27 December 2019

My name is Owen Thomas. I'm Australian.

One day in 1987, I picked up a TI/994a home computer collecting dust in a cupboard. I plugged it in, turned it on, and got it to do something I didn't think was smart enough to understand. From there, I quickly gravitated to C on an 8088 XT that was purchased as a birthday present the next year; an expensive gift that sent me on my way.

I started using NetBeans in 2008 around the time I began implementing a proof-of-concept (PoC) for a personal project of mine.

Previous to July 2008 I worked for IBM, Accenture, my alma mater, and the NSW Police in their computerised records keeping department. Since July 2008, I have been working exclusively on the PoC.

I am using NetBeans to develop my PoC in Java SE. Apart from the SE API, my project uses no other third-party libraries. I have so far kept my development effort small and simple.

I particularly wanted an IDE that would allow me to aggressively refactor when necessary. Before I started implementing my PoC, I had plenty of software development experience, and had realised that without being able to aggressively refactor, one's code can become entrenched in perpetuating structures that are the subject of historical ignorance. I didn't want my development progress to be slowed by my historical ignorance. At $0, NetBeans is very affordable, and I found that when I did some initial comparison with other freely available IDEs, NetBeans came out as being the most helpful and intuitive and non-judgemental.

I have been developing on a series of laptops, most from Dell. Recently, I have been investigating what will be necessary to deploy to an Android phone.

I use Git for code base version control although, as I'm the only developer, Git is serving merely as a way to manage code provenance. I do not store my code on GitHub or other third-party managed code repository.

My email is a good place to reach me. Or my phone number.

14 December 2019

My name is Yiğit Bul.

I started programming around 2004, as a student. Professionally, I started working in 2011.

I think it was second year of University when I started using NetBeans. We were all using Eclipse for Java, and struggling terribly. Especially with the GUI editor, because it was a plugin and not stable at all. So when we had an Eclipse install that had a running UI editor plugin, we used to copy and transfer it around on CDs and just hold it sacred.

Then someday, I saw that Netbeans has the UI editor integrated (I believe) and working just fine. It blew my mind and it also spread like wild fire among classmates. That's how I started :)

I've been using NetBeans for all my professional projects. I have implemented more than 50 web applications (Tomcat) and 100+s daemons, mostly back-end infrastructure for TellComm software and 3rd party User APIs. Another different project is an easy-to-use CRM platform.

Now we are working on a project for helping developers orchestrate any agent or event in their domain, positioning it as an API for BPM. Again NetBeans is the tool for web applications and daemons :)

For work I'm just using a Toshiba Satellite from 2015; does a good job with SSD and extra 8GB memory, can't complain much. Though, I hate the glossy screen...

Our products run on starter level HP and IBM servers, a little beefed up with extra memory and cores. But on cloud services like Digital Ocean and Scaleway lighter instances, usually do the job for us. Some of them are x86, some of the Scaleway ones are ARM baremetal. Never had a problem with running Java on ARM machines, to be honest.

As for other tools, I personally can't do anything without a terminal. My precious is Yakuake. When I try to do something with a PC and there is no terminal dropping down when I press F12, I really seriously struggle.

I guess DB connectivity tools are a must, for finding your way around. I do need MongoDB Compass at hand lately.

When developing an API, Postman comes really handy. Helps you group requests in workspaces, and share with team members. You can also save credentials for sessions.

One can reach me on medium as @kommradhomer. I use the same handler for Twitter and StackOverflow as well. My email address address is always available.

22 October 2019

I'm Jerome Lelasseux, I live in Toulouse, France.

I started programming when I was 13, using an Oric 1 computer; that was quite a long time ago! Since then I always loved programming. I worked on real time embedded systems for a research lab in optics, then in the automotive industry. From a software engineer at the beginning of my career, I switched to business-oriented positions and stopped programming professionally.

