Ian's Top 5 EclipseCon Picks

EclipseCon 2014 is less than 6 weeks away and I’m getting pretty excited. The schedule has been published and the diversity of talks is really what makes this such a fun conference. While I helped pick the program, the real thank-you goes to the great program committee I worked with.  John, Cedric, Dave, Andrew, Shawn, Pascal, Eike, Lars, Gunnar and Tom – working with you was awesome. I learned a lot, and had blast too!

I was looking through the program and put together 5 talks that I’m really excited to see.

UI Performance Monitoring This is the type of technical talk that should immediately have an impact on how I work. Anyone who has done any user interface development has certainly hit performance problems, and many standard profiles / techniques simply don’t work.

API Design In Java 8 Good API design is not easy. It takes a strong understanding of both the application domain, insight into how things can evolve and a solid understanding of the underlying technology stack.  Java 8 has the power to completely change the game when it comes to API design and this talk will give a good overview of how.

Multi-Cloud Deployment with Docker Replicating and provisioning application environments from development-time, through testing and into production has been a challenge we have all faced. Providing a lightweight way of managing self-sufficient, portable applications using ‘containers’ – inspired from the consistency of ‘shipping containers’ – is a great idea. This talk will provide an introduction into this awesome technology stack.

NASA Verve: Interactive 3D Visualizations within Eclipse I started my involvement with Eclipse in 2003 working on a visualization toolkit based on GEF and SWT.  While this talk is unrelated to work I did 11 years ago, I still have a place in my heart for the intersection of Eclipse and Information Visualization. The fact that this work was derived from tools used both for the ISS and several different Mars lander missions makes this even more cool!

Built to Scale: The Mozilla Release Engineering Toolbox Having your best engineers move on to other places and projects, and then return to discuss their experiences there is a great way to evolve a community. This is exactly what happened when the Kim – the Eclipse release engineer – moved to Mozilla 2 years ago. I am very excited to hear about how Mozilla manages their massive release engineer efforts and I hope to learn some lessons that we can apply within the Eclipse community.

EclipseCon is shaping up to be a great week!