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June 26, 2012
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Ecipse Juno Released for “Friends”

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Besides finding out that the Eclipse Foundation is finally on Twitter (follow @EclipseFdn), I was greeted with this email this morning regarding the Eclipse Juno release:

It’s available one day early for Friends of Eclipse members who donate to give back a bit to the Eclipse community. If you want to access Eclipse Juno a bit early, consider donating as the money goes to great causes like sponsoring community events and sending students to Eclipse conferences.

Stepping back a moment to reflect on the Eclipse Juno release, it’s amazing to see over 70 projects ship at the same time which results in about 55 million lines of code being delivered.

It’s one of the largest open source releases ever. In my opinion, this is really attributed to the maturity  and professionalism of the Eclipse community. It’s a great feeling to be a small part of this community and of a release this size.

Enjoy!

June 9, 2012
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Canyon Meadow Trail Half Marathon

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Due to taking a new and fun job, I’ve neglected my blogging as of late, especially when it comes to running. My new goal is to fix that as it’s important for me to hold myself accountable when it comes to improving my running performance. My pace has slowed down a bit since San Francisco just can’t compete with Austin when it comes to the fitness and running scene.

However, there are some nice trail runs put on by the Coastal Trail Run folks here and there. Last week, I ran the Canyon Meadow trail half marathon. The run started out beautifully, the weather was great. The downside was that I was a little late to the start line so I had to wade through a lot of people…

There was a lot of climbing involved the first several miles which hurt, that’s what I get for not looking at the elevation profile until after the race…

However, once the hills were done, the trail was beautiful and just involved coasting downhill for the most part…

I ended up finishing in 1:56 and 6th in my age group which isn’t that bad, but no where near my old sub 7 trail running days a year or so ago. But hey, practice makes perfect, the next race I have planned is the Zombie Runner on June 16th, let’s do it.

April 17, 2012
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The Innovators Patent Agreement

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For those of us who work as engineers in the software industry, we may have patented a few things related to software in our careers. Typically, engineers and designers sign an agreement with their company that irrevocably gives that company full control of the patents. The company then can use them however they want, which may include selling them to others who can also use them however they want. These days, there are many non-practicing entities stifling progress, aiming offensive patent lawsuits at software and high-tech companies who are innovating and moving the industry forward. We can do better than this, today at Twitter I’m proud we announced the Innovators Patent Agreement (IPA).

The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers. It is a commitment from a company to the engineers that patents can only be used for defensive purposes–that is, only in response to a litigation threat against the company or a recent history of offensive patent use. The company will not use the patents in offensive litigation without the permission of the inventors. With the IPA, employees can be assured that their patents will be used only as a shield rather than as a weapon.

We are still in early stages, and have just started to reach out to other companies to discuss IPA and whether it might make sense for them too. We have posted the IPA on Github, with the hope that folks improve the IPA in an open source fashion and share it with their respective companies.

Twitter will implement the IPA later this year, and it will apply to all patents issued to our engineers. If you have comments, feel free to look at the Github repository or join the conversation on Twitter with hashtag #IPA

April 5, 2012
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Travis CI

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I’ve been slightly enamored with Travis CI as of late…

For those who don’t know what Travis CI is, it’s a hosted continuous integration service for the open source community, still in alpha stages but surprisingly stable from my point of view. It also integrates nicely with your GitHub account so you can easily decide what projects you want to build by logging in using your GitHub credentials. On top of that, the Travis CI code itself is hosted on GitHub for people to contribute to.

Traditionally, open source projects benefited from having continuous integration service if they were hosted part of an open source foundation, however, Travis CI allows any project to take advantage of the service if they support the language:

For example, I recently decided to add Travis CI support to hogan.js, which is one of Twitter’s open source projects, essentially a compiler for the Mustache templating language. You essentially get a nice build status icon that integrates nicely into your GitHub’s projects README:

Adding Travis CI support for the hogan.js Javascript library was fairly trivial, you can take a peak at the commit to figure out how it was done or read the Travis CI documentation. The only tricky part was ensuring that git submodules were properly initialized and phantomJS was launched so QUnit can successfully run. It’s even easier for other languages that Travis CI supports!

In the end, I love what Travis CI is doing for the open source community and how it integrates with GitHub. Continuous integration is something every software project should have and Travis CI makes it really easy to get started. In a future post, I’ll considering comparing Travis CI to some of the other CI options out there (e.g., Hudson/Jenkins), but for now, consider trying out or even sponsoring the service.

April 2, 2012
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Summer of Code 2012

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It’s that time of year, where post-secondary students get to apply to their favorite open source organization for Google Summer of Code (GSOC). Essentially, Google pays students to hack on open source projects over the summer, which is just amazing.

As a student, you get a stipend of of $5000 USD and the respective mentoring organization gets $500. Students have from March 26th through April 6th to apply to the mentoring organizations that they are interested in. Afterwards, the mentoring organizations rank and review the proposals. Finally, the accepted proposals are announced on April 23rd.

