Check out OSCON 2008

I have attended at least part of OSCON every year since moving to Portland, Oregon in 2003. Last year, I reviewed the day I attended. I was happy when the opportunity appeared to go again this year as the conference always challenges with new ideas.

OSCON claims to be the largest gathering of open source developers in the world and at 2500+ attendees who can argue.

My main role this year will be demoing and fielding questions about Jazz for the IBM Rational table at the Expo.

So whether you are on a free expo hall pass or a full OSCON ride please be sure to drop by the Expo Hall on Wednesday or Thursday.
Then track down the IBM booth to chat about Jazz, Eclipse, open source or trail running :-)

Portland Eclipse Ganymede DemoCamp

On Tuesday we had the second Portland Eclipse DemoCamp. The wiki for the democamp can be found here and includes the listing of the presenters (8 people), some of the presentations, and a listing of the 40+ people who attended.

We started out correctly eating some salad and pizza along with some beverages.
The actual demos started around 7:30. Below are my notes from the presentations that will hopefully give you an idea of the demo and whet your appetite to ping the presenters for more details or try the stuff out for yourself.

Rob Ryan, Instantiations, Code Pro AnalytiXs
A product to help find problems early using static code analysis for the entire source or can be selection specific.
This part seemed similar to open source projects I have seen but then I have never tried AnalytiX myself.
It has extensible rule sets with the intent to have FindBugs and PMD import in the future
Also has automated generation of JUnit tests.

Chris Elford, Intel, TPTP Profiler Enhancements
Java profiling for Ganymede...new Java profiler went GA in Europa and they spent the Ganymede time fixing up the usability bugs reported by users.
Worked to reduce usability diffs between JVMPI and JVMTI and make enhancements for better multi-thread analysis and improved Java 6 support.
Presentation is here.

Joe Hoffman dynatrace Diagnostics
Diagnostics Client 2.6.0
I was not sure whether this was an Eclipse based product or just a product that could fire up Eclipse to view the source for diagnostic issues that the dynaTrace product found? Missed Joe to ask.

Elias Volanakis , Innopract, Java-based web-apps with Eclipse RAP
Elias gave a compelling demo of the "RCP for the web" and the promise of sharing code between the rich client and the web app. See the presentation here.
I plan to try this out some more in our breather now that we have shipped.

Rob Ryan, Instantiations, WindowBuilder Pro
Quick demo on a WSIWYG GUI builder that apparently has 10,000 users and works for SWT, Swing and GWT designers. There is a free 14 day evaluation.

Chris Goldthorpe, IBM, Little Known Secrets of the Eclipse Help System
Chris gave a interesting insight into the security holes he has been plugging within the help system and then, how for 3.4, the team has simplified the addition of help and user assistance.

Ryan Manwiller and Darin Swanson, IBM, Jazz and Rational Team Concert
Ryan and I walked through a simple work flow of a team lead and developer interacting to triage, assign, assess, fix and verify a problem all within the context of Rational Team Concert. We sampled the work item, SCM, process and build integration of the Jazz platform to show how some common pain points of software development are relieved.
To find out more please explore jazz.net.

The demo camp was good timing for the Jazz team as Rational Team Concert 1.0 is available today. Register and download RTC to kick the tires.

Thanks to Instantiations and Innoopract for sponsoring the gathering.
All the demo camp pictures can be found here (Thanks Anne).

Friday Fun with Wordle and Source Code

Wordle...a colorful way to waste time :-)

Here is the representation of the source code for some of the functionality I have been working on recently: The Jazz User Selector Dialog internals
Here is the representation of code I have worked on more in the past...the Eclipse Ant editor
Not much has changed: null, return, import, org and eclipse figure prominently whether writing open source or open commercial software.

Jon sent me off to Wordle...thanks? :-)

EclipseCon 2008 Wrapup: It's all about Collaboration

What hit me today as I was biking into work after 4 days at EclipseCon was the collaboration undercurrent running throughout the conference.

