Meet This Year's Top Ambassador Nominees

Mik Kersten

DZone: Congratulations on the nomination Mik. Could you tell us more about yourself?

Mik: I’m the lead of the Eclipse Mylyn project and CEO of Tasktop Technologies, the company behind the task-focused interface and Mylyn. For quite a while now I’ve been obsessed with building Eclipse-based tools that allow us to control the enormous amounts of information we now work with day-to-day.

My Eclipse journey started out with evolving programming paradigms, in the form of AOP and AspectJ, and then moved onto the UI layer of the IDE, where we were in even more need of new technologies to make us productive when working our growing systems. I’m happy to say that those efforts have been paying off, since a large portion of Eclipse-based developers now use the task-focused interface for their daily work. We’re also managing to infect non-programmers with this way of working via the RCP version of Tasktop.

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

Mik: My involvement over the years has been pretty broad, so I’ll focus on the priorities that I juggle today. At the 30,000 foot level, I’m on the Eclipse board of directors and help represent committers’ needs for driving the strategic priorities of the Eclipse Foundation.
At the 20,000 foot level, I participate in a few groups that help coordinate the evolution of Eclipse, including the Architecture Council, the UI Best Practices Working Group, and the groups that oversee coordinated builds and EPP packages.
At the 10,000 foot level, by leading the Mylyn project, I work with the input of users, integrators and vendors in order to help us determine the priorities and plans for evolving the Mylyn framework and tools. Finally, I still get to spend some time in the trenches on one of my favorite past times, coding Mylyn.

DZone: How long have you been involved with Eclipse?

Mik: It started in 2001, while I was at Xerox PARC working on the AspectJ tools suite and framework, which included extensions to NetBeans and JBuilder . Gregor Kiczales and I bumped into Erich Gamma and Brian Barry (previously the OTI CEO) at OOPSLA, and they told us they were about to release an extensible tool platform that could make my job a whole lot easier.
In early 2002 Adrian Colyer (now SpringSource CTO) and I created the AJDT project, and immediately started appreciate the power of Eclipse's extensibility. Later in 2002 we re-implemented the AspectJ compiler on top of JDT Core, and made it incremental to boot. The amazing thing was that thanks to Eclipse's plug-in architecture modularity we were able to make it run in Eclipse, JBuilder, NetBeans, and on the command line. This and the dramatically easier mechanisms for adding UI extensions gave me a profound appreciation for Eclipse being the best platform for tool innovation, and as a result I focused all of my future tool building efforts on it.

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

Mik: No, because I’ve been fortunate enough to structure my responsibilities at Tasktop Technologies in a way where it is an important part of my day job. On the flipside, Eclipse does seem to manage to transcend my day jobs, since I started evangelizing it while still at Xerox PARC, then at Intentional Software, then as a student doing my PhD, and now at Tasktop. So it I seems that it has been difficult for me to find a line of work where I don’t spend my time promoting and supporting the Eclipse community. I’ve always thought it would be fun to be a welder, so maybe there’s still time.

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

Mik: While the community activities that I have listed above give me the perspective I need to be an ambassador for Eclipse, I see my main ambassadorial contributions as things that fall outside of the Eclipse community. To thrive, a software community needs to grow and to evolve. One of the most rewarding things that I did over the past year is to introduce Eclipse and Eclipse-based technologies to a lot of new users and organizations.

Part of this came from the ongoing movement of people who are choosing to leaving their IDE for Eclipse because they want Mylyn and the task-focused interface. I’ve also been able to get a lot of people onto Eclipse through the high profile talks I’ve been giving, including a Rock Star talk at last year’s JavaOne, which made me realize how many Java programmers were still discovering Eclipse.
As Tasktop’s CEO, I’ve worked with several tool vendors to create new Eclipse-based solutions, each of which has made a very positive contribution to our ecosystem. More recently, I’ve been helping large companies and organizations adopt Eclipse and RCP-based solutions. While treading into domains that are less familiar with the benefits of Eclipse can be challenging, the technology tends to speak for itself. So I think that I’ll stick with the Eclipse work for now, and put off dreams of being a welder for a couple more decades.