I have to say EclipseDay at the Googleplex was quite a success! Thank you to Robert, Mustafa and Leslie for putting things together!
The day started out with a talk about eBay’s usage of Eclipse by Michael Galpin. It was interesting to see how eBay turned Eclipse into its smorgasbord tooling platform to build applications for eBay’s website. When I asked if there was any issues or regrets in adopting Eclipse, Michael looked a bit stunned, paused for a bit and finally said no. I was surprised by the response 😉
I gave a talk about tips and tricks around plug-in development that I found useful through my experience of hacking plug-ins. It was cool to see the glee on people’s faces when they learned about things like Ctrl+3 and Plug-in Spy.
There was also a lot of CDT fans in the audience. One person was complaining how CDT4 wasn’t fast at indexing his ~20 million LOC product, which could be fair, however, I told him to try out CDT5 which is part of Ganymede. I know that the CDT team spent a lot of time improving the indexer for CDT5 to handle the most ridiculously sized projects out there. The interesting part of this discussion was the fact that he never bothered to ask about his problems on the CDT newsgroup or mailing list. If you don’t ask, how can you expect someone to help you? I wonder how we can better direct people to asking questions on the newsgroups… I wouldn’t want Eclipse adoption impeded by silly things like people not asking questions about their problems.
Overall, I enjoyed meeting everyone and especially some of the new faces I haven’t seen in person before (hi Mustafa). I hope Google does something like this in the future, maybe on the east coast this time, around their NYC offices ;)?