Reply

Mik Kersten: Top Committer Award Nominee

At 3:48 AM on Feb 2, 2007, Alex Blewitt wrote:

Mik Kersten ( Mylar Project Lead , Vancouver, Canada) has been nominated for the Eclipse Top Commiter Award . EclipseZone asked him a little about himself:

It was 2001, while I was at Xerox PARC working on the AspectJ tools suite and framework, which included extensions to NetBeans and JBuilder . Gregor Kiczales and I bumped into Brian Barry and Erich Gamma at OOPSLA, and they told us they were about to release an extensible tool platform that could make my job a whole lot easier. In early 2002 Adrian Colyer and I started the AJDT project, and immediately started appreciate the power of Eclipse's extensibility. Up to that point Jim Hugunin had the herculean task of implementing and maintaining a compiler that had to be a superset of javac . Later in 2002 we re-implemented the AspectJ compiler on top of JDT Core, and made it incremental to boot. The amazing thing was that thanks to Eclipse's plug-in architecture modularity we were able to make it run in Eclipse, JBuilder, NetBeans, and on the command line. This and the dramatically easier mechanisms for adding UI extensions gave me a profound appreciation for Eclipse, and as a result I focused all of my future tool building efforts on it.

I lead the Mylar project, and am still a committer on the AspectJ and AJDT projects. Most of my time goes into coding on Mylar and managing the user and developer communities. The AspectJ and AJDT efforts are lead by two excellent programmers, Adrian Colyer and Matt Chapman, and and at this point I only play a supportive role on those projects.

That's easy: Mylar's Task-Focused UI. I simply could not work without it anymore, and when I sit down at a workbench that has the Package Explorer showing the full structure of dozens of projects I find myself constantly scrolling and squinting.

JDT , hands down. We now take for granted the innovation and quality of what the JDT Core and UI teams have produced and are continuing to evolve so gracefully. Thanks to the way that they've implemented refactoring, content assist (Ctrl+Space), do-what-I-mean (Ctrl+1), structure navigation (e.g. Ctrl+T, Ctrl+O, Ctrl+Shift+G) we now program and navigate Java code in a very structured way. I used to think that we needed the full-blown structured editing or MDD story to get that kind of productivity gain. What the JDT Core and UI guys have demonstrated is that you can get a lot of those benefits with the lightweight structured editing facilities they added to Eclipse. Their framework is becoming increasingly reusable, so the great thing is that we're now seeing many of these benefits percolate to tools for working with other languages and artifacts.

I always try to make my setup reflect the most common setup of our user community. So I'm currently on Windows. But we try to keep things balanced by always having at least one team member on Linux, and soliciting as much feedback and contribution from Mac OS X users as we can.

Yup, I'll give a long talk titled Task-focused programming with Mylar with Rob Elves and will participate in Eugene Kuleshov's short talk titled Team version control mashup with Mylar . We'll also have a Mylar BOF at the conference, and I'll be on the Google Summer of Code panel along with Steffen Pingel, our Summer of Code student turned committer.

Other than people's feeds I only read Planet Eclipse and EclipseZone . Keeping up with community feedback and opinion is key and helps me understand what features and finessing people need from both Mylar and from the platform.  But time spent reading and blogging takes away from coding, and I'd rather be coding.

I work long workweeks, and find that to sustain creative thinking and coding my mind does need time away from the keyboard. Part of this is Mylar's fault, because it ends up focusing my workdays to the point where my brain is totally drained by Friday. So on the weekends my wife and I spend time in the mountains. But admittedly many of my best ideas about Mylar and Eclipse have materialized on a chairlift or alpine hike.

Well, you could just do it by the numbers and check my stats in the commits explorer .  In trying to answer this question I was surprised to notice that my code contributions for 2006 add up to more than the total team contributions of any Tools or Technology project. I'm only being half serious because stats should never be used as the sole measure of a committer's merit, since their meaning can vary between projects. However, I do think that it's great that we have mechanisms like the commits explorer and Bugzilla visible on eclipse.org, and you'll notice that in order to promote meritocracy the Mylar Team page is ranked by bugs resolved.

Consider voting for me or for one of the other nominated Mylar committers, Eugene Kuleshov and Rob Elves, if you like what we're doing with Mylar. We have this amazing opportunity to make Eclipse the de-facto platform for task-focused interaction. We're really excited about the potential of this technology has on making people's workdays easier, and along with the support of our user and developer community will continue pushing it as hard and as fast as we can.

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.

0 replies so far ( Post your own)