My favorite EclipseCon of the many I’ve attended happened at one of the earliest ones. Of course there have been many good onces since, but this one was different because of the vibe that was happening. This was the 2005 edition at beautiful Hyatt Regency in Burlingame, California, our first in the “Valley”. It was a time when companies were clamoring to be a part of the community. Borland was jumping head first to compete with IBM in the modeling space by joining as an Eclipse Strategic Member and that threw the IBM/Rational team into a tizzy as it had to learn how to work with a competitor in the open. It was so much fun to sit in the front row and watch the industry change in front of us in real time.

EclipseCon Europe 2017 showed progress back towards that excitement. With a steady attendance of 600+, it really is the main event on the yearly calendar, at least for now. With all the activity recently around Java with Java EE moving to Eclipse and IBM finally releasing their J9 VM to the open, there’s definitely a vibe in the air that brings back memories of those early EclipseCons. It will be very interesting to see how this evolves.

Well, enough about Java :). It was a very good EclipseCon for Eclipse CDT project and tools for Embedded in general, probably the best since the glory days when we had our own CDT Summit events in the Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto corridor. As I put it to someone, “CDT needs new blood and there’s some blood on the doorstep, just need to get it inside.” And I’m very excited to see some of the CDT contributors stepping up to help with some much needed revitalization of CDT’s build system in the upcoming months. And with Jonah’s work on the Debug Server Protocol and all the work going into the Language Server Protocol and the clangd language server, we’re poised to bring CDT to a new generation that expect a more modern and lightweight experience.

One final word for now, I have to reiterate what I said on Twitter and Facebook how incredibly honored I am to receive this year’s Eclipse Lifetime Contribution Award. Those who know me well know I’m a very shy and introverted person. But there’s always been something about the great people in the Eclipse community that brings me out of my shell. They make me feel a part of the family. For that I am and will be forever grateful.

I’ve made so many friends along the way and I am immensely proud of what we as a community have built. I share this honor with everyone I’ve worked with and everyone whose helped me along the way, especially to QNX for giving me the responsibility to represent them in the community and to John Duimovich and CDT’s first great leader Sebastien Marineau who made this crazy gamble to entrust me with the CDT project leadership :). All I can say is Thank You!

Any way. I promised people at EclipseCon I’d write more. There’s so much going on and my involvement and interest continues to grow as exciting new technologies are becoming mainstream (think embedded systems meets cloud meets artificial intelligence and all the runtime and tool needs in between). So much to write about. I can’t wait to get into it.