Life at Eclipse

Next Wednesday, October 15th at 12:30pm Eastern time I will be giving my first web talk via Eclipse Live.

The talk is going to be “A Practitioners Guide to Ecosystem Development”. Consider it a peak into what we at the Eclipse Foundation think about how to build and foster ecosystems around the Eclipse technology.

It should be fun. I hope to see you there.

Bjorn and guests have been blogging about the results of the recent committer satisfaction survey at Eclipse. I think that the survey itself embodied genius in its simplicity: one question on “…how happy are you with the Foundation’s support of you and your project?”

As the Executive Director, I am pretty thrilled with the response, as 82.5% are on the “happy” side of the equation. That’s a darn good result.

Of course, there is always work to do and improvements to be made. You can see those thoughts well reflected in the comments that Bjorn gradually worked his way through in his blog series. The good news is committers are generally pretty happy with the IT infrastructure and the support they get. Unsurprisingly, they are a little less happy with the processes that we impose on them. There’s a shock! 🙂

To all of the staff at the Eclipse Foundation, I want to extend a hearty congratulations. I know that as the pointy haired boss I rarely say “thank you” enough for the great work that you do. So here are a few thank you’s, along with my personal favourite quotes from the survey.

To Denis Roy, Matt Ward and Karl Matthias: You are obviously taking customer service seriously and it is being noticed by our community. Thanks

Very happy, especially with the fast response time of the webmasters

To Bjorn Freeman-Benson, Anne Jacko and Gabe O’Brien: The development process and portal have come a very long way over the past year and your work is helping to improve our committers day-to-day interactions with the Foundation. Thanks!

The development process is well thought out. I also _really_ like the portal.

To Janet Campbell, Sharon Corbett and Barb Cochrane: You bear the brunt of running our IP due diligence process. A process which clearly puts a burden on our committers, but one which has been an enormous part of our community’s success. And you do it with grace and humour. Thanks!

Their’s is a tough job and, in my opinion, they do it very well

Some of you might have noticed that when Ganymede was first launched yesterday, the eclipse.org website was reeeaaallllyyyy slow for a little while.

By way of explanation, I offer the following:

But more seriously, many thanks to Denis, Matt, Nathan and Karl for all of their work in getting our IT infrastructure ready for the deluge.

As a Friend of Eclipse, I was able to download Ganymede this afternoon. Not only did I get it sooner, I got it faster. In fact, thanks to the dedicated bandwidth it was crazy fast to download.

Thanks goes to Denis Roy and the webmaster team. It looks like the Ganymede distribution setup is well architected and running smoothly.

So friends get benefits!

Ganymede is just around the corner, and I wanted to take a moment to say thank you to the many Eclipse committers, project leaders and contributors who have all participated in its success. You have done our community proud.

I was tempted to list some of those who have made particularly significant contributions, but I am certain I would miss too many deserving people. Please feel free to provide their names in comments. From releng to packaging to developers to CQ reviewers to bug triagers to movie poster competition organizers to Ganymatic kickers, there are a many individuals who have chipped in to helping make Ganymede a reality.

One interesting note: as most readers are well aware, I’m pretty much useless when it comes to shipping these releases. My personal contribution is primarily in support of the press and analyst activities in support of the release. As this was the third release train, Ian and I were pretty much convinced that the press interest in Ganymede would be lower than in past years. You know: same old same old. We were dead wrong. There is a ton of interest in Ganymede, and how the Eclipse community continues to predictably deliver value and innovation year after year.

So: congratulations and thank you!