It’s 7am Wednesday morning in Santa Clara, CA. Breakfast is on its way and I’m trying to sort my schedule for the day ahead at EclipseCon 2009.
The last couple of days have been busy. Not as busy as previous years - there’s a marked downturn in the attendance due to corporate travel bans and a seeming go-slow in the US Immigration Dept responsible for issuing travel visas.
On tutorial day, Monday, I attended a PDE builds/Athena builder tutorial. Peak learning came from Andrew Niefer (the last PDE build guy standing) whos skilled explanations painted a picture of PDE build not so much as the be-tentacled monstrosity many believe it is. Top tip - think of PDE as a framework for generating Ant scripts.
Nick has slides and comments on his blog.
Verdict: early days yet, but potential there. Looks like most of the presentation to the user is going to be a minimized properties file plus a conventional project structure. It’s ok. Work to be done with tests etc.
I’d planned to attend the p2 tutorial in the afternoon, but turned up three minutes late (lunchtime visit to Apple store, natch) and the place was rammed.
Rant ensues - we do need to get sorted on room allocations. The p2 thing is popular, since it was forced down our throats last year, and it was in a small room. Downstairs, there were huge rooms with a dozen people scattered about. Grr.
In the heel of the hunt, I went to the Domain-specific Language Development talk, which turned out to be a good learner (the pain). I actually twigged how GMF works at last. The concern is that I may have lossed SAN points in the process - I’ve often remarked how learning the many Eclipse frameworks closely mirrors character progression in the Call of Chthulu RPG. What’s more, I learned about model tranformation with Operational QVT, which is good - will use it. I zoned out during the Xpand piece (jetlag).
Top tip to presenters - Address your audience, not your slides. The slides can’t beat you with sticks for a bad delivery. Ask your audience how they are doing now and then: are they following? Have they got the ellipse in the node mapping done yet? Do they need a minute to regenerate the model because they are newbies at reading your mind? That would be a good start.
To wind it up, I got fingered by The Powers That Be to do powerpoint karaoke session with the inimitable Mik Kersten of Mylyn fame (going to have to get that integrated with FUSE tools). We presented a new framework for identity theft in the cloud. ROFLMAOs there were in abundance.
Back to the schedule selection. At this point in my career I had expected to have mastered basic bi-location, but haven’t, so I thinking of relying on oscillating between sessions. Tuesday update later on. Don’t forget there will be tweetin’ ahead - #eclipsecon.