It’s New Years Eve, a great time to reflect on the year that was 2015. I’ve been full steam ahead on a number of projects both with Eclipse and with my real job at QNX and quite often both. I’ve been blessed to have a management team that lets me me do the things I love and hopefully I am repaying them by making great products that our customers will love and that the open source community of Eclipse will love too.

2016 will be more of the same. I’ll have two cloud-y type projects for QNX on the go. I’ve grown to really love that area of software development, especially using the tools we’ve built on Eclipse and the great run-time technologies you get for so little cost from cloud platform providers. And it’s just great to have something new to learn to feed my insatiable curiosity.

For Eclipse, a few things are going to come together for the Neon release in June. I’ve been working hard with my intern Matthew, who’s “unfortunately” gone back to school for a few months, in building great Qt development environment for the CDT, including a QML editor with content assist and search. It will be a great alternative for Qt developers.

The Qt support is built on a new light-weight build and launch system I’ve put together. We’ve started work on CMake support based on that as well. Of course the new system is based on the Launch Bar which you will continue to hear more about. I think it’s an important addition that brings our Eclipse users, especially those that target multiple platforms, a great user experience.

I’m doing a lot of work on my Arduino C++ IDE. I’ve had such great feedback and help from the community. My plan is to take it beyond the Arduino platform to other microcontroller systems, especially the ESP8266 and upcoming ESP32 based on FreeRTOS. They are are great platforms for IoT projects. I had thoughts of doing Raspberry Pi too, but I have other plans for that (hint: programming real-time GPIO with Linux hurts my soul).

I’m really looking forward to EclipseCon NA 2015 in Reston. I have two talks, one on the work with Arduino C++. The other one is especially important to me. I’ll be showing Eclipse being used where it really shines, as the “IDE for everything”, or at least in this case, IoT. Eclipse is great because it’s frameworks let you build an IDE for anything and it really shows when you use it for a bunch of different things, Arduino, Qt, Android, vert.x Java, web front end, AWS lambda’s, everything you need in a single workspace to manage a distributed system, uh I mean IoT system (new lingo for an old idea).

So, that’s all for now. I’ll continue to write and make demo and instructional videos about the Eclipse projects I’m working on throughout the upcoming year. I can’t wait to get 2016 started. Happy New Year to you all!