I started using NetBeans 7 or 8 years ago. I had already started my main hobby project, JJazzLab. It was a music desktop application in Java and I had to implement everything: window management, undo management, preferences, etc. The result was quite bad because I lacked some good practices. Then I discovered the NetBeans Rich Client Platform. I liked the marketing promise: "out of the box, the NetBeans Platform provides all the 'plumbing' for a reliable and flexible application". So I started porting JJazzLab to the NetBeans Platform. It was not easy at the beginning, but I don't regret it!

Nowadays I still work on JJazzLab and just released it to the public this September. JJazzLab is a Midi-based application which automatically generates backing tracks (a musical accompaniment) for any song. It’s a jam buddy to have fun improvising, learn new stuff or just practice your instrument. It’s also a great tool for teachers. Note that the JJazzLab infrastructure has been released as an open-source project called 'JazzLab-X'.

I develop on a Win10 laptop with Netbeans 11. I also use an old Linux computer and my wife's MacBook for testing! GitHub and Hugo for the JJazzLab website.

You can reach me via the JJazzLab website.

07 October 2019

My name is Jack Woehr. I've worked from microcode to mainframes and everything between. My professional practice nowadays is mostly IBM big-iron business systems, doing core coding in legacy languages and modernization in open source languages.

I started using NetBeans in the 1990's when it was called Xelfi. Over the years I have used NetBeans, sometimes alongside simpler text editors, to develop (among others) the following open source projects: FIJI ForthIsh Java Interpreter, PigIron Open Source Java Class Libraries for VSMAPI and Ublu Midrange and Mainframe Life Cycle Extension Language.

I also coded my wife's pottery website in PHP using NetBeans.

I'm not a tool adopter by nature. I do as much as possible with the simplest tools I can find. I found early workstation-based IDEs largely repellent, as they imposed a model upon programmer.

Xelfi and its later incarnations up to modern NetBeans mostly did not / does not impose upon the programmer. At times when the project strayed in that direction, it seemed to quickly auto-correct its course back towards simplicity and programmer freedom.

NetBeans has nothing to sell, and I appreciate that. Everything it implements tends to common sense practices. Everyone uses Ant / Maven. Everyone uses version control. Everyone appreciates syntax checking, jumping to definition / declaration, code completion. Even in this latter, NetBeans suggests completions in the least obtrusive manner of any IDE I have tried.

If NetBeans has one gap affecting me, it's lack of full-featured Python support.

I have been pushed towards other IDEs from time to time, but never stuck with me. Too large and too complex. NetBeans seems to have become a minority approach, but a critical approach for those of us who focus more on our programming than on our programming tools.

Long live NetBeans!

I can be reached by email.

29 August 2019

My name is Keith Vogel. I started programming in C in 1982 for McDonnel Douglas. I got a nice job as an intern working in the avionics lab doing some test software for the F15 fighters. My real start to my programming career was when I worked for Microsoft from 1988 – 2000. I was the primary developer for Codeview, the source level debugger for Microsoft. Later I developed the Microsoft source profiler and ended up leading the public key encryption team.

In 2012 I was working at Digilent on a joint chipKIT initiative with Microchip developing chipKIT boards using the MX series of 32-bit Microchip MCUs. I attended the Microchip MASTERs and attended their class introducing MPLAB-X, Microchip’s newly updated debugger. MPLAB-X was a very new product and needed improvement to become fully functional. I met Vincent Sheard at the MASTERs, the head of the IDE tools group, and I became a beta test for MPLAB-X. At the 2013 MASTERs conference Vincent and I presented a class on how to debug chipKIT sketches with MPLAB-X.

I wrote many of the chipKIT libraries using MPLAB-X. As well as designing and developing the hardware and software for the Digilent WiFIRE, OpenScope USB/WiFi oscilloscope, and OpenLogger a USB/WiFi DAQ each utilizing the Microchip MZ MCUs.

Currently I am working on some proprietary navigation hardware and software using a Microchip 32-bit MCU.

I have used MPLAB-X for all of the chipKIT 32-bit Microchip MX and MZ series of processors, and the MZ and MZDA for the OpenScope and OpenLogger products. I am currently using the MZ for my current prototyping. All of which is/was debugged in MPLAB-X.

