Meet This Year's Top Committer Nominees

Steffen Pingel

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

Steffen: I graduated from the University of Stuttgart, Germany two years ago. During my Masters' degree, I got involved with Eclipse by creating the Mylyn Trac connector as a Google Summer of Code student in 2006. At that same time, I was in the process of moving to New York city to work as a Java developer on Swing applications but I stayed involved with the Mylyn project in my spare time, and earned my commit rights. My contributions made it into the June 2007 release of Mylyn 2.0.

After that, Tasktop Technologies, the startup that created and leads Mylyn, extended me an offer to work full time on Mylyn and Mylyn-based technologies.I have since moved to Canada where a lot of the Eclipse excitement is happening. I enjoy working on tools that keep developers focused and productive, when I am not riding my bike in the beautiful mountains surrounding Vancouver.

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

Steffen: Most of my Eclipse time is spent collaborating with the community through Bugzilla and the Mylyn newsgroup. The Mylyn project has a very active user base who keeps me busy with a never ending stream of feedback and contributions. We applied over 130 patches for the next 3.1 release in March alone. While prioritizing contributions is a great way to evolve the tool to users' and integrators' needs, I also enjoy hacking on new Mylyn features.

DZone: How long have you been involved with Eclipse?

Steffen: I started using Eclipse for Java programming when support for Emacs key-bindings was added. Ever since the time I spent in the workbench has steadily increased. Thanks to the endless number of extensions I now do the occasional Python and C++ hacking in Eclipse and don't need to rely on browsers and emails for tracking tasks anymore.

My first serious exposure to plug-in programming was getting my feet wet as a Google Summer of Code student. Since then I have been getting sucked into the broader Eclipse community and taken over more responsibilities in the Mylyn project.

I am managing the project's participation in the Ganymede and Galileo release train and I am also one of the maintainers of the Java EPP package.

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

Steffen: That's easy. Mylyn.

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

Steffen: The Ganymede release is the first 2008 Eclipse highlight that comes to mind. As part of that I worked hard on releasing Mylyn 3.0 which was a major milestone for the project.

My favorite new Eclipse feature that was added last year is PDE's API tooling. It's the type of automation that makes maintaining API much easier. And it helps us ensure that we don't cause integrators problems by accidentally changing public method signatures.

I also had the privilege to be a Google Summer of Code mentor last year. Owen Ou integrated rich text wiki editing with the Mylyn task editor based on WikiText which is a new component contributed by David Green. It was great to be part of this team effort and to see the results of the project which are now being released for the first time.

I am very much looking forward to EclipseCon in March. It's always a great opportunity to meet other committers in person. This year it will be my first time to give a talk at the conference so I am extra excited.

DZone: What is your full time job?

Steffen: I am a software developer at Tasktop Technologies, which is the company behind the Mylyn project.

DZone: What do you like most about contibuting to Eclipse?

Steffen: I keep being impressed by the quality and extensibility of the platform. It's fun to work with the rich APIs and solid framework Eclipse provides. It also sets a high bar for every Eclipse project to meet the same standard. I enjoy this challenge and the positive community feedback makes it worth the effort.

DZone: Is it difficult for you to find the time to commit to Eclipse projects?

Steffen: Yes, even though I am in the great position that Eclipse development has become my day-to-day job it's still challenging at times to find enough cycles to dedidicate to Mylyn between my different responsibilities at Tasktop.

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

Steffen: As a committer, my goal is to build solid, reusable frameworks. Eclipse thrives on everyone's participation which I am supporting through my active involvement with cross-project, the EPP project and user community.

James is a DZone Zone Leader and has posted 231 posts at DZone. You can read more from them at their website.