My stay at EclipseCon 2008…
So after my brief trip in Seattle concluded, I boarded an Alaska Airlines flight down south to San Jose to head off to EclipseCon.
Once I got the logistics of hotel check-ins and all done, I headed off to the registration area where I bumped into Nitin. After hanging around there for a little while, I met Markus who told me that he was hanging out outside of the bar with some other folks so off we went. I got to meet Tom and Markus’s coworker (whose name evades me) there. Paul and Eric also dropped by a little later to say hi. Some time later, we headed back over to the registration booth where I took some pictures of those AMD machines since my brother works for them. We also spotted Scott here. Markus and he had a good chat while Nitin, Achim, and I started yapping about the difficulties around implementing a shared editor.
After this, Nitin and I headed off to Ian’s blogger party.
This is where Ian asked me if I ever go to class. And the answer is, why yes, I do go to class. Although I will admit I do sit on IRC during some lectures, but not all, mind you. In any case, the rest of the day ended rather uneventfully.
On Monday, I was up early to grab some food and drinks. I bumped into Pascal, Andrew, and Steffen while I was darting around the tables.
The first tutorial I went to was Benjamin’s “Plastic Surgery For Eclipse: Custom SWT Widgets, RCP Customization, And More“. While I’ve done plenty of UI work in the past, I’ve never done any of the things that Benny talked about, so this was certainly well worth my time.
I skipped the second time slot since Andrew and I were going to head over to Google to visit Igor. We waited for the time to pass on the second floor whilst checking emails and the likes on our notebooks.
I was lucky enough to bump into McQ there as I hadn’t met him since my Extreme Blue internship at IBM Ottawa ended. I wasn’t so lucky since I had bugzilla open on my notebook screen, which he was quick to critique about. I guess I failed to show him that I was working on my “work/life balance“.
Time flew by soon enough and it was time for Andrew and I to head off to Google. I asked someone to take a picture of us. Here you can see Dave, yours truly, Andrew, and Neil. McQ had already left, hence he is not here. :(
Google’s buildings are quite elaborate and their food is certainly one of a kind. I forgot to take any pictures so you’re just going to have to take my word on this one. Our trip back wasn’t so great as Andrew had noted, but no problem, we only lost a few minutes. Being Paul’s unofficial underling, I felt compelled to go to his tutorial, so I did. It’s hard to help fix Paul’s bugs if I don’t understand the stuff he works on after all.
While I was waiting for Nitin’s tutorial to get started, I went off to go look for Tomasz and Szymon. Szymon was busy attending to someone else but I was able to have a nice chat with Tomasz.
Nick dropped by Nitin’s tutorial after I pinged him and he, Dave, and I started reminiscing about the good times we’ve had together on #eclipse.
After the last of the tutorials, it was time for the community awards. There was some good Jeopardy action before that first though. I don’t remember what the question was but this answer was real long. I think it was something like “What does the Eclipse Foundation do?” or “What is the Eclipse Foundation responsible for?”. I do believe no one got it.
The community awards came after the two rounds of Jeopardy concluded. Thank you all for your support! :)
Once the event was over, it was on to the BOF sessions. Of course, this wasn’t before having a brief chat with Jeff and Dale and a photo with Nitin first.
I attended the SOC BOF first with Igor where I got to meet Wayne for the second time and Rob for the first time. It was nice having Igor and Rob there as it helped give us a bit of an “insider’s perspective”. Prior to the ECF BOF, Igor and I went over to look for Andrew where I was able to meet the famed Billy Biggs.
At the ECF BOF, we had Scott, Jan, Markus and me from the team. Rob, Pascal, and another fellow were also there to join us. We talked about p2 and ECF’s discovery APIs as well as shared editing.
Upon its conclusion, I waved my farewells and headed off back to my hotel room. I listened to some tunes from Final Fantasy XII before I retired to bed. I was pretty surprised that they had such a device, but hey, I’m totally down with that.
The next day, I woke up at 0400 and took a cab at around 0435 to head to the airport. Hopefully, I’ll be able to attend again next year. Oh, and staying longer next time wouldn’t hurt either. ;)