User Spotlight - Frederic Ebelshäuser
What do you do?
I am a Software Engineer at Yatta in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Before I started at Yatta, I was working as a consultant for a number of eCommerce projects. As project lead, I am responsible for Yatta Profiles, an app allowing you to save, share, install and update complete Eclipse and Workspace setups. I am also a committer for Eclipse Oomph.
At Yatta, we work with Eclipse ourselves and we started developing Profiles because we wanted to make developers’ lives easier. Since Oomph was already great, we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel entirely: Profiles is based on Oomph, but unique, because you can share and update your Eclipse Workspace setups with just a single click. This is a huge benefit, especially for development teams working with the same Eclipse Workspace setup.
How long have you been using Eclipse?
I started using Eclipse in one of my first university classes, back in 2004. In the meantime I have tried Netbeans, IntelliJ and also Visual Studio (if necessary), but eventually I came to love Eclipse and I’ve been using it ever since.
Name five plugins you use and recommend:
My first recommendation is of course Yatta Profiles. It has become absolutely essential to my own work and will soon be available for you to use. I can provide a working Eclipse setup to new team members by just sending them a link. If there is an update for our Eclipse setup (for example a completely new plugin), I can roll out the update at the flick of a switch.
- qwickie: I am a big fan of the Apache Wicket framework. Qwickie provides Apache Wicket integration in Eclipse, so it has to be on the list.
- M2e: This is actually more of a pet peeve of mine, but M2e provides good Maven integration – and Maven support is absolutely essential for a modern IDE.
- Tycho: For developers who use Maven like me, Tycho is a vital plugin – I can’t think of any better alternative.
- Findbugs: Although I don’t use Findbugs every day, it always offers good clues to track down source code weaknesses.
What's your favorite thing to do when you're not working?
If I am not working, I train to make a 10 km run in under 42 minutes again. I also like taking short trips to European cities. It’s quite possible to meet me for breakfast in Barcelona on a Sunday morning. As I usually don’t bring my runners, it will probably take me some time to beat 42 minutes.