User Spotlight - MÉlanie Bats
What do you do?
I work as a software developer at Obeo. In my daily work, I mainly focus on the development of modeling tools with Sirius like UML Designer. I am also involved in several research projects to work on the future of modeling tools, such as the Gemoc project.
Finally, I participate in conferences and recently started publishing blog posts to promote Sirius and other tools we are developing at Obeo.
How long have you been using Eclipse?
The first time I used Eclipse was about ten years ago, when I was at university. At the beginning, Eclipse was just a good, free Java IDE to me, but then through my different professional positions, I started making some modifications to Eclipse by developing new internal tools to solve business specific issues. It was great, since I love developing tools that improve other people's daily work.
However, all of these tools and modifications were kept proprietary, which didn't meet my desire to work on open source and contribute code in the open. Obeo gave me exactly that: continue to work on Eclipse related tools, but in the open source world. Today, I develop plugins released under the EPL license and available on Github, such as UML Designer. My work is available for everyone and since the code is available it can inspire others to develop new things on top of what I initially contributed.
Name five plugins you use and recommend:
- Sirius: It is a great tool that allows you to easily create graphical modelers as we did with UML Designer, Arduino Designer, Dart Designer... I encourage you to have a look at the Sirius gallery. It is amazing to see what you can create with it. Yes, I am a bit corporate, but I truely believe in it ;)
- JBoss Tool Usage: I saw this plugin during an EclipseCon NA talk and it was a revelation. I did not use this plugin directly, but it inspired me to create "my own" to collect some useful information on UML Designer users (with their consent) in order to better understand their behavior and improve my tool!
- Target platform DSL: This DSL saves me so much time when creating and maintaining my target platforms, I just use it on all of my projects! It's a must have!
- Baseliner: An interesting draft plugin to help you manage your plugin versioning at development phase.
- Buildroot plugin: Some promotion here ;) This is not a plugin I use every day, but I develop it in my spare time. Its purpose: to properly integrate, in CDT, the cross compilation toolchains generated by Buildroot.
What's your favorite thing to do when you're not working?
In my spare time, I am used to being an open source activist by organizing and participating in free software events in the Toulouse area. Besides, you are all welcomed to participate to the next EclipseCon France in Toulouse organized by the foundation on June 24-25 ;)
I also enjoy having good time with my family. We love skiing in the Pyrenees during winter time and going to my native region, the Landes, for surfing and sailing during summer.