2008 Candidate:
Robert Day

I believe that a common technology can unite many different worlds, and that technology is driven and developed by a community rather than a single entity. It can bring partners and competitors closer together and it can span across many different markets and types of product development. I believe that Eclipse has many characteristics that will allow it to become that single common enabling platform. The huge and growing ecosystem of companies and technologies that surrounds Eclipse, coupled with a business model that allows companies to build and sell better products will continuously evolve and enhance the technology and its applicability to more and more developers.

My world has been that of embedded device development, and I see many synergies between the software development tools from embedded and the enterprise/desktop worlds that could bridge the gap between these two areas. I also see that by using a higher level of abstraction when designing systems, then hardware development and software development could also be more closely united. Eclipse certainly has the flexibility to allow these typically disparate entities to unite making the developers more productive and allowing tool vendors to integrate more effectively. I would like to encourage more collaboration between companies and their technologies that have traditionally been focused in their own domains or markets and to explore new solutions (or Eclipse projects) that will ultimately increase the productivity of developers.

I earned a Bachelors degree in Computer Science. My first role was programming SCADA systems (RTL/2 on a PDP-11), and then moved into programming the embedded parts of those systems in assembler and Pascal. I changed career path and worked for Microtec Research, where I developed some of the early versions of the famous XRAY debugger. I found that I enjoyed explaining the technology and products as much as developing them so I moved into a technical sales role, and spent my time explaining compiler optimizations, and demonstrating the first IDE for embedded development (MasterWorks). My career for the last 10 years has been marketing, where I help bring new software products to the embedded world. I have been very active in promoting both Eclipse and Eclipse based products with both Mentor Graphics and now LynuxWorks. I have chaired the Eclipse embedded workgroup for the last 4 years and have been focused on how to bring the embedded software world together under the common standard platform of Eclipse. I have written many Eclipse articles and papers for embedded publications, and have presented Eclipse papers and chaired Eclipse discussions at the last four Embedded Systems Conferences and EclipseCon 2007.

Articles:

• Eclipse as a common IDE
• Shared future
• Eclipse: software development environment in the firing line