JAXenter: What are your duties and responsibilities within the Eclipse Foundation?

Christopher Guindon: I am the Lead Web Developer at the Eclipse Foundation. I often say to members of our community that our team is responsible for everything being served to your browser from Eclipse domains on port :80 and port :443. Obviously, this is not true but we do contribute to a large portion of it!

We build and maintain services and websites for the Eclipse community. We have an extensive list of web properties that we support. At the moment, I am really proud of the work that we are doing for the Eclipse Marketplace and our new API service.

The webdev team at the Eclipse Foundation currently includes Éric Poirier and myself. We work in the IT department led by Denis Roy. You probably know Denis as one of the Eclipse Webmasters and you might have met him at one of our EclipseCon events.

It’s a very exciting time to be a web developer! Tools and frameworks are evolving very quickly and it’s our responsibility to stay up-to-date to make sure that our websites are secure, fast, modern, and user-friendly.

 JAXenter: When did you join the Eclipse Foundation and why?

Christopher Guindon: I always had a passion for open source and I knew at an early age that I needed to work for a company that shared my same values and beliefs.

When I finished school, I started working for inter-vision.ca. At the time, it was a small startup that aimed to help not-for-profit organizations with open source. It was a great experience for me because I got to see first hand how a business could make money and benefit from open source. This was at a time where a lot of businesses, organizations, and governments were still hesitant to adopt open source software, mostly because they didn’t really understand it. As I became aware of all of this, I came across a job posting from the Eclipse Foundation for a web developer position. At that very moment, I knew that this was going to be my dream job. I could pursue my love for writing code and contribute to the awareness and the benefits of open source at the same time. This was a win/win opportunity for me.

It’s been five years since I started working for the Eclipse Foundation, and I still believe that this is my dream job. I love writing code, I love working with everyone at the Foundation, but most importantly, I love the Eclipse community.

JAXenter: Which project(s) do you like most? 

Christopher Guindon: I support and am passionate about all of the projects at the Eclipse Foundation but I do have a soft spot for the Eclipse Marketplace Client (MPC). MPC allows Eclipse users to discover and install Eclipse solutions directly into their Eclipse installation. The solutions shown in MPC are tailored to each user based on their operating system, Java version, and Eclipse release.

JAXenter: What does the future of Eclipse (and the Foundation) look like? 

Christopher Guindon: Back in the early days, we used to focus on Java tools, but the Eclipse Community has grown to encompass a lot more than Java alone. Now, we also have Eclipse Working Groups that are involved with geospatial, scientific research and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, just to name a few. I hope that the community continues to expand and that the Eclipse Foundation remains the home of choice for innovative open source projects.

JAXenter: Finally — Eclipse Neon. What is your favorite feature?

Christopher Guindon: PHP development tool is one of the reasons why I use and love the Eclipse IDE so much. Our team writes PHP code on a daily basis, so it’s really great to see that it fully supports PHP 7 now.

I am very happy with the new features from JSDT (JavaScript Development Tools). They now support two package managers, Bower, and npm. They also included support for Grunt and gulp tasks. Tasks are now accessible from the project explorer view and can run via launch shortcuts.

I also love the Oomph project which allows users to manage personal preferences in their Eclipse workspace. Oomph is a very exciting project for us because it’s the first project to adopt the new Eclipse User Storage Service that our team built last year. The Eclipse User Storage Service (USS) allows Eclipse projects to store user-specific project information on the Eclipse Foundation servers. The goal is to make it easy for our projects to offer a better user experience by storing relevant information on our servers.