I use MPLAB-X almost exclusively on Microchip’s 32-bit line of MCUs. To date that has been the MX and MZ series of MCUs. The actual PCB hardware is hardware I designed. In particular, the WiFIRE, OpenScope, and OpenLogger.

As I am developing hardware, I also use Altium for circuit design and layout, Tina for circuit simulation, Excel for analysis and plotting, and some proprietary software to interface to our hardware. Of course, the standard stuff, Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook.

I only heard of NetBeans because MPLAB-X was developed using the NetBeans IDE environment. I am not an IDE developer, only an IDE user. So, my experience with IDE development tools is limited.

I can be reached by email.

31 July 2019

My name is Koos du Preez.

I started programming quite early. When I was 11 years old, my mom owned a clothing store and I wrote her an inventory system in Apple Pascal on an Apple II.

Later I wrote an Open Source app called "myFairTunes" so I could convert my apple music to mp3 and play on my non-apple device. That was fun, until I got a cease and desist letter from Apple for the fair-use of my own music...

Around 2001 I started to use NetBeans to build a Java based GUI for an IBM AS/400 clustering software.

Currently using Netbeans to develop cross platform C++ applications for our Computer Vision and AI and robotics applications.

We apply Computer Vision, AI and robotics to create agriculture automation solutions. Our first project is a rock removal service: we autonomously fly drones and use Deep Neural Networks to detect rocks from the aerial imagery and then use semi-autonomous ground vehicles with onboard Deep Neural Network based machine vision to identify the rocks and use an electro hydraulically controlled robotic manipulator to acquire the rocks.

This is developed on Apple Mac / Ubuntu X64 based GPU Servers and deployed to Ubuntu ARM based NVidia Jetson embedded devices / ARM Debian based Raspberry PI embedded hardware.

Besides the IDE I use NVidia CUDA and CUDA compilers, Darknet/YOLO, TensorFlow.

I can be reached by email.

22 June 2019

When I was 11 years old Father Christmas 😉 delivered a brand new Commodore 64 Hollywood Edition. I had the shiny new, and what turned out to be the last revision of the iconic machine. My parents made one edict - you must learn how to program and in between games of Sid Meier’s Pirates and anything by Accolade, I did. I wrote a program spread across 6 5¼ disks that tabulated and tracked a Ten Pin Bowling league. I heard that it was still being used some 9 years later and I was paid the princely sum of 1000 Deutsche Marks for the code which started the thread that has woven my life.

Much of my career had been contracting SQL and C services to organisations such as Defence, Publishing and Government until 2004 when I was fortunate enough to become aware of Cerner Corp. They were just getting involved in the UK health care market and beginning to show what was possible with a unified architecture crossing all patient care settings, commonly referred to as the EHR (Electronic Health Record). I am with Cerner to this day and enjoying having my hobby be my means of income more than ever as an Associate Principal Engineer spanning several strands of global development, from fledgling open source projects to large closed source Java/Scala enterprise architecture and proprietary languages. The founder of Cerner passed in 2018, spoke my language - he promoted responsibility in production. Like Charles Babbage before him, a hero of mine, he believed that humanity could improve when it could compute itself. Numbers, they matter and with numbers we host for the clinical practitioners save lives. Getting out of bed in the morning is really easy with a goal that important.

I started using NetBeans in about 2012 with 7.1, 7.2 perhaps. Until the beginning of the transition to Apache it was just a tool, but as that process began and I found time in my expanded roles to start questioning what I could do to make things better - initially for me and then the engineers working with me. I was using Scala heavily and relying upon the excellent nbscala from Caoyuan Deng when he began to focus on other things, so I took a fork and began to move it forward based on the Apache NetBeans branches. I now have a little suite of plugins for Apache NetBeans that I use within Cerner on a daily basis but sadly closed source. One project I have however, that I would like to open source is a plugin that logs and aggregates statistics for applications running on the local machine. We might be lucky and I will be able to share a preview at the upcoming Apache NetBeans Day in London. I have also been getting excited by the opportunities of bare bones iOS/Android with AdoptOpenJDK, OpenJFX and Apache NetBeans.

