An interview with Eclipse Orion Project Co-lead Ken Walker

Next in line for an interview is Eclipse Orion champ and former IBM JVM team member Ken Walker.

JAX - Can you sum up your JAXConf session in 140 characters?

Ken - Your IDE is a browser, clone a git repo, hack Node code remotely on a Pi, fork our components, engage in our community, code.everywhere=true

JAX - Why is the theme of your session important to developers right now?

Ken - It’s time to leverage the Cloud in your development processes. This is both the goal of using a browser as the integration point for the services that help you write code, and to leverage the elastic nature of the cloud to do compilation, test, deployment and scaling of your applications. Coding in the browser will become as natural as a desktop IDE but without the pain of workstation lock-in and configuration nightmares. Is there a lot of work to do?  Yes, but communities are forming to collaborate on all aspects of web tooling.

JAX - Why did you start coding?

Ken - I started coding during high-school in 1980.  I loved the ability to write applications that others would use, provide feedback on, and lead to subsequent versions.  I only had a few places I could code, one of which was the University by sneaking in on the weekend and the other being Radio Shack.  Nobody in the store had a clue about how the TRS-80s worked so they didn’t mind a few of us hacking on them and writing demos. I started making money writing educational software for the Commodore PET in 1981 and continue to love software development.

JAX - What in the development world (project or otherwise) is really interesting you at the moment?

Ken - I made the switch to working on browser based development tools in the fall of 2011 and I’m really excited about this area.  The whole JavaScript community is fast paced and extremely innovative.  It took me a couple of months to understand working in the cloud but I’m totally hooked now.

JAX - Who are your tech heroes?

Ken - I think initially my tech heroes were the standard ones you would expect like Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates. People who were in at the beginning and providing the hardware and software we all started to use.  Now, I’m so impressed by the efforts of Elon Musk and others to push the private Space industry forward.  So I’d say my heroes are dynamic depending on the times.

JAX - What does the future hold for Java and/or the JVM?

Ken - Having come from the IBM J9 JVM team to work on JavaScript tooling I know that there is still a significant amount of innovation happening there. Leveraging the JVM to support other languages, supporting multi-tenant cloud capabilities, native direct access to OS structures for speed, there’s a lot of opportunities here.  The JVM and Compiler teams at IBM are extremely skilled and they continue to push the envelope. 

JAX - What’s the soundtrack to your work?

Ken - I’d have to say my listening preferences are along the industrial side, dubstep and avant-garde. How could I not plug my own Butterflies & Zebras as a group that falls into the last category, pushing the acoustic capabilities of the instruments we use.  Not for everyone, and I think that’s where my musical tastes end up, not for everyone.

JAX - Would you rather fight one horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses? Explain your reasoning.

Ken - I’d rather fight the horse-sized duck.  There’s a certain skill required to assess and analyze how to tackle something that scary even if in the end you just do a flying spinning hook kick to the bill and hope it knocks that duck to the ground unconscious.  All in slow motion.