the audience. We were a little hesitant at first because deeply technical audiences don’t seem to take the zen style well from my experience, but looks like people enjoyed it. I guess anytime you characterize Peter Kriens as tinkerbell sprinkling OSGi dust everywhere people get a kick out of it.

On top of that, we had a good debate on Require-Bundle versus Import-Package.

I think the devil in the picture above looks more productive, right ?

In the end, I hope you benefited from our experiences and learned something along the way.

One of the most common complaints I hear about open source projects is around documentation, from the complete lack of documentation to just outdated documentation. There’s many reasons why this is the case, from time to skills but I’m not going to go into that. Yesterday at EclipseCon, David Green and I gave a talk about Crowdsourcing and Singlesourcing Documentation at Eclipse and our thoughts on how to solve the documentation problem for Eclipse.org related projects.

While the talk is focused on Eclipse.org related projects, there is nothing in there that prevents you from taking what we did and apply it to your own projects, whether or not they are open source. The key lessons here is that most developers don’t like contributing to documentation to begin with. They also never have the time. On top of that, if the barriers to contributing documentation is high, no one will contribute and you’ll end up with low quality documentation.

Lower those barriers by enabling a variety of people to contribute documentation, not only people with commit access to the project. If you involve and enable the community to contribute, you may be surprised at what contributions you get.

What other experiences have people faced when it comes to open source related documentation? What can make things better?

Tomorrow as part of OSGi DevCon 2010… Simon Archer, Jeff McAffer, Paul Vanderlei and I will be giving an awesome OSGi tutorial. The tutorial will take you through developing a fully functional OSGi-based application based on the famous Toast example from the OSGi and Equinox book.

We’ll cover the key elements of OSGi and creating OSGi-based systems with principles and practices that are applicable in a wide range of application domains and execution scenarios. A lot of time and effort went into the book and Toast example. In my opinion, the Toast example is the best OSGi example out there and you’ll benefit from learning it.

Why should you come to our OSGi tutorial? Well, you’ll have the eyes and ears of four guys who have been doing OSGi for many years. On top of that, you’ll get to hear us make some controversial statements like when programming OSGi, don’t use OSGi. Oh, and you’ll hear Jeff talk about how modularity is the lubrication of collaboration.

There will be a Eclipse community tweetup at EclipseCon.

The Eclipse community has a fine tradition of taking over the Hyatt bar on the night before EclipseCon. Let’s continue that tradition.

Please sign up if you can come!

I’m pleased to announce I have decided to join Red Hat.

Gandhi said you must be the change you wish to see in the world. I was given a unique opportunity to change things and am looking forward to it. Look for me to strengthen the state of Eclipse on Linux and improve the state of Git tooling at Eclipse. On top of that, I get the opportunity to spread the Eclipse and OSGi love to the JBoss folks.

I look forward to seeing everyone at EclipseCon and enjoying some frosty beverages.

For those who don’t know, the Eclipse Platform freezes its APIs soon with the release of Eclipse 3.6 M6… a great time to start targeting Eclipse if you’re planning to ship a product on the Eclipse Helios release (or a great time to start bribing platform committers for API changes). At this point, API won’t change and only a couple features will sneak in until 3.6 M7 which feature freeze hits. After that, it’s a sprint to the finish to get the Eclipse Helios release out the door.

On top of that, EclipseCon is less than 10 days away and I’m not done my presentations and tutorials yet.

The only reassuring thought is that I think I’m not the only one that is procrastinating a bit, right ?

Are you attending EclipseCon 2010?

Does snacking on all that conference food (think chocolate fountains) make you feel guilty?

Want to improve your 5K time ?

Well, I have good news. This year, EclipseSource has graciously sponsored the EclipseCon Exercise event. To attend, please register on the wiki and let the event organizers know that you’re coming. This year, we have something special for the runners due to sponsorship, technical tees!

Anyways, I want to continue the tradition of morning exercise during the conference and I hope to see some fresh faces this year in the morning. There really is no better way to start off your morning than running through some fresh California air.