2015 Candidate:
Jay Jay Billings

I think that the most amazing thing about Eclipse is the way that it has grown beyond an IDE and now even beyond the RCP. While the establishment of the Working Groups has broadened Eclipse’s reach into new areas such as automotives, science and location technologies to name a few, new projects that make the developer experience even better continue to expand the platform as a whole at an amazing rate. The way I see it, this growth is being driven by one thing: Eclipse’s amazing community.

As your committer representative I will strive to serve and help this great community by improving the experience and meeting the needs of all committers, whether they be committers from large projects with big backers or individual committers who are just starting out. For established projects, I will identify the areas where your committers are having the most trouble and help to fix or improve their experience. For committers in new projects, I will help you navigate the sea of processes surrounding contributions, releases, third party content and, perhaps most importantly, get you the help you need as fast as possible when I can not provide it. I will also work with the rest of the board to reach out to the community and clarify many rules and policies that I, as a new committer, and others find to be confusing or limiting. Finally, for everyone, I will tackle the issue of using LGPL licensed software in Eclipse projects, which is the single greatest complaint that I hear from old and new committers, since the restriction of such software slows down progress in established projects and severely dampens growth in the working groups.

I believe that community service is important and that it is the only thing that leads to healthy communities. It is clearly the reason why Eclipse has thrived. So, while I am a relatively new committer and project lead - arguably still having a lot to learn about the community myself - I am ready to serve you and I believe that I can help make Eclipse even better as your committer representative.

I am a member of the research staff in the Computer Science Research Group at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, TN. I have the privilege of leading the ten person Integrated Computational Environments Team, which focuses on the development of large-scale, next-generation modeling and simulation technologies for the U.S. Department of Energy and other sponsors. I am a founding member of the Eclipse Science Working group as well as Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s representative on its steering committee. I hold the M.S. in theoretical astrophysics from the University of Tennessee and I am currently an Energy Science and Engineering Ph.D. candidate in the University’s Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education. I stopped counting the number of scientific publications I have a few years ago when I realized that I was writing way more code than papers!

In my few hours of spare time each week, I enjoy spending time with my wife, family and friends.