Dr Alex Blewitt has been developing Java applications since version 1.0 was released in 1996, and has been using the Eclipse platform since its first release as part of the IBM WebSphere Studio product suite. He even migrated some plug-ins from VisualAge for Java to WebSphere Studio / Eclipse as part of his PhD in Automated Verification of Design Patterns. He got involved in the open source community as a tester when Eclipse 2.1 was being released for Mac OS X, and then subsequently as an editor for EclipseZone, including being a finalist for Eclipse Ambassador in 2007.

More recently, Alex has been writing for InfoQ, covering generic Java, specifically Eclipse and OSGi subjects. He was the keynote speaker at the OSGi Community Event 2011 on the past, present, and future of OSGi. The coverage of both new releases of the Eclipse platform as well as its projects and video interviews with some of the Eclipse project leads can be found on the InfoQ home page; for this, he won the Eclipse Top Contributor award in 2012.

Alex currently works for an investment bank in London. He also has a number of apps on the App Store through Bandlem Limited.

Alex blogs at http://alblue.bandlem.com and tweets via Twitter as @alblue regularly and is the author of Eclipse 4 Plug-in Development by Example Beginner's Guide, Packt Publishing.