Our goal in Jazz is to have a platform designed to be team first and allow smooth and seamless collaboration with your team members and with your artifacts. What does it mean to collaborate with your artifacts? For me this means I can have something like a build result communicate all about itself:

• who contributed
• why they contributed
• when they contributed
• what they contributed

As well, the build result allows me to exactly reconstitute the state that existed for exploration of any issue. Same goes for the Jazz process enactment. We have to make it easy for the user to explore and understand, to collaborate, with the team process. The team advisor is one of mechanisms for this communication of process.

And it is not just about collaborating with your fellow team mates or work artifacts. It is also about collaborating with your clients and customers. The Eclipse work for p2 and e4 proves this point.

From Pascal Rapicault's talk p2 will make it easier for consumers to discover and install. p2 will make it easier for developers to share their work.

e4 will help to extend Eclipse into new domains beyond the IDE space. People who never have used an IDE and will never use an IDE. These same people understand the web interface. Reuse of our code for a web client just makes sense. We can provide a web client experience, whether it be the same or different experience from a desktop client without duplication of all the effort. The required tooling to achieve this nirvana will be a great addition to the Eclipse tool set. And just the process of creating e4 will necessitate Eclipse and the Eclipse process embracing collaboration at a new level.

Easing collaboration also helps to enable what I am calling mercenary programming. John Wiegand's glimpse into the future was validated via Sam Ramji's announcement of Microsoft supporting / sponsoring Eclipse development but with no interest of having its own committers. To me this means paying committers to wade in and tackle your problems. Short lived and dynamic teams composed of globally distributed members. This just screams for the need of tools like Jazz and beyond. Kevin McGuire and Tim Wagner mentioned the evolution of a team as a driver for trends in UI design and interaction as well.
Also from Sam's talk on Wednesday, we "offend any type of developer at your own peril". If you make it hard for people to collaborate with you, this would seem to be some type of insult don't you think?

Cory Doctorow continued the theme where a key point of his presentation was how we have extended and improved the capabilities of the individual. We have become superhuman as a result of pervasive collaboration and availability of information. Cory also proposed that the ease of collaboration within a company will decide its success. Collaboration cost is no longer a factor with it being a close approximation of zero. This was echoed by the ECF talk where Scott Lewis stated that we need collaboration to work on a system that is outside of the understanding of one person. I think that describes most systems we all work on. The tools just need to keep improving the support for this free interaction and productivity boost.

Finally, I don't think the strong desire for people to come to conferences such as EclipseCon indicates a deficiency of our tools to allow us to collaborate. The tools and the work enable the day to day interactions but I hope we will always crave the face to face :-)
I know I look forward to next year.

EclipseCon Jazz Recording Sessions

Yesterday was IBM Developer Day at EclipseCon and the Jazz team "roving" reporters are checking in on the Jazz Team blog with the highlights of the Jazz talk presentations from the afternoon sessions.

The Jazz team blog is here: link.
My roving report from Erich's talk is here: link.

EclipseCon Day 2: Fakin' It

This morning we had the delightfully irrelevant and funny Dan Lyons aka Fake Steve Jobs give a keynote and make fun of pretty much every on in the room.
Besides making us laugh, I found it cool how his blog / job / book evolved over time and Dan adapted to the demands and wishes of his community.

Fake Steve Jobs was created as Dan was bored of covering large IT like IBM and Sun for Forbes magazine. He also had a fear stemming from the perceived attack on the traditional print media from the blogs. So he faced his fear and dove in to learn about blogs. The "fake" blog started as a learning experiment and spiraled from there.

I then attended a talk by Tim Wagner from Microsoft on open source versus commercial platform strategies. The abstract is here: link.
Tim, who used to be heavily involved with Eclipse via WTP did a high level overview of the similarities and differences between how the Eclipse platform is developed and how Microsoft Visual Studio is developed.
There were far fewer differences than you may think and Tim proposed that one key to Eclipse's success is how closely it emulates commercial software development.
I am not sure who is emulating who? Reliable shipping dates over 6 years with a strong development heartbeat driven by community iteration and feedback: I propose all commercial software could learn something from the Eclipse development process.

Once of my last duties as a board member was to spend some time at a Meet the Board Member table in the exhibit hall. Not really sure this idea worked...

The rest of the day was filled with Jazz. I plan to write separate blog entries for the Jazz talks I attended.

