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Eclipse Cloud DevTools Contributor Award:Tobias Ortmayr for improving the performance of Theia

Tuesday, November 28, 2023 - 16:07 by John Kellerman

The Eclipse Cloud Developer Tools contributor award for December goes to Tobias Ortmayr at EclipseSource for his outstanding and transformative contributions to improving the performance of Eclipse Theia.

Tobias Ortmayr continues to exemplify exceptional proficiency and commitment in his instrumental work on Eclipse Theia. His work on significant performance enhancements is remarkable for its immediate effects. However, it  also enables observability of the ongoing progress:. https://eclipse-theia.github.io/theia-e2e-test-suite/performance/ (see also screenshot below). This work and progress resonates and is appreciated by the Eclipse Theia community.

Furthermore, Tobias, along with Philip Langer, has led  community discussions on performance, bringing four different vendors to address this critical issue: STMicroelectronics, Ericsson, EclipseSource, and Typefox. See also Matthew Khouzam’s talk at TheiaCon about “Theia Observability and Lessons Learned for your App” for more details. 

A notable achievement under Tobias's leadership is the optimization of the frontend-backend communication by a factor of 30 and the reduction of start-up times for Theia-based IDEs by an impressive 60%. In a cloud-centric design like Theia, even marginal reductions in docker spin-up times and communication improvements, when scaled over thousands of instances, translate into substantial savings in developer time. In the words of Will Rogers, "you never get a second chance to make a first impression." In this vein, Tobias has not only enhanced the initial experience of Theia, but continues to refine it persistently.

For these reasons and more, we congratulate Tobias Ortmayr. His contributions have significantly improved the performance of Eclipse Theia and, equally as important, enable transparency and continued progress. Well done Tobias!

This Eclipse Cloud DevTools contributor award is sponsored by the Eclipse Cloud DevTools Working Group. The working group provides a vendor-neutral ecosystem of open source projects focused on defining, implementing and promoting best-in-class web and cloud-based development tools. It is hosted at the Eclipse Foundation, current members of the group include AMDArmEclipseSourceEricssonObeoRedHatRenesasSTMicroelectronics and TypeFox.