At a Glance:
- Involved in open source since 2018
- Works for German Aerospace Center (DLR)
- Eclipse Foundation contributor since 2018
- Involved in Eclipse SUMO
- Committer to Eclipse SUMO
- Eclipse Foundation committer since 2018
What’s your background as a developer?
I’ve been working at the German Aerospace Center for several years, after graduating with a computer science degree and spending around a decade in software development elsewhere.
I had only limited experience with open source before I joined the centre. I had done some work with the Eclipse IDE and used some other free open source software but hadn’t really engaged with the open source community or contributed to it, for that matter, before joining.
How did that lead you to open source and the Eclipse Foundation?
Working at the German Aerospace Center, I’ve been involved with the project that would ultimately become Eclipse SUMO for some time. SUMO was an open source project since its inception. But at some point, there came the question of its future as it continued to grow and become more complex. We needed to ensure the project would be publicised to attract more people to learn about it, contribute to it, and provide feedback to help us improve it. Therefore, we thought moving the project to the Eclipse Foundation would be a great way to ensure its longevity and sustained future development.
How have you found that experience, coming over to the Eclipse Foundation?
To be honest, because the original project was open source as well, it wasn’t a huge adjustment for me to start working within the Eclipse Foundation. One of the biggest changes was the release schedule. When we were working on the project at the German Aerospace Center, we had the freedom to schedule releases as we saw fit or as made the most sense given the circumstances.
But at the Eclipse Foundation, releases are every six months, firm. That obviously represents a challenge because we suddenly needed to not only be having releases much more frequently than we were used to but we had to ensure that the quality of those releases never suffered from the faster pace. So, we had to make sure we were not only getting those releases ready much faster and more efficiently but that we were testing and performing checks along the way without slowing down too much.
What are your goals as a committer?
I’m really excited to continue expanding the Eclipse SUMO project, particularly into South and North America. I’ve been in touch with universities and research centres across the continent, and there are many big projects happening in this region that SUMO could potentially play a significant role in.
Any advice for someone considering getting more involved in open source?
I would highly recommend it. In my opinion, the best way to become a good programmer is to program. You can learn a lot in university or a course, but ultimately there’s no better way to improve your skills as a software developer than by developing software.
And there’s no better place to learn than in open source. It’s easy to get involved: just find a project, read about it, and start working on a contribution. You can work on a huge variety of different things, essentially whenever you want to, and meet and learn from an enormously broad and diverse community.
Plus, there’s a very easy test for if the code you’re developing is good when you’re working on open source. Are people using it? Then it’s probably pretty good. I’ve certainly noticed a meaningful improvement in the quality of my own code since I started working in open source. If I look back at my code from ten years ago and at my code now, there’s a pretty clear evolution, and that’s exciting.