In the evening, I participated in Jazz Live! where some of the senior Jazz devs got the chance to demo and explain all the cool things we have been designing and building over the past years. If you missed it grab somebody with a "Talk to me about Jazz" button and ask for a demo of what they think is cool.

Jazz Team Blog

As indicated in a previous post, Jazz has opened the floodgates and is accessible to everyone.

I neglected to mention the Jazz team blog.

Point your favorite feed reader at the Jazz team blog: https://jazz.net/blog/

Numerous developers working on Jazz technology have posted and are planning to post within this forum to keep the community engaged and informed.

Watch, learn, get excited and get involved :-)

The Performance is about to begin...please take your seat

Rational Team Concert Beta 2a (or Beta 2eh to follow the Eclipse tradition) has been released and:

Jazz.net is now open to everyone!
Everyone is now welcome to join Jazz.net. A special thank-you to all our Rational customers and partners, the university researchers and students, and everyone else who was part of the Jazz.net early pilot program. (from Jazz.net this morning).

Jazz is built on top of Eclipse by some of the same people who were and are involved in the development and success of Eclipse.
I have had the privilege of being involved with the Jazz development for the last couple of years and watching it evolve into a tool that helps me build software more effectively.

So the title of this blog is not necessarily correct: With Jazz you do not just have to be a passive member of the audience.
Rather, you are invited to pick up your instrument, step up on the stage and start collaborating with the rest of us :-)

Eclipse DemoCamp: Portland

On Monday we had the first Portland Eclipse DemoCamp. We need to ensure it is not the last as I feel it was a great success and well worth the effort to attend and present.

The format was simple: people signed up on the wiki to attend and if interested signed up to present a demo. We had about 30 people show up to watch and present 8 demos. There was a great taco bar to fuel up so the brain was ready to digest the demos.

For whatever reason my VPN refused to work so I had to revamp my demo to be hosted entirely on my laptop. Thankfully Chris G swapped demo spots with me so I had some time to set up for the demo. So I apologize for the sketchy notes / missed demos as I was fairly focused on prepping instead of listening to the demos that came before mine :-)

Chris Goldthorpe, IBM, presented first on whats is new in Eclipse user assistance.

Scott lewis, BEA, presented the ECF shared editor. Appears to be a cool prototype and the ECF guys are working on more sophisticated locking, synchronization and transaction support for Ganymede.

Chris Elford - Intel - demo the state of the TPTP profiler. We saw the threading mode and execution statistics. The TPTP project is requesting user experience reports to get kudos as well as input on where changes are required. Dive in and give your feedback.

Phil Quitsland - Instantiations WindowTester - recorder and test code generator. Apparantly you can try it out for free.

Emerson Murphy-Hill - PhD candidate - Portland State University. Cool (wacky..his word :-) ) take on improving the Eclipse refactoring tools. Circular menu with gestures for refactoring: direction indicative of refactoring - up is pull up, down is push down. Refactoring cues view to remove the menu/wizard interaction for refactoring. Contact Emerson to try it out and make his adviser happy.

I presented on Jazz, with a focus on the process component of which I am a team member.
Don't run screaming from the room with the mention of process or governance with respect to software development. The Jazz Platform is process-neutral. Jazz itself has no built in process enforcing what is done for any particular occasion. One of the mandates of our team is to allow Jazz users to explore, define and adapt their process for use for their team and project. This is what I demonstrated with some simple examples.

Overall an excellent use of a Monday evening!

Book review: The Imperfect Board Member

The Imperfect Board Member by Jim Brown.

Nice, light, interesting read which I would recommend.
And not just for board members. I think anyone who has to interact with other people to accomplish their job should plow through this book on the beach, during a flight or while watching the New York Marathon this weekend. I read this book while on vacation in Florida. :-)

First lets all agree that being an effective board member is hard work. The book points that out in spades.

What I found interesting was how much of the insights and advice in the book can be generally applied to both my role as a board director for the Eclipse Foundation and in my other life as a software engineer as part of a globally distributed development team (where I happen to be working on Jazz and Eclipse).

Perhaps a few too many of the problematic situations presented in the case study / story seem to easily and conveniently resolve themselves once (a few) changes are made. I mean, do we all have the privilege of always working with logical and reasonable people? Anyone who works with me is at a disadvantage here :-)
But the presentation is well meaning and does ensures you consider the intentions, actions and interactions that you can control: your own.

