Careful when working late - you might meet vamPeers

One thing that strikes with the Eiffel community is how much, few people have achieved.

Take Gobo, ePosix or EiffelStudio - all three packages are maintained by small determined groups of people. Much smaller groups that one would generally imagine when using them. I believe, what makes this possible in the first place is the technology itself - Eiffel.

This is my first blog post as a geek and contrary to what the introduction might suggest, I am not going to write about the technology. I think it is of more interest if I describe what I am working on as a PhD student at ETH. I hope that if I do that on a regular basis the ivory tower becomes a bit more transparent to Eiffel aficionados all over the planet and that this will eventually help to strengthen the entire community.

So let's start. At the moment I am visiting UCSB and enjoy the proximity of EiffelSoftware's headquarters. My two former students Julian and Martin are doing their internships here and we hang out together most of the time. Of course I was involved in helping to restore the backup of eiffelroom (operating a huge asynchronous backup robot can be tricky, I'll spare you the details) - but the main happening for me this week was that two students I'm supervising back in Switzerland have finished their Master theses.

Samuele Milani and Beat Strasser worked on a Single Sign On framework and a peer-to-peer framework vamPeer that I'm both using for Origo. Nobody had time yet to make a proper announcement, but if you are willing to build p2p applications - now you can!

OK, reading this through, I realize that much more has happened, but that will be for next week...