Most of what I do is on a Mac these days, both at home and at work, I drank the juice. I have been desperate to use Haiku-OS, the excellent follow up to BeOS but at the moment it only exists inside a VM. I am shopping for something with which to do a bare metal install. I particularly like the idea of a couple of older multi-core Xeons. BeOS had a beautifully simple GUI and a super fast filesystem. Now, in a very stable x64 beta, HaikuOS is becoming a viable home development platform just in need of a good O365 extension.

You can reach me on Twitter and read my coalesced thoughts on Dzone.

19 June 2019

As a long-time daily NetBeans user, I use CoolBeans because it’s NetBeans with all the extras I’d normally need to install and configure on my own.

It is an improved distribution of NetBeans, it makes my experience as a user smoother and nicer, and I appreciate greatly that Emilian has volunteered to take this responsibility on.

You can reach me via Twitter

08 June 2019

I am a retired corporate lawyer living in Cleveland, Ohio ten yards from Lake Erie. I got into computers when I went out to buy stereo speakers and they were too expensive and I came home with a Commodore 64. That was about 1982.

In 1985 I read Byte’s review of the Amiga so I got one, started an Amiga user group and started learning to program. I began with C and was the King of prototypes for awhile as prototypes were being introduced into C.

The user group did a group buy of the only hard drive available for the Amiga. Twenty-megs and we thought we would never fill it up!

One of the members of the user group had a business connected to the internet and did a demo for the group. I started getting on the internet with a 1200 baud acoustic modem. No web, only usenet, ftp and mail.

In April 1994, I, and many others, were the first recipients of commercial spam. A couple of jerk immigration lawyers had a solicitation for clients sent to hundreds of usenet news groups (newsgroup spam). I responded to the unwanted post saying that the group (comp.system.amiga) was for Amiga users and the post was unwanted. No surprise, I got no reply.

I like languages and got really good with the Amiga Rexx language. I wrote a graphic front end to the Byte online bulletin board. I used Perl for a long time. Learned HTML from a book while on vacation. I have played around with Java, go, Swift, Visual Basic(oh well), Python, PHP and a few others.

I started using NetBeans when I had my only formal programming training -- a worthless college Java class (pun intended) in 2011. Once the class was over I stopped writing Java since what I was primarily doing was websites.

My development environment is an iMac with CoolBeans, writing PHP based websites using Bootstrap 4, CodeIgniter with MySQL databases on the backend. I use TextWrangler for text editing. I am doing one site using CoolBeans on a Windows 10 machine for reasons that seemed logical at the time.

I am a hobbyist. I really enjoy programming, but I also enjoy duplicate bridge, and gardening. I am a political junkie, but I can’t say I have enjoyed it for the last few years(WTF). I tell my bridge friends that I don’t know whether I would rather play bridge or program. I have about the same number of books for each. But programming gets me out of bed in the morning and CoolBeans is my tool of choice.

I get paid for some of the websites, but that is really more for the site owner’s peace of mind than my desire to make money programming.

These two bridge sites are created dynamically from the MySQL databases: whistclub.org and d5bridge. This weather page is a mess—much of the code is not mine and it is definitely not Clean Code.

I can be reached by email. I am always looking for bridge partners!

04 June 2019

I'm a Hungarian recently relocated to and living in Portland, Oregon. I've first encountered Java on an university project in 1996, Szeged, Hungary. It was Java 1.0.2, no modal dialog support in AWT. I did not like it at all. Two years later another university course chose Java over C, so I had to deal with it again. Java 1.1. What a surprise, correct event handling now, I fell in love! Later on Swing came by and I bumped into an ad on the net requesting alpha and beta testers for a new IDE called NetBeans. I remember that I carried the 13 floppy disks to home. I had a PC with 16mb of RAM. I had to buy 64mb next week to stop the constant swapping (I still do not know how I got the money for that.). So NetBeans and me became friends. I was considering to move to Prague for developing it after university, though my life took another turn.

