From the 21st to the 24th of March, 2011, I was a lucky attendee of EclipseCon 2011.

Lucky because it was my first time at EclipseCon, my first major conference in North America (it was located in Santa Clara, in the Californian Silicon Valley) and also because my employer, Compuware, agreed to let me go there, along with 2 of my colleagues.

EclipseCon 2011 was great, because

• the main actors of the Eclipse community were there : people I may follow on twitter or ask questions to on several mailing lists; the committers of the projects I use everyday at work; being able to chat with them and ask them questions (even harass them ! no I’m kidding, I did not harass Jeff during 2 days! )
• the talks were diversified and most of them were really interesting, you have below links to some of the talks I attended while there.

Attending this conference made me also realize, maybe once more, that meeting with other developers working on the same technologies, is really inspiring, motivating, and it makes you grow technically.

Ok, you got the picture, I enjoyed the conf !

Here are some of the talks I attended:

• Under the provisioning (p2) and release engineering themes,

1. p2, your savior or your Achilles heel? Everything an Eclipse team needs to know about p2 at EclipseCon 2011
2. Discovering the P2 APIs at EclipseCon 2011
3. Tycho presentation and tutorial at EclipseCon 2011
4. Next Generation Development Infrastructure: Maven, m2eclipse, Nexus & Hudson at EclipseCon 2011
5. Growing an open source project one bugday at a time at EclipseCon 2011

• Under the architecture ,  performance and OSGI themes,

1. Stop the Architecture Erosion of Eclipse And Open Source Projects at EclipseCon 2011
2. Using and Extending Memory Analyzer into Uncharted Waters at EclipseCon 2011
3. OSGi introduction and OSGi 4.3 at EclipseCon2011
4. 10 signs you’re doing OSGi wrong at EclipseCon 2011

• Under the Eclipse tooling theme,

1. Android Development with Eclipse at EclipseCon 2011
2. Getting Eclipse Preferences Under Control in Teams at EclipseCon 2011

• Other really cool talks

1. Keynote on Apache Hadoop at EclipseCon 2011
2. Virgo and RT playing together at EclipseCon 2011
3. Effective Git Tutorial

If you want my opinion, well, I’d say that Tycho, p2, Virgo, git along with gerrit, and Eclipse Memory Analyzer were predominant topics; you could definitely not ignore them.. and not like them neither !

If you did not, you’ll hear from these great technologies in the next few months !