Chris Aniszczyk's (zx) diatribe

I finally made it back from Eclipse Forum India. I think I have had enough Kingfisher beer to last another year and I also found my new favorite Indian-based airline, Kingfisher airlines. The airline has the awesome motto of “fly the good times” 🙂

On a serious note, I’m pleased to report that the conference was very enjoyable with enthusiastic attendees curious about Eclipse technology. If I were to change one thing, I would love to see an Eclipse-specific conference in India by 2010. What I mean by that is we currently have the well-organized EclipseCon 2008 and Eclipse Summit Europe conferences… why not expand into Asia a bit with an Eclipse Summit India :)?

Oh, if anyone has recommendations for in-ear headphones… let me know… I’m currently looking at the Shure E3c and Etymotic ER6i. My old pair of headphones has finally bit the dust and I’m looking for an upgrade 🙂

I have to say that I’ve been very impressed so far with the Eclipse Forum India conference. The people are very welcoming and kind. During Day 1 of the conference, Wassim and I gave a full day tutorial on RCP/Plug-in development which was well received. To my complete surprise when I asked my standard question of who has developed plug-ins and used Eclipse before, well over half of the room raised their hand (~150 people). The audience’s general Eclipse savvy made for a very interesting Q&A 🙂

The following day, I gave an introductory talk on eRCP that went well. Most of the people in the audience didn’t really have an embedded background, but I hope my message around reusing Eclipse skills to develop mobile applications got through.

Our beloved Mik Kersten gave a talk on Mylar and his new venture Tasktop.

On the whole, I think Eclipse has a surprisingly strong presence in India. In one of the talks, CodeGear’s chief evangelist (David Intersimone) asked a large audience how many people use Eclipse, Netbeans, IntelliJ, Emacs/VIM (hi Ed). I would say easily 80% of the audience used Eclipse and the rest of the audience was equally split between IntelliJ and Netbeans (except for that one guy in the back who used VIM).

I would like to say thank you to the conference organizers (especially Dilip, Masoud and Neeru) for a job well done and many thanks for your hospitality. I am definitely looking forward to next year’s conference! I’m now off to find an elephant for Wassim to ride, because apparently this is on his “things to be done before I die list.”