I skipped the year 2000 and 2001 while NetBeans was transitioning to Sun and started using it again when it become Open Source, from 3.0. Since then I'm using NetBeans every day. I worked as a Java Developer on a few dozen projects since 2000. I've change my trade to from development to more like construction, a build engineer later on DevOps engineer, whatever that means.

I made NetBeans usable on OS/2 till it was run-able with Java 1.4.1. I've submitted patches every now and then, but became really active when NetBeans went to Apache. I think Oracle did a several unfortunate mistakes with Sun's software portfolio (Hudson, OpenOffice, the Jakarta EE case is just forming right now). NetBeans seems to be an exception here. It is more easy to contribute, to be involved. I've started with simple things, like herding JIRA issues, answering questions on the development mailing list. Then I volunteered for release manager for NetBeans 10.0 and 11.0.

Being a build engineer means I have gathered knowledge on Ant, Maven, and later on Gradle. I've started to write my own Gradle plugin for NetBeans about 4 years ago. I've contributed that work to the Apache NetBeans after 10.0 came out. I'm maintaining that piece of code since then. Support for Gradle Java EE web projects are coming as well.

I switched to Ubuntu in 2005, using that ever since. I always liked the apt package manager. NetBeans and Java Class library packages were never was consistent enough for me to use it for any other than install the JVM. Then NetBeans gave up on its own support for Debian packaging starting from 8.0. A few individuals did step up to make the netbeans package alive with more or less success. Apache NetBeans 9.0 has been left without an installer (we are working on bringing them back). In the meantime Canonical introduced Snap packages for Linux. It really fits into NetBeans "unzip and run" installs, it is just came with automatic upgrade, and easy install and desktop integration. So I moved a few rocks around and made netbeans as a Snap package happen.

If I'm not coding Java, I still use NetBeans as an editor, file manager and terminal emulator combo, to deal with my Ansible playbooks or Terraform projects. My current pain point is that NetBeans does not recognize Terraform files, and I'm probably going to do something about that, but ironing out Gradle Support wrinkles are the top priority ones.

You can reach me on Twitter or LinkedIn

01 June 2019

My name is Benjamin. I’m 30 and grew up in Hungary. I’ve been working in the finance and HR sector for nearly six years and lived in several countries: Poland, Slovakia, Croatia and currently in South-Africa. I’ve always dealt with people in my life but a big dream of mine was become a Java developer.

People always said “it’s too late to start” and I accepted it until I found my love in South-Africa and she was the catalyst who urged me to start doing Java. So I made a big decision and started learning this language giving up my old career at the end of August 2018. I am not a Java developer yet but I am programming every day since I’ve decided to change my path and found that Java is my drive, my best-loved hobby and a good therapy when I feel down.

I started using NetBeans 8 from the beginning. I tried other IDEs as well but I feel comfortable coding with NetBeans as I usually stick to the same things which gave me good impression the first time. I like using NetBeans because it’s simple and serves my need of writing code efficiently and quickly. Last but not at least I definitely like the NetBeans mailing list where people are very helpful.

I use to work on Windows laptop when I started learning Java but shortly I turned onto a MacBook Pro which made my life easier to program.

Currently I am working on my main project which is a flashcard program to help memorizing / learning previously stored expressions and words. You can add a sentence in English to a flashcard and show its translation if you can’t remember it.

Apart from this I am doing online courses and practicing with other smaller programs. I can’t wait to start working to use my freshly gathered knowledge creating real value. In the future I'll put a big focus on Apache, Maven, Spring and PHP. On top of that, I signed up for a class on how to prepare for an Oracle exam to get a certification as soon as possible.

You can reach me on Twitter or GitHub

14 May 2019

I've been working in the IT area since 1998 and have coded in a few languages in the past like Clipper, Delphi / Pascal, Java and a few lines of code in PHP and Perl. I have studied a few other languages like Lisp, C, C++ and Ruby, but only for fun. Overall, I’m an easy going person. I like to teach what I know and learn with everyone willing to teach something new.

