Each year when people register for EclipseCon we ask a small number of questions to better understand who is attending. As is the tradition, I publish the data so everyone can get a feel for who was at EclipseCon.
For EclipseCon 2010, the top line summary is that the attendee profile continues to be very technical and very experienced with Eclipse. A common misconception is the EclipseCon is only for committers and people building Eclipse based products, however 30% are using Eclipse as a tool platform for internal IT development and 19% are building internal applications based on Eclipse. Another take away is that the attendee profile is very very similar to 2009.
Year of Experience Using Eclipse
73% of attendees have been working with Eclipse 3 or more years. As you can imagine this is a very experienced crowd at EclipseCon. Frankly as Eclipse is more established I am not sure how useful this question becomes. Maybe we should ask “how long have you been using Equinox or EMF”?
Hard core Technical
Once again EclipseCon demonstrates it is a conference for hard core technical people. 67% considered themselves a developer or architect, and if you include development managers that numbers is 77%. Next year I think I will start a club for us marketing types; maybe we should even get special shirts. 
A Diverse Community
Often people will say to me EclipseCon is for people working on the Eclipse projects, meaning the attendees are committers or employees of member companies. In fact, only 33% said their companies create commercial Eclipse based products (typical of companies working on Eclipse project). 30% use Eclipse as the tool to build internal applications and 19% use Eclipse as the platform for their internal application. There continues to be a lot of enterprise developers attending EclipseCon.
Popular Projects
The most popular projects being used by EclipseCon attendees continue to be JDT, EMF, RCP, Equinox, Mylyn, etc. We didn’t include a list of all the Eclipse projects but I don’t think this ranking should surprise anyone.
Thanks to everyone that completed the registration questions. See you next year at EclipseCon 2011!