So check out the Secret Formula and the GEM (Note: both are trademark of Strive! Inc. ... the book says so).
And if every meeting started exactly on time with no re-hash...that makes the book golden right there!
You might even learn how to better manage teenagers and be a proactive tipper ;-)

OSCON 2007

I had the opportunity to spend a day at OSCON 2007.

This is my attempt to capture what I found interesting from the presentations that I attended for future exploration and reading.
It is long and not formatted very well. The content is thought triggers for my future explorations. Hopefully yours as well.

Note: that most of the thoughts here are from the presenters with my note taking and interpretation...my comments in italics.

KeyNote: Year in Review: Open Source at Microsoft
Bill Hilf: Open Source software lab at Microsoft.
- Their progression has been from Experimenting to Learning to Architecting.
- Worked to overcome open source bias within Microsoft.
- Check out: Port 25, Channel 9, CodePlex
- Microsoft has submitted shared source license to OSI for approval: read more
- New Microsoft open source web property: microsoft.com/opensource (live at 7am July 27th)

Definitely some interesting new movement that will be fun to watch.

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Key Note: Copyright Regime vs. Civil Liberties
Rick Falkvinge, The Pirate Party
- Sweden political party..read platform at the web page.
- Copyright is intended to be commercial...but in the digital age is touching everything and is everywhere.
- Under current law that messenger is not responsible for the contents of the message...commercial interests would like this "limitation" to be changed.
- Society must choose: privacy or copyright
- Another possible outcome is a filtering the internet.

I think this is a group of people who are asking questions that are great to get people talking. Not sure I agree with everything but...discussing the situation is good.

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Key Note: How to Ignore Marketing and Become Irrelevant in Two Easy Steps
Steve Yegge (works at Google):
- New Coke is like New God??!! Who needed the redefinition.
-59% said New Coke tasted better in blind.
-With label 59% old coke
- Turbo C and Quick C : which sounds faster to you?
- Brand is a placeholder..like a pointer in programming (constant identifier).
- GTE trying to change image...constant.
- Data indicates it takes a generation to change a brand perception...GTE --> Verizon
- Eclipse must be careful...watering down of brand by becoming a mega-brand...a brand must stand for something...and the consumer usually picks.

- 22 immutable laws of branding (book to check out).

- IBM Visual Age for Java - names can really hurt adoption
- Visual Age for Java --> Eclipse
- eBay / auction.com - which one is the better name?

- Eclipse known as Java (joke from the audience is that Eclipse is associated with being slow...ouch!)
- Hard to successfully move into other spaces
- Attempting to extend brand...Eclipse main web page given as example...(even though the old quote of good for everything but nothing in particular has been gone for more than a year!)
- Claims Eclipse should just stay focused on Java...but then admitted that Java is getting close to being your father's programming language.
- Open source licensing: GPL brand leader for OSI
- What does open source mean...depends on license...hard to define. Brand has no strong meaning. Needs attention and a solution.

Likely the best talk I have heard where the presenters slides refused to show up on the screen!

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How to Protect Your Open Source Project from Poisonous People
Subversion anecdotes
- Producing open source software, Karl Fogel (book)
- Attention and focus is the scarce resource: conflict drains this aware, infighting
perfect is the enemy of the good --> good old analysis paralysis
- build strong community based on: politeness, respect, trust, and humility
- increase bus factor for project..how many people need to get hit by a bus before your project is in real trouble.
- Don't be afraid of process
(Wahoo...just what we believe on the Jazz process team! The team owns their process. The process must be easy to explore and open to change. Only an enacted process is real.)
- Genius is now a commodity so just don't let someone in just because they are smart.
- EVERYONE must be a team player.
- Everyone agreed that no one really understands "angry demands for help".
- Pink bike shed: so true!!
- Apparently this talk is available on Google video

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People Hacks: Adam Keys
Machines tend to be rational / people tend to be irrational
(at this very moment someone in the audience took a cell phone call that was very disruptive to the talk: hilarious)
- There is no readme for humans
- Easier to convince someone to do something if they like you
- There is a reason programs have laff tracks
- Negativity is lazy
- Criticisms --> turtle with its head stuck in a shell can make no progress. Be gentle when critiquing someones work.

