And before I fall into a big dark hole (because I forgot to think about what is next), I wanted to use this medium in order to thank my team. I never ever had the pleasure to work with such nice and talented people. Without them there would be nothing to release.
Usually I prefer to stick talking about the team as a whole as opposed to talking about the individuals, because the synergy is so important and needs to be emphasized. But on the other hand it's important for me that everybody knows who was involved and made this possible.
So I will make an exception this time and want thank them in alphabetical order:
Heiko (Behrens), our drummer, came in one year ago. The first thing he did was developing the Ecore model generation from Xtext grammars. He's an excellent software developer and at the same time (and that is rare) a highly skilled communicator and team player. He developed a profiler for Xpand and improved the performance of the static analysis of Xpand templates about 300%. Also he designed and implemented our nice new website.
Thank you, Heiko. I have learned a lot from you.
Michael (Clay) is one of the few people who were already active contributors to the previous version of Xtext. He worked a lot on the code completion functionality as well as implemented a textual format for Ecore models as one of the examples. I'm sorry that especially in the beginning, I was not able to integrate him enough, since we had a lot of offline discussions, which he couldn't join. Thank you for contributing (and for your patience).
Moritz (Eysholdt) joined our team in April 2008 in order to write his master thesis on co-evolution of meta models and models (he finished with 100 out of 100 points). In parallel he not only managed the support for the XSD adapter he wrote for Xpand, but wrote the serialization algorithm for Xtext. That is definitely not an easy one and he solved it without too much worry. Good to have you!
Peter (Friese), our tweeting bird, always has an eye on how the project is viewed from outside. He is not only one of the kindest people I know but is so a
ctive in the Eclipse Community, that some people even have thought that he was the founder of itemis. Thank you, for doing all that community work and spreading the word. Also thank you for coming up with the WikiText infrastructure, which we used to write the documentation.I've been working with Dennis (Huebner) for about 6 years now. He's always been a great person to work with. Last year we had serious problems with our build infrastructure. Every now and then strange errors came up and we didn't know what to do. So at some point Dennis took this thing over and managed it. It was great to see how he cared about the whole project, he fixed broken builds even at night or at the weekends. Without him there would be no release today.
Jan (Koehnlein) joined the team in February, 2008. Among all the cool stuff he did, the most noteworthy things may be co-authoring the initial design of the grammar language as well as implementing the partial parsing algorithm. Also he's the most experienced with EMF. Jan has really become a friend of mine over the past year and I especially enjoyed visiting all the conferences with him. But, Jan, please do not talk me into drinking whisky again. Thanks!
Patrick (Schoenbach) is the good fairy behind the scenes. He's responsible at any day time and when ever there was something wich needed urgent action, Patrick was there. Thank you, Patrick, I hope we can meet some day.
Knut (Wannheden) joined the team very late, but had provided a lot of useful features before. Knut is one of these seldom seen developers who look deep into the code and understands what's going on in an incredible short amount of time. Whatever he contributes is of highest quality. Good to have you.
Sebastian (Zarnekow). He is unbelievable. He joined the team late 2008. If you look at the commit statistics, you'll see what kind of productivity gain Sebastian brought to the project. From day one he cared about every single line, he reviewed every bit which was committed. On the other hand he contributed masses of code, which is between the best I've seen so far. Sebastian is propably the one with the most knowledge about the whole system and has become something like a co-lead to me. Besides other things he tought me to improve keeping discipline (still learning ;-)) and why it is important. Sebastian, you made my year.
We've just been out for lunch where I got the chance to take this nice photo (Note the name of that restaurant!). Hopefully we can convince someone to open a new restaurant or rename an existent to 'Helios' soon.Have fun (while downloading the complete Xtext distro from http://xtext.itemis.com/)!
