At a Glance:
- Involved in open source since: 2010
- Works for: Ericsson
- Eclipse Foundation contributor since: 2010
- Involved in: Eclipse Trace Compass, Eclipse CDT.cloud, and its TraceCompass.cloud component
- Committer to/Project co-lead: Eclipse Trace Compass, Eclipse CDT.cloud, and its TraceCompass.cloud component
- Eclipse Foundation committer since: 2010
How long have you been a developer?
I started learning about computers and programming in high school and university, as part of my courses. My university education was initially more tailored to hardware development. But I realized that I enjoy software development more and started specializing in software development towards the end of my university studies.
What was your first involvement with open source?
My first involvement in open source was 17 years ago, as a user of the Eclipse IDE for C/C++ and Java development. I was impressed by the productivity gains I realized from using an IDE, beyond syntax highlighting of a simple editor, as well as its ability to provide instant feedback of syntax errors, auto-completion, and refactoring.
As part of the same project, I developed a standalone Eclipse RCP to provide a graphical user interface for an internal tool at Ericsson. After that, I switched to a group with open source developers contributing to various Eclipse Foundation open source projects. I first contributed code as a contributor and eventually became a committer.
How did you get involved with the Eclipse Foundation?
I got involved when I joined the tracing team at Ericsson 12 years ago. Our job there was to develop open source plug-ins to the Eclipse Foundation framework for analyzing and visualizing traces from various systems. The development started in the Eclipse Linux Tools project before it was extracted in 2014 into the newly created Eclipse Trace Compass project.
With the emergence of the Eclipse Theia framework and cloud development tools, the Trace Compass team is now developing a JavaScript frontend to the Trace Compass backend, which integrates with Eclipse Theia IDEs. This work for TraceCompass.cloud is part of the Eclipse CDT.cloud project as one of its subcomponents. I’m also the project co-lead of the Trace Compass project, as well as the Eclipse CDT.cloud project, with a focus on the tracing components.
I’ve attended and presented at EclipseCon conferences several times, and this year I’ll be presenting the progress of the TraceCompass.cloud project.
What has your experience been like as a committer?
It’s been a great experience for me. As a committer, I’m able to shape and contribute actively to projects and can guide the evolution of the software by helping the community with its contributions to the projects.
It’s also worth noting that as a committer, you have a lot of responsibilities: ensuring that contributions are reviewed and the IP due diligence is followed are important ones. I have also done many releases of the tool as part of the Eclipse simultaneous release process and have taken care of the continuous integration. You need the support of a great group of committers to successfully handle all these responsibilities, and I’m glad to be part of this group of committers.
Any advice for someone considering becoming a committer or getting more involved in open source?
It is important to get involved in the community first. Asking questions on the mailing list, forum, or chat or opening issue trackers for bugs or feature requests are great first steps. Then start contributing code: maybe do some smaller bug fixes or improvements to learn about the code base, the development, and the contribution process. Then you can tackle larger contributions by implementing new features and enhancements. Don’t forget to ask a lot of questions, and don’t be afraid to, either. The committers and community will support you.