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Ed Merks: Top Committer Award Nominee

At 6:41 PM on Jan 31, 2007, Alex Blewitt wrote:

Ed Merks ( IBM Rational , Toronto, Canada) has been nominated for the Eclipse Top Commiter Award . EclipseZone asked him a little about himself:

I first became publicly involved with Eclipse when Eclipse Modeling Framework ( EMF ) project was open sourced back in 2002, but I have been working with Eclipse since the very early days even before Eclipse itself was opened sourced.

Along with Rich Gronback, I am a co-lead for the top level Modeling project, the lead for the EMF project, including XSD and SDO, as well as the lead for the EMFT project, EMF's satellite technology project. I'm a member of the Eclipse Planning Council and Eclipse Architecture Council. And I'm running for a committer representative position this year.

Some may think that all I do is answer newsgroup questions---I've answered approximately 3,000 of them last year---but what I really love to do is develop code, so that's what I try to spend most of my time doing. I like to ensure that problems reported in bugzilla are solved as quickly as possible, so between the question answering and the bug fixing, there's not nearly as much time to develop new things as I would like.

I'm extremely proud of what my team and I have done with EMF over the years. It's a corner stone for data integration and there are just so many cool features. If I had to single out one particular thing that I think is especially cool, it would be the ability to convert an XML Schema to an Ecore model and then generate the Java API for it.

It's a little bit like admitting I'm an alcoholic, but I really couldn't function well without my vi plugin . Before using Eclipse as my development environment I just used vi , Thread.dumpStack , and System.out.println , so naturally the JDT is my favorite feature of Eclipse. It's hard to estimate how much of a productivity boost it provides, but certainly I am saving on average at least one day per week...

Windows. First vi and now this!

What Eclipse-related bookmarks/feeds (other than EclipseZone, of course) do you frequently use?

I monitor many of the Eclipse newsgroups as well as these feeds:

• www.planeteclipse.org Planet Eclipse
• www.eclipse.org/home/eclipsenews.rss Eclipse News
• www.eclipse.org/home/eclipseinthenews.rss Eclipse in the News

What do you get up to in life when you're not thinking about or working with Eclipse?

As so many in our industry, I have compulsive tendencies to work excessively. I'm mostly just a stay-at-home type of person who enjoys his home life, pets, and garden. My primary hobby is gardening but the long and cold Toronto winters tend to put the brakes on that hobby for half of each year. There's nothing like digging in the dirt to bring a guy back down to earth. I also love scuba and snorkeling, and just got back from a fantastic Windjammer cruise that helped recharge my mid-winter batteries.

I see myself as a person who helps make Eclipse what it is today: a vibrant diverse community of people who take pride in their own work and take pride in helping others to achieve their goals. My team and I fix most bugs within days of being them opened, often within hours, and no question on the newsgroup goes unanswered. It often takes personal time to make all this happen but leadership is all about setting very high personal standards. It's best to lead by example, because others are far more likely to do as you do than to do as you say...

EclipseZone would like to thank those that took part, and please remember to vote for the individual awards prior to the closing date of February 16th 2007.

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