Thursday, July 07, 2011

Moving to Germany

After six years in Ottawa, working for IBM, I have decided to move back to Germany with my family. Today was my last day in the office, and on Saturday we will be embarking on a longer vacation, driving from Ottawa all the way to Vancouver, before we board our one-way flight to Germany.

We'll try to pass by Orion, AB :-)
I may be able to remain an Eclipse committer, but it will definitely no longer be my main job. I decided to join Google at their Munich office at the end of the summer, and expect to be working on web-based tools there.

Over the last year or so, I spent most of my time getting the Orion project off the ground, which is about web-based tools and how tools from various servers can work together. We are code complete for our first tech preview release, which will be announced in a few days. The goal for this first release was to get to the point where we can self-host, and the team will from now on use Orion itself to develop Orion. I've been doing this for the last few weeks already, and it's a lot of fun to never leave the browser, from filing a bug, fixing and testing it, committing and pushing the fix, and closing the bug. There is a lot of potential for Orion, and I will be closely watching its progress.

I will also try this chocolate (thank you, Steve!)
It's been a blast. I've been very fortunate to work with some of the smartest people in the industry, both here at IBM as well as in the Eclipse community.  I have learned so much. Thank you!