At a Glance:
- Involved in open source since: 1999
- Works for: codbex
- Eclipse Foundation contributor since: 2015
- Involved in: Eclipse Dirigible, Eclipse Cloud Development
- Committer to: Eclipse Dirigible
- Eclipse Foundation committer since: 2015
- Fun fact: When he’s not coding, Delchev enjoys going off-roading in his truck and blazing a trail in the wilderness.
What’s your background with open source?
I’ve been involved with open source for a long time, and most of my 25-plus years as a developer have been spent working in and on open source.
I remember the early days of open source, when Linux had just come out and the free software movement, which would give rise to what we would later call open source, was in full swing. At the time there weren’t many of what you’d call open source development tools, but even in the early days, it seemed like there was an understanding that open source was going to be a good home for development tools.
I remember when NetBeans was first created, when Java went open source, and when internal projects at IBM eventually gave rise to the Eclipse IDE and, ultimately, the Eclipse Foundation.
One thing I always really enjoyed was how you could meet and learn from people in the open source community. In my early years as a developer, I built a visual component library for Java web technologies. It got popular, and a few months later, I was contacted by someone from Sun Microsystems to see if I wanted to help out on the Java Server Faces specification, which was like having a rock star call to ask if I wanted to join the band.
How has open source changed over that time in your experience?
Of course, it was quite different in the early days from how it is now. Back then you generally had one of two types of projects. The first was one that had been created and pushed forward by one company that was looking to improve the quality of its project or was pushing it out to the community as a marketing effort.
That’s ultimately what happened with Eclipse Dirigible. I started that project at SAP, where I worked for a long time, to try to develop a cloud development environment to simplify consumption of enterprise services. It grew and grew and eventually got large enough that we felt it was too large to stay proprietary. The Eclipse Foundation was the most prominent open source foundation at the time, and the rest is history.
But on the other hand, you had very small projects with one person or a couple of people who were working on the project because they were trying to do something but couldn’t, or couldn’t do it as well or easily as they wanted, with the available tools.
And so, it’s been really interesting to see how those two sorts of divides have converged over time. Both extremes still exist, of course, but over time as open source has become more mature and better-known, we’ve seen the small projects get big and well-developed and the single-enterprise projects make inroads with both other companies and grassroots developers.
You’ve been a committer for nearly a decade now; any insights or advice for someone considering the role?
First and foremost, you have to understand that while there are businesses built on and around open source, there’s no real business in it for you, unless your company is paying for you to contribute. The first thing you have to ask yourself is, am I willing to do this without getting paid for it? There’s no right or wrong answer, and open source isn’t ultimately for everyone.
If you decide it is for you, understand that it requires discipline. The only way to produce high-quality software is for you, and the team working on the project, to be disciplined about contributions.
I don’t want to sound gloomy or overly serious. Open source is a lot of fun. You can work on something you care about and it will make you a better software developer. You will face a lot of technical challenges, you will always be on the cutting edge of the technology wave, and you’ll meet great people to learn from and to teach. It’s a fantastic way to develop skills and meet people. That developer who invited me to work on JSF back then? That’s Ed Burns. We got the chance to reconnect at the Eclipse Foundation, which was just fantastic.
Speaking of the foundation, I highly recommend joining one. I’ve had a great experience at the Eclipse Foundation and its well-governed and clearly defined processes really help with producing high-quality code and building healthy communities. In a completely independent open source project, certain people can be leaders or given authority simply because they were there first, or because the person who was there first likes them. But the clear, external standards of the Eclipse Foundation ensure fairness and recognition based on merit. If you put in the effort and produce good code, you can advance and do more.