User Spotlight - Jay Jay Billings
What do you do?
I am a research scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and I am a computational physicist in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division. I work on high-performance computing simulators for energy science and I lead the development of the Eclipse Integrated Computational Environment. I also squeeze in as much interaction as possible with the Eclipse Science Working Group.
How long have you been using Eclipse?
The first time I used Eclipse was in 2006 and I used it lightly thereafter until late 2008 when I started using it regularly. I've always been fascinated by it and I really buy into the philosophy behind it. I have a serious nerd crush on the Mars release because it is *so* well done.
Name five plugins you use and recommend:
This is hard to do with all of the projects that are part of the simultaneous release these days. Let's see:
- Moonrise: A dark theme for Eclipse. I like it better than the Eclipse Dark Theme because I think it has a better color balance and interaction with the color schemes on older versions of Linux, like RHEL6.
- The Eclipse Advanced Scripting Environment (EASE): I just recently learned about EASE, which is technically an Eclipse project. It gives you a scripting environment in either Javascript (Rhino/Nashorn) or Jython that gives you direct access to the platform and other services.
- PyDev: An absolute must for anyone doing Python development and it includes some things for python development that are more common in editors like SublimeText, such as a graphical, vertical outline next to your code.
- TeXlipse: I write a lot of scientific documents in LaTeX and Texlipse is the best LaTeX editor I have found because of its strong integration with both LaTeX and the rest of the workbench.
- SonarQube: We use SonarQube to track various aspects of our code quality and it has some really great support in its Eclipse plugin for tracking issues in our SonarQube database.
What's your favorite thing to do when you're not working?
Get out and about! :-) When I am not working I always try to get out on the town and separate myself from work, whether it be by hitting the gym, kayaking or attending community events.