Meet This Year's Top Ambassador Nominees

Nick Boldt

DZone: Could you tell us more about yourself?

Nick: Sure. I'm a committer for multiple Eclipse.org, JBoss.org, and sf.net projects, including several Eclipse Modeling projects, JBoss Tools and Dev Studio and a couple of Eclipse Dash projects. When not sitting in front of a screen or Blackberry, I enjoy cycling, hiking, swimming, and kayaking. I have two dogs that keep me exercised & entertained, even during the several months of snow we get here in Toronto.

DZone: What are the main things that you do within the community?

Nick: Release engineering. Evangelism. Testing. Blogging. Documentation. Writing parodic songs to gently poke fun at Eclipse, software development & open source. Finding & reporting bugs. Monitoring newsgroups, mailing lists, and forums. Running contests to give away Eclipsewear to the community in exchange for some fun viral marketing.

DZone: How long have you been involved with Eclipse?

Nick: Since 2004 - the second half of the Eclipse 3.0 / EMF 2.0 release year.

Initially I was brought in to be a developer for the EMF project, but my focus shifted toward the website, release engineering, database work, and then to the project management involved in coordinated release trains for both Eclipse and IBM. Now that most of the release engineering work at Eclipse (for Modeling, anyway) is self-sufficient, I can focus more on the fun stuff like contests, testing, and marketing/evangelism via blogging.

I'm also co-leading a project to get a build farm set up at Eclipse.org to ease new projects into the process of building, testing, and publishing their bits.

DZone: Do you have a favourite project within the Eclipse ecosystem?

Nick: EMF will always be my first love, but I have many favourite projects at Eclipse: Mylyn is by far my best productivity enhancer; Zest is just plain cool; the Plug-in Spy has saved me a number of times; Eclipse's Ant integration is invaluable; PDT and phpeclipse have made my life much easier for years; JDT and PDE are impossible to live without; BPMN is great for sketching process flows; RSE is great for publishing to FTP sites.

DZone: In the Eclipse world, what were your highlights of 2008, and what are you looking forward to in 2009?

Nick: 2008: Ganymede release; EclipseCon '08; p2; Ontario Linux Fest '08 (where we met dozens of Eclipse fans and still more who were eager to learn about Eclipse for C/C++, Ruby, PHP, Python, and Git work -- Eclipse isn't just about Java anymore, and the community knows it!)

2009: Galileo release; EclipseCon '09; p2, second release; JBoss Tools 3; Dash Athena, aka the Eclipse Common Builder

DZone: What is your full time job?

Nick: Productization & Release Engineering for JBoss Tools and Developer Studio. I work remotely from home and support people from California to Colorado to NY to Switzerland to China. Makes for erratic sleep, but a very fun job.

DZone: Is it difficult for you to find the time to promote and support the Eclipse community?

Nick: No - even when I'm doing JBoss work I'm evangelizing Eclipse -- be it Mylyn, PDT, CDT, EMF, RSE, or GMF. There's always something to be said about the work going on at the Foundation.

DZone: Why do you think you should be chosen as Top Ambassador?

Nick: Well, it's 3:57am, so beyond everything I've said above, let me leave you with a song... http://divby0.blogspot.com/2009/02/workin-9-to-9.html