Mickael Istria

Red Hat

What do you do?
I work for Red Hat. I mainly take care of the continuous build of JBoss Tools and JBoss Developer Studio, and improving the tools and process to increase productivity of other people in the team. Out of that, I write some code for JBoss Tools, and I contribute to some Eclipse projects that are relevant to our use-cases.

How long have you been using Eclipse?
I just checked and found the origin of my involvement in the Eclipse community, while I was doing my master degree internship. So it's been already more than 6 years, I feel old!

Name five plugins you use and recommend:

• FindBugs: is by far the most useful Eclipse plugin for any Java developer after JDT. It adds some extra rules to Java file analysis to detect bugs as you're typing it. It's really something that saves you a lot of time and that allows you to learn better ways to code. Simply essential.
• Jeeyul's Eclipse Themes: I like colors! and especially since I deal with several workspaces, I like them to have different colors. This plugin is perfect for that, it provides some cool color themes (such as the Hello Kitty one) and allows to define you own color theme very easily just by picking colors.
• Groovy-Eclipse, apparently now part of GGTS: I like Groovy to write multi-platform scripts in a syntax similar to Java. For a Java developer, it's often easier than bash, and you can write Groovy scripts and directly execute them without having to compile or package stuff. It's so easy to write bugs in script/dynamic languages that you need a good tool to do that efficiently. Groovy-Eclipse is that necessary tool for Groovy hackers.
• EclEmma: Getting and monitoring code coverage becomes a trivial task with Jacoco and EclEmma. It can be used to identify parts of code that are not covered by tests, but also by real usage so you can deduce which useless lines of code you can get rid of.
• JBoss Tools: without being corporate here, I had the opportunity to really use JBoss Tools for a personal project using Jave EE parts (JPA, Jax-RS) on an application server running on OpenShift and write a dummy JSF web frontend for web and mobile + an Android client application, and I didn't expect it to be easy to set up environment and develop Java EE applications. All that becomes straightforward with JBoss Tools.

What's your favorite thing to do when you're not working?
There isn't just one... All year long, spending time with my girlfriend, friends and family. In winter, skiing and snowshoe hiking. In summer, skydiving, hiking and outdoor volleyball.