At a Glance:
- Involved in open source since: Early 2000s
- Works for: University of Firenze
- Eclipse Foundation contributor since: Early 2000s
- Involved in: Eclipse EMF Parsley, Eclipse SWTBot, Eclipse Xtext
- Committer to: SWTBot, Xtext
- Eclipse Foundation committer since: Early 2010s
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
I am an associate professor in Computer Science at the Dipartimento di Statistica, Informatica, Applicazioni of the University of Firenze, Italy. I teach courses on programming methodologies, advanced programming techniques, and automated testing. My research interests cover design, theory, and implementation of programming languages — statically typed object-oriented languages, network-aware languages, and modeling languages with IDE support, in particular.
What’s your background as a developer in open source?
I’ve been a developer now for over 20 years. In the late nineties, I fell in love with Linux and that opened my eyes about open source software as a user. A few years later, I had one of my first open source software approved as GNU software. I’m happy to see that software is still around and installable in all the main Linux distributions and macOS. I think that was my very first active participation in an open source software community.
How did you get involved with the Eclipse Foundation?
Since I switched from C++ to Java in the late nineties, I got in touch with the Eclipse Foundation through the Java IDE, and the interest in contributing to its ecosystem naturally led to the involvement with the Eclipse Foundation. I also switched from Flex/Bison to Eclipse Xtext for implementing languages, as that’s my main research interest and the main implementation context, which soon became one of the most popular Eclipse projects. Thus, the Eclipse Foundation was providing me with main daily driver tools and frameworks.
What led to you becoming a committer, and how have you found that experience?
If you love open source projects as a developer, you somehow need to actively take part in the development of the open source projects you use. What’s better than becoming a committer then?
I’ve been a committer for about a decade now. I think the best moment is when other committers nominate you to become a committer to their project. It’s rewarding when other committers find your contributions and ideas worthy of becoming one of them!
Any advice for someone considering getting more involved or becoming a committer?
The biggest challenge involved in being a committer is keeping track of issues, bugs, and feature requests. It’s not just about fixing things or implementing new features: it’s about trying to understand what needs to be done and if it’s right for it to be done.
But if someone’s interested, I’d definitely tell them to give it a try! It’s worthwhile and you learn a lot of things. I’m not only talking about development skills but also communication skills. But be ready and willing to use a lot of your spare time.