At EclipseCon this year I heard the sound of the universe. And it was awesome and breathtaking. To be precise, it was the sound of two black holes colliding over a billion years ago, part of the enthralling final keynote from Dr Benno Wilke on detecting gravitational waves. It was a fitting way to end a conference that had kicked off with another amazing keynote: Stephen Carver delivering a powerful and emotional story of the people and tech behind the space shuttle disasters, framed in profound lessons on real communication and avoiding silo thinking.
For the very first time at EclipseCon Europe we held a CDT summit. Over 10 years ago I had the honour of being the first developer from Europe involved in CDT, so to bring the summit to Europe was a particularly special moment for me, especially with our renowned project co-lead Doug Schaefer in attendance. The summit was a success, particularly welcoming contributors from the wider community into the fold, and will definitely something we will be doing again next year.
As this year’s focus there was also a big community focus on diversity and raising awareness on this topic. The activity included my talk on ‘7 Habits of Highly Diverse Communities‘, addressing the board on the topic and a diversity BOF session. The discussions were great, lots of good energy, practical suggestions and I am so proud to see the community work together to ensure we can be as open and inclusive as possible.
The Science Working Group had good reason to celebrate at the conference: we have just completed our very first simultaneous release of five projects. A significant milestone for this nascent group, and was terrific to talk about the projects to the rest of the community.
There was an incredible amount on at the conference this year, the best way to get a quick taste was hearing what people enjoyed: language servers, Xtext, Sirius, scripting, IoT & testing were topics that kept coming up. On a personal level, it was my most intense EclipseCon yet with three talks, a BOF and a summit to organize. On the whole it was the busiest conference yet with a record attendance of 619. The most important thing is always the people: lots of new and old friends to talk to and exchange energy. At EclipseCon this year I heard the sound of the Eclipse universe. And it was awesome and breathtaking.
(A version of this article was first published on jaxenter.com: https://jaxenter.com/eclipsecon-europe-at-a-glance-129883.html)
Kichwa Coders 