Sunday, March 29, 2009

What a great EclipseCon!

As anyone on this planet knows, last week was EclipseCon time. As always, it was a great experience. Seriously... How many conferences can one discuss, during lunch, the double-checked locking pattern or how EMF could support facets? (thanks Eike and Kenn)

All talks I've attended were awesome. It's reinvigorating to see all the energy and technology happening behind Eclipse: from known technologies to hot topics like E4 and XText.

And it gets better! The people at the conference are simply fantastic. Just to name a few, it was great to chat with Nick, Chris, and Boris and to finally meet in person Tom, Kevin, Peter, and Paul Webster. There are many others that, although not listed here, have contributed to make last week a memory that will not fade away from my mind.

A bit more personal, I like to think that the EMF tutorial was well received. We chose to go deeper into several subjects instead of mechanically read all the slides. Unfortunately, because of that, we didn't cover all the material. The offer to be available to answer individual questions after the conference is still valid ;-)

I got some positive reviews for the modeled UI in e4 talk, which definitely doesn't seem to agree with the official numbers. I wonder if we were too "slide driven" while the folks attending were expecting to see more action. Or perhaps my delusional-self is correct and people did mistake the '+1' for the '-1' bucket. Oh well... I am sure we'll do better the next time.

Finally, a special thanks to Steve: I was peacefully seated at the closing event when he handed me a winning deck for Thursday's poker game. My son loved the RC boat and will enjoy playing with it on summer time.

Another finally... The EMF book was the first one to be sold out at EclipseCon! I had the pleasure to autograph a few copies. On the subject, EMF and modeling in general are everywhere. It is good to see something I helped built making others more productive ;-)