20+ Years of Tools Development – and still loving it…

Having spent over twenty years on developer tools I was convinced that Eclipse is the last development tool I work on. I was wrong… The story continued seven years ago as an experiment to see what is possible when it comes to developing in the browser using modern JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Seven years later Visual Studio Code is a popular code editor that is extensible with lots of extensions, is open source, runs cross platform, and supports many languages. It is fascinating to see how many things have changed since working on Eclipse. It was a fun and interesting journey, where we sometimes have gone full circle. In this talk I look back on this journey, describe the design and technology decisions, the pivots, the circles, and what we learnt along the way. Finally, I look forward where we want to go from here.