I reviewed the nominations for the Eclipse Awards today and there seems to be only moderate activity. In fact, I only see eight nominations for top contributor. There’s a lot more contributors out there than that.
Nominating somebody is easy: it’s just a bugzilla entry and there’s handy links to the entries off the Eclipse Awards landing page. The real trick is knowing who to nominate. Most contributors and committers don’t spend a lot of time basking in the glow of the limelight (ambassador nominations shouldn’t have this problem); fortunately, most Eclipse contributors and committers spend their time contributing and committing. So how do you find these people?
It may be a little time consuming, but the information is out there. In one of his nominations, Chris Aniszczyk nominated “the guy who created CTRL+SHIFT+T” (I’m considering it a nomination anyway). I’m assuming that Chris actually means the guy that thought it would be cool to be able to match a class from just the first letters of the words in a camel-case name in the “Open Type” dialog (i.e. “NPE” matches “NullPointerException”). Chris may indeed mean the guy who added the keyboard equivalent to the menu entry, but I choose to go with my assumption.
Anyway, I poked around bugzilla for a while, using an initial search term of “camelcase” in the JDT project and came up with Bug 92799. While numerous people have been involved in discussions around the feature, it seems to me that Dirk Baeumer is the major contributor/committer on this particular feature. Just to make sure that I didn’t pick the wrong guy, I opened the CVS Repository Explorer, navigated to the Eclipse development repository (dev.eclipse.org/cvsroot/eclipse) and found the org.eclipse.jdt.internal.ui.dialogs.OpenTypeSelectionDialog2 class (I guessed at the name using the Open Type dialog in Eclipse). The “CVS Resource History” view for this class has Dirk’s name all over it along with comments regarding the camel case support. It seems to me that Dirk’s the guy. Somebody should nominate him.
Anyway, a lot of folks spend a lot of time making Eclipse great. It’s the least we can do to spend 20 minutes trying to figure out who they are. Remember: it’s an honour just to be nominated (but the awards will be cool too!)