If you qualify (you’re a student and older than 18) and have some coding skills, I highly recommend you consider doing GSOC as it’s a great way to learn something, get some experience and even get a job potentially. I recommend looking over the list of mentoring organizations. I’m excited this year because Twitter is a mentoring organization and we will have some students work on some of our open source projects. Of course, the Eclipse Foundation is participating and has a great list of project ideas.

In the end, if you’re a student, just do it if you don’t have anything else crazy lined up. You get to work with quality mentoring organizations that have been vetted as great places to get started on working on open source.

March 24, 2012
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EclipseCon 2012

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Next week, I’ll be at EclipseCon 2012.

I look forward to attending the Eclipse Foundation board meeting and also giving the Git tutorial with colleagues. Over half the projects on eclipse.org have already moved to Git, if you haven’t yet or have hesitations, I highly recommend you attend the tutorial. Also, If you just want to grab a frosty beverage and chat open source let me know. I would love to talk to eclipse.org committers who have some ideas on how to make committer life better at the Eclipse Foundation.

See you there!

February 29, 2012
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Eclipse Board Elections 2012

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As Mike Milinkovich recently mentioned, voting is now open for the Eclipse Foundation’s Board of Directors election until 3:00pm Eastern on March 16, 2012. I highly recommend you take a list of the candidates, read their position statements and cast your vote.

I’m running this year for one of the committer representative spots and plan to continue to do my best to represent committers if given the opportunity again. I’ve had the honor to be on the board for the last few years and have helped push through changes that I thought were important for the committer community. For example, I would like to see our migration to Git through, we are getting close and I would like to see this happen by the end of 2012…

 

In terms of the future, there are three main things that are important to me:

There are many businesses that adopt Eclipse tools and runtimes, it’s important that we find a way to support these existing adopters while moving the eclipse.org mission forward. There are companies with mature products built on Eclipse with long support cycles that need to be accommodated. For example, Airbus has a crazy ~30 year support cycle on the planes that they build using Eclipse software. One way to do this is supporting the Long Term Support industry working group and ensuring we have the infrastructure (e.g., common build) in place to support these scenarios.

It’s great that the eclipse.org community prides itself on clean Intellectual Property, I’m proud of what we do and it’s crucial for certain types of commercial adopters. However, the downside to the Eclipse IP process is that it can be a barrier to contribution due to the process and record keeping. Given that the software world has changed in recent years with the advent of Git (distributed version control), GitHub and notion of social coding, we should take a serious look at improving our IP process to work in this new world. Can we find a ways to simplify the contribution process using Git or Gerrit? Can we find a way to host an eclipse.org project outside the eclipse.org infrastructure, say on GitHub? I know, heresy, right :)?

Finally, I would like to continue pushing on eclipse.org’s foray into web tooling via projects like Orion. It’s great to see Mozilla Firefox already adopting Orion in its developer tools, but we can do more in this space.

In the end, I encourage everyone to vote and make your voice heard.

February 16, 2012
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EGit and JGit 1.3 Released

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The EGit and JGit teams are happy to announce the 1.3 release, just in time for Eclipse Indigo SR2.

The precise release version is 1.3.0.201202151440-r

It can be downloaded from the Eclipse Marketplace or the p2 repository.

There’s a lot of new improvements, the largest being git-submodule support:

I’m also a huge fan of the branch status decorations:

If you’re interested in the details of what’s new, check out the JGit New and Noteworthy and the EGit New and Noteworthy.

Note that this is the last release in the 1.X stream for EGit and JGit, there will be a 2.0 release in June targeting the Eclipse Juno simultaneous release. When we move to 2.0, there will be some breaking API changes and API cleanup that happens. If there was something you didn’t like about the API, now is your chance to speak up and contribute.

February 13, 2012
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Gerrit at the Eclipse Foundation

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Good news everyone, the Eclipse Foundation has been git’n it done and rolled out Gerrit to be used by any eclipse.org project who wishes to do so.

If you’re interested in using Gerrit for your eclipse.org project, please speak up on this bug.

It’s satisifying to see this finally be rolled out as a few of us committers have been pushing on this for the past couple of years as a way to modernize the Eclipse infrastructure. We have been piloting Gerrit for quite awhile in the EGit and JGit projects and have been very pleased with it. It’s great that Eclipse committers now have a convenient way of doing code reviews using Git if they wish to add that workflow for their project.

On a side note, I’m working on improving the way git contributions are handled by the Eclipse Foundation when contributors use Gerrit. I’m hoping to simplify the amount of work that needs to be done by committers and the IP team, if you’re interested in this effort, please follow and comment on this bug.

January 25, 2012
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Kepler

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Just to let everyone know, some members of the eclipse.org community recently voted on naming the next simultaneous release after Juno gets released in June 2012. Taking input from the community, the Eclipse Planning Council finalized the name to be Kepler.

Personally, I think it’s a great choice and a nod to Johannes Kepler.

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