Alternate title: I Went to EclipseCon Europe and What I Saw There Blew My Mind…
EclipseCon has great tutorials and sessions. The speakers are second-to-none, and the networking opportunities are fantastic. if you’re looking for it, you’ll find software developers doing amazing things together. For EclipseCon Europe 2015, we’re going to formalize this a bit. At very least, we’re going to give it a nice home and a lot of love.
We’re extending our usual notion of a hackathon: instead of just having a single evening session, we’re going to host a hacking area for two full days during the conference. We’ll have a few things happening in this hacking area.
There will be multiple tables arranged in perfect order for pair programming. The tables will have wired connections so that participants don’t have to wrestle with the wifi. We’re going to set up a server with mirrors of our Git and Mars p2 repositories so you don’t have to make the long trip back to our servers in Ottawa to get started (once you’ve cloned, you can connect to the master repository to get updates and push patches).
We’ll have Eclipse Foundation staff and others there to help. We can help with things like creating Eclipse Foundation accounts, setting up Contributor License Agreements (CLA), configuring development environments, understanding the development and intellectual property (IP) processes, and more. We can even help you find a problem to solve and a partner to solve it with (if you need that sort of help). We’ll have a little presentation area set up where we’ll run short how to contribute sessions throughout the day.
You are most certainly welcome to work on your own problem. Or, you can select from our short list of issues that we feel can be solved with up to two hours of effort: pick something from the list and we’ll help you get started and sort through the development process. If you’re not quite ready to submit patches, you can help us test by downloading one of the packages, the installer, or a feature; we’ll help you create bug reports for issues that you find. Or we can help you just create a bug report for some aspect of Eclipse that’s been driving you batty.
We’re going to set up some office hours: specific times set aside when we’ll have subject matter experts on hand to help with specific sorts of problems. Use the office hours to connect with experts on topics such as building Oomph configurations, testing your plug-ins, or using the Common Build Infrastructure; and committers from specific Eclipse projects.
Eclipse committers are, of course, welcome to use the hacking area to collaborate with fellow committers that you don’t normally get to work with directly.
I think that you’ll find that we have a little something for everybody.
