Meet This Year's Top Contributor Nominees

Miles Parker

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

Miles: Like a lot of developers in their early forties, I've been writing programs since I was in grade school, before there was a PC. I had to walk two miles through snowdrifts to get to the mini-computer at the library. I've been building Open Source tools for ten years; check out http://ascape.sourceforge.net/ and http://www.metascapeabm.com/

I'm in an interesting position because I bridge two worlds; social science and computer science. Software development skills have allowed me to collaborate on projects and with people that I never would have otherwise -- from archeologists to surgeons to policy wonks.

I recently moved back to the mountains and try to get away from my desk a few times a week to go skiing. And I'm gong to be a new father in March so I'll have less time to write bug reports.

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

Miles: Mostly bitch and moan. Its an important role in any healthy ecosystem.

DZone: How long have you been involved with Eclipse?

Miles: Three or four years. I first got into Eclipse because I was looking for a tool to build some next-generation tools based on DSL and MDSD technologies, and it was the only toolset that offered a functioning and well-thought out approach to that. Since then I've been mostly a tool consumer, but have been drawn more and more into the larger community. Recently, I've decided that Eclipse is the best home for some of the technology that I've been working on, so I'm working on a project proposal and hope to finally offer some actual code to the project.

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

Miles: Definitely EMF. It takes a very advanced and initially confounding approach to software development and manages to make it approachable and fun. I won't mention my least...

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

Miles: Ganymede was a really important release -- it consolidated a lot of pieces that I believe are going to emerge at the core of what Eclipse has to offer. Microsoft isn't even promising anything like the capabilities that EMF, GMF and GMT / oAW are offering today. (Still trying to figure out what Oslo is.) I'm also going to go out on a limb and say that P2 was a critical, if sometimes painful, effort and the end result is looking really good. 64-bit Cocoa has been the sweetest new thing and I've been out a bit far on the bleeding edge with that as the performance and UI are already a huge improvement over Carbon.

I see 2009 as a period of consolidation of gains and housekeeping. I'm hoping for a nice clean integration of all of the model transformation and generation stuff so that all of those mind-blowing tools become a part of the core offering. I look forward to seeing an update mechanism that is robust and flexible, but even more importantly that end-users find transparent and friendly and I think that the p2 UI team have been working really hard to make that happen. And I'm hoping that we will see a nice clean build mechanism that scales from desktop to fully automated builds for update sites and RCP.

There is functionality in Eclipse now to keep us all energized and exploring for years to come. My most frustrating days with Eclipse are the one's when I can't work with the highly-leveraged stuff because I have to do something like try to get a build working, or track down an issue with an Eclipse component that I know nothing about. As the toolset becomes more accessible, more people will begin to realize that Eclipse has much to offer way beyond JDT and I think that's going to generate a lot of new interest and a ton of really amazing, innovative stuff.

DZone: What is your full time job?

Miles: I'm the founder of Metascape LLC. We do Agent-Based Modeling tools and services; modeling social, economic and ecological systems by describing all of the interesting pieces, plugging them together, and pushing the start button. We think our approach can do a better job of representing important aspects of complex systems -- for example, financial market risk -- then the current models do, though admittedly that's setting the bar a bit low!

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

Miles: That I can point out something that is broken and have a fixed version on my desktop in two weeks for free. That beats a two year wait and thousands of dollars for Visual Studio!

But its more about what ends up in front of my end-users. I'm the only developer working on my toolset but I have the entire Eclipse infrastructure behind it. Perhaps something is confusing or could work better. Perhaps the user clicks a button and something magical happens. It doesn't matter wether it is a component of my software or of Eclipse -- it is still part of the user's experience. They really don't  care who wrote it. So the way I see it, when I write a bug report or a feature request and someone else submits code to fix it, they're contributing to my project. Its nice having all of these IBM developers working for me.

DZone: Is it difficult for you to find the time to contribute to the Eclipse community?

Miles: Its actually difficult for me to not find time to contribute. I think most of us have experienced falling down the rabbit hole of verifying a bug, spending time grokking it, reporting it, and then following the resulting thread. I have to police myself, but it is a more than a fair trade in the end.

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

Miles: I'm not sure that I should! Reading over the nominations, I was struck by how much time and effort the other nominees have put into Eclipse over many years. I do like the idea of recognizing people who don't necessarily contribute code as I think it supports the idea that everyone can contribute in a meaningful way but I'm not the only pesn who does this. My income comes through project consulting work so I don't get paid for this, but that is also true for many other contributors. Honestly, it was really gratified just to be nominated.

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