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Meet This Year's Top Committer Nominees

02.12.2009
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Paul Webster


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

Paul:I've been working in the industry for about 14 years now in C, C++, and Java, and up until I joined the eclipse team mostly on low level framework or networking applications.  I went to school in Waterloo, and currently work for IBM Rational in Ottawa.

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

Paul:I try and answer questions in the eclipse.platform.* branch of newsgroups :-)

DZone:How long have you been involved with Eclipse?

Paul:I've been working on Eclipse for almost 4 years on the Platform UI team.  I started off in presentations and workbench part lifecycle, and then moved onto actions and commands.

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

Paul:I'm quite partial to EMF+GMF (it can do cool things).

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

Paul:2008 included Eclipse 3.4, which had some new and very useful features (especially in the PDE area) and but also had some improvements to help mature the Commands Framework.  In 2009 I hope to get the chance to contribute to some of the Eclipse 4.0 work (e4) which I think has a lot of potential.

DZone: What is your full time job?

Paul:IBM employs me as a full time committer on the Eclipse Platform UI team.

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

Paul:I like working through the public bugs and mailing lists.  Communication with our downstream consumers is very important and I think that on some other software projects (especially commercial ones) it is hard to get that communication that level of communication.

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

Paul:Not in my case, no :-)

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

Paul:Ha, would you believe I don't have an answer for that except it would be a good opportunity to poke fun at Chris Aniszczyk :-)

"Starting from scratch" is seductive but disease ridden
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