I have never been a full-time Java developer, but every time I need to code in Java, NetBeans is my first choice.

My first contact with NetBeans was version 4. Version 4 and 5 gave me a lot of trouble as being a slow and unstable IDE, but easier to use than the competition.

After NetBeans 6 things started to change and NetBeans became, for me, the best IDE for Java development.

In 2013 I started to work in operations / infrastructure, mostly Oracle, following a path that lead me to become a Weblogic Specialist. In 2018 this changed a lot when I joined a team of Enterprise Architects and after a year working and learning about The Open Group Architecture Framework, I’m back to an operations team, using DevOps practices and doing a lot of infrastructure as code.

I'm a former emacs user, and nowadays I wish I could use NetBeans more when working with Python, Terraform, Ansible and Shell Script.

That's it.

People can reach me on LinkedIn

07 May 2019

I grew up and studied law in South Africa. In 1995, having completed my studies, I went to the Netherlands because my family is from there/here, to start a world trip before going back to South Africa to work somewhere with my law degree. However, I needed work, i.e., money for the world trip, and so got a job as an editor for computer software manuals that were written in English and needed English-language editors to review and edit them. From there, I learned on the job about software programming and then wrote books in this software company and led training sessions in their software.

After that I worked in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Vienna, and Prague as a technical writer and trainer. I was working for Coca-Cola in Vienna, on their technical documentation, as well as for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization, which is part of the United Nations in Vienna, when I heard about a job vacancy in Prague at Sun Microsystems on NetBeans. That was in 2004. I had never heard of NetBeans, or of Java, except as a competing technology for one of the companies I had worked for in the Netherlands in 1996. That's how I moved from Vienna to Prague and joined the NetBeans team, writing documentation. At the time NetBeans IDE 3.6 was being released, or had just been released. I focused increasingly on the NetBeans APIs and gave many training courses at companies around the world that base their large software systems on top of the NetBeans Platform.

With the transition of NetBeans to Apache, I became one of the people responsible in Oracle for overseeing the donation. And I am still and will remain involved with NetBeans in Apache. It's been a long and interesting journey. :-)

I like all NetBeans project types. :-) I haven't used PHP or C/C++ very much, but everything else, from Java project types, to Maven, to NetBeans module types, and HTML5/JavaScript projects, I am very familiar with.

Over the past few years, I have used mostly Mac OS. Before that, and even still, I use Windows as well, and I was an Ubuntu fan for several years too.

You can reach me on Twitter or LinkedIn

02 May 2019

The first time I saw NetBeans I was a student and some actual programmers were writing code with this awesome purple-themed IDE I never heard of.

I did manage to get it on a CD only to discover that in the NetBeans 3.5 (or 3.6) days I didn't really have a computer fast enough to run such a heavy duty professional IDE.

When I left my corporate job at the age of 26 I started working as a NetBeans Platform contractor which later on turned into a company of 5 people doing Java and NetBeans-related things.

I've coded almost exclusively on NetBeans and on vi when I'm in the terminal.

While initially I had a Windows laptop I switched pretty soon to a MacBook Pro and I'm using one to write this right now. I am probably among the few that used NetBeans so much on macOS and I started to notice early on how the IDE looked on the Retina Displays and the need for better native integration.

The Apache donation meant I spent a whole lot of time on NetBeans to get through the code review process and to finally add in some fixes that I didn't manage to get in during the Oracle or Sun Microsystems' days.

I was the Release Manager for Apache NetBeans 9.0 beta and Apache NetBeans 9.0, the first major release after the much loved and used NetBeans 8.2.

For practical reasons I created the NetBeans distribution called CoolBeans. Note that I don't consider it a fork in the same way we have OpenOffice and LibreOffice but just a distribution where I have more freedom to do some things like include a JDK with the Windows installer.

You can reach me via email or Twitter