- No Asshole rule (Book to check out)
- Generally not worth tolerating even geniuses
- Start your own method of coping (My method is to write an scathing email to a jerk and then delete it! Always ensure the TO address is to yourself :-) )
- It is good therapy to admit you are a jerk...sometimes
- Advocating ideas:

• understand the box/context someone is living in. Then you can move towards thinking outside the box
• resistance to change
• prepare for the tough questions
• honesty and modesty
• plant ideas in other people...then be ready to implement when they see the light

- move teams to hive mind
- make easy for people to try out and make them feel like a hero when they do
- move "know it all" (teenage mentality) to mentor, if not mentor then friend
- give people an incentive to really care...even just implied rewards.
- social gatherings to grow team dynamic. Even team "inside jokes" grow the dynamic.
teams that can have fun produce more...feel of belonging, pride in group identity
- How to win friends and influence people (old school book that is still relevant)
- Test out someone: jerks will generally show their hand dealing with wait staff at restaurants.

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Next generation Version Control Systems
Distributed src control
We all need to keep up with
- Git
- inode history uninteresting, derivable from the content
- important to encourage frequent topic branching
- if you want a usability feature...patches welcome...not the focus
Apparently there is a Git eclipse plug-in ?

Bazzar-NG

Mercurial

- And for lots of fun on a Sunday night: Comparison of revision control software

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Body hacking and functional body modification...you are the platform (Quinn Norton)
Enhance function of body or perceptions
- rare earth metal implanted in ring finger...no anesthetic--> artist not doctor
- re-purpose brain for new functional capacity
- RFID implantation
- people putting together CT scan with open source packages
- Emotiv - basically a game controller but ooohhh the potential for "hackers"
- if steroids are cheating why isn't Lasik?
- Provigil - reduces need for sleep...7-10 dollars per pill
- CUV1647 - tan, weight loss and increases sex drive
- vaccination is required modification
- black market medicine---back alley hospitals
- What makes or defines a human?
- When does someone stop being human?

Not directly related to anything I do or would try but man is this a conversation starter!

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Art of Community Panel
Great code comes out of a good community
Is it really about the community or is it the code?
-over the long term these merge to become one
- people are important. Anonymous software, ability to get away with lower quality
-Wikipedia - people building an encyclopedia. Healthy community software is emergent
-Ensure your community has a defined goal. This makes it much easy to define healthy community

Is a community healthy?
-consistent, constant participation
-distribution of workload
-many roles in a community
-ease of joining and ease of use, ease of sampling...taking college course
- self moderating, self governing
-vested interest in community success

Benevolent dictatorship...is it dead?
- General consensus...yes. Always really a core group of committers that you can trust.
- You do have the opportunity to take your toys and leave the party

Community that is too large?
- attempting to break down areas of expertise is a sign of too large of a community
- having a reputation system - tends to be gamed
- Linden Lab love machine - A vehicle to give someone kudos for doing a good job. Giving and getting. Hard to game as transparent
- Communities just plain do not scale: look at a map

Are communities becoming a commodity?
- Source forge into marketplace
- Value is in the committers: IBM and committers for Apache
- Community only stays if things are still healthy

- Community about communities...book in the works: link

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What Do You Mean, Marketing? Promoting Open Source Projects
- If your project sucks no amount of marketing effort will make it successful
- It is not evil to engage in marketing
- Give talks and presentations to promote
- write articles
- A really good web page is a must
- postgres sql given as an example: web page
- simple but provides the user with everything in an expected and easy to recognize format
- Do not hide the source code
- make it easy to get and try out the project
- VMWare image
- Good documentation is great marketing
- Don't disrespect the competition
- have a low traffic announce list
- have predictable release cycles for users, downstream vendors --> great comfort for IT managers
- regular users should be involved in every stage of the project
- get the stats of your users: Who is your consumer?- Fedora project doing good work here
- Eclipse given as an example still run by IBM...memories are long :-(

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Overall interesting and thought provoking talks.
I appreciated the slack time to think about these tangents.