Erich Gamma, TweetDistinguished Engineer at Microsoft

Biography: Erich Gamma

Since 2011 Erich Gamma is a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft in Zurich. Previously he worked at IBM Rational Software's Zurich lab. He was the technical lead of Rational’s Collaborative Application Life Cycle Management effort. Previously he was the technical lead of Rational Team Concert. Erich was the original lead of the Eclipse Java development environment and was one of the leaders of the Eclipse project. He is also a member of the Gang of Four, which is known for its classical book, Design Patterns - Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. Erich has collaborated with Kent Beck on developing JUnit, the de facto standard testing tool for Java software, and on writing the book contributing to Eclipse: Principles, Patterns, and Plug-ins.

Twitter: @erichgamma

Presentation: TweetThe Journey of a Large Scale Application Built Using JavaScript/TypeScript, Node, Electron & 100 OSS Components at Microsoft

Time: Tuesday 09:00 - 09:50 / Location: Effectenbeurszaal

Having spent over twenty years on developer tools I was convinced that Eclipse is the last development tool I work on. I was wrong.

It all started five years ago as an experiment to see what is possible when it comes to developing in the browser using modern JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Five years later we have shipped Visual Studio Code a new smart code editor that is extensible, open source, and runs cross platform.

Code is now a 350k+ TypeScript application built using web technologies on top of the Electron shell, Node.js and uses hundreds of open source components. It is fascinating to see how many things have changed since working on Eclipse. It was a fun and interesting journey.

In this talk I look back on this journey, describe the design and technology decisions, the pivots, and what we learnt along the way.