EclipseCon 2006 Final Thought

As someone that is very new to the whole eclipse community i found eclipsecon to be a very motivating and positive experience. The community will continue, full steam ahead for years to come. Of this I have no doubt.

Highlights of the conference for me:

• Joel Spolsky's talk to open the conference, if you read the description on the eclipsecon website it didnt really do it justice. His metaphores worked really well and i think everyone came out of the talk with the right idea. There is more to a product then its features, visualisation and emotion have alot to do with the success of the product.
  


• Ian Skerrit's talk on building community, and how to keep them healthy (No im not just saying this because he is my boss). He drove home the point that community based on "the conversation" and to really get the community to work together and build useful things there needs to be this conversation.


• Ward Cunningham - Ward's just awesome and he loves being blogged about, For those not familiar with Ward he's a pioneer of modern thinking and computing. I mean the guy helped develop extreme programming, and is credited as the father of Wiki, If you dont know what a wiki is then you must be living under a rock.


• Food - The food at the conference was plentiful, lunches were good, reception dinners while not sit down were a good assortment of everything. I mean they even had a chocolate fountain, not only in milk chocolate but white chocolate too!


• The after dinner / bar conversations, I got alot of time to bond with the other foundation employees, Healthy work relationships are always good


• Being in california meant never having to lug a big winter coat around all the time :)
  

I got a chance to meet the RadRails guys, imagine three 20 year olds that have developed an amazing product, are in third year university, and leave eclipseCon with 6 job offers. They showed me RadRails and i will definetly check it out.

Schwag! I got lotsa crap. 3 Shirts, a backpack, 256 meg USB key (that had all the conference slideshows and PDFs on it, Brilliant!), a Hacky Sac, a couple pens, a self reeling network cable, and im probably forgeting something.

The flights have been ok, with the exception of the frist flight from Ottawa to Chicago. I had a 6 year old kid, kicking the back of my seat for the whole flight, it was kinda like a very bad shiatsu massage. I'm blogging this from the San Jose - Chicago flight. Prime was the inflight movie which wasnt that great, stupid ending if you ask me but i digress. I'll be good to be back home in Ottawa to see my lovely wife and pooch.

EclipseCon Day 3

We'll i've been at eclipseCon for 3 days now and its a really fun place to be, everyone is very friendly, either the majority of the people here are canadian (which they are) or everyone just knows that eclipse is a great project (which it is). I've gotten to talk to Ward Cunningham on more then one occasion, hes quite the interesting guy, with a lot of really interesting ideas. Yesterday they had a reception in the exhibit hall, and they had this tower of liquid chocolate, that you could dip marshmellows, strawberries, rice krispies, and cookies. Needless to say i have had enough chocolate to last me a while. I got a cool pen from the Acutuate Guys, i'll take pictures later. I also stoped by the RadRails guys. Imagine 3 20 year olds writing an application that can make websites really easy to build and change. Very Impressive.

I'm sitting in the Greg Stien - Comparing Apache and Eclipse keynote right now, but my battery is about to die.......

EclipseCon Day 2

I went to Joel Spolsky's Keynote this morning and it was freaking hilarious, he made alot of great points and funny jokes, i do beleive that the entire Keynote series will be available on the website soon. The tutorials yesterday were somewhat advanced, and while im sure they were useful to some they were way too much for me.

There's alot to do all day and night here, so i'll post more later.

EclipseCon!

Well it's monday morning 6am here i knew i'd have problems adjusting to sleeping patterns so i guess 6am isnt bad, went to bed last night at 12:30am so i was up for almost 23hours. What a great day tho, California is sunny and warm. I attended a blogging party and the board reception, and got to me alot of people. The trip down took a total of 10 hours from leaving my house to arriving in my hotel. It was fun to travel with the guys from the foundation, made the time fly by. There were alot of people on the flight from GDC, and some of them even use eclipse.

The hotel i'm at has a vending machine in the lobby that sells iPods, WTF, i'll snap a picture later and post it. Very bizzare. Out the window of my hotel room i can see Paramount's Great America Theme park, and the hills of California. More later from EclipseCon

Oy with the pain in the Cellphone-"glavin"

So last night i'm heading to bed, turn off my cellphone, and head upstairs. Wake up this morning and find my cellphone on, with 1 bar left. Recently my phone has been a real pain in the ass so i figured id be cautious with the battery life, boy was i wrong. So i make all of 2 one min long phone calls and the phone dies. Now when i turn it on it loops the splash screen. Have i mentioned i hate my cellphone. I'm gonna go to Telus this weekend and have some words with them.

On a side note, COLDPLAY TONIGHT!!! *rock* *rock*.

Saturday i'll be playing tennis then going to Telus to have words. Then spending the day with KT. Sunday i'll wake up around 5:00am and get my ass to the airport for my 7:05am flight.

More later.

Listening to Pink Floyd - Cluster One at the time of this post.

Commiter Status

Today after 3 weeks of fixing bugs, changing content and sending my updates to someone else to upload to the CVS Server, i'll be getting Commiter Access for the Phoenix Project at eclipse.

What does this mean?, well to start i wont have to bother anyone and will be able to make changes to the website when they need to be not when they can. It's been quite the transition from Sitel to Eclipse but its been great, more responsibility, more work, but much more recognition.

First Post

We'll i've started this new blog because my other blog is syndicated on planeteclipse.org and i don't think they'd take to lightly to me spamming them with all sorts of nonsense. And if it does show up there then ive got some 'splaining to do.

Im going to be using this blog to report on most of the things that happen at EclipseCon 2006