Eclipse On The Street In Hackney

So I am standing on the street with my boy this morning, outside the local grocery store, watching some workmen use a digger (my son loves diggers of all shapes and sizes) when I notice someone stop on the corner and look back our way. I ignore it or don’t really take it in. A few minutes later a guy walks up and says… kind of nervously, and points to my t-shirt… “is that the Eclipse… software”. “Yes” i reply, it is. “Oh good”, he beams, and says how much he loves Eclipse- “I use it every day”. Turns out that Tim is into this weird thing called Soda, which is apparently used in scientific testing and simulation. But Tim made it sounds more like a testing game. Eclipse also has a soda acronym meaning service oriented device architecture. Anyway I am on a 115k phone modem so I can’t Google it right now, but it was fun to have a conversation with someone about tech that came from wearing a t-shirt. In Silicon Valley nobody would bat an eyelid. But in good old Hackney software is still an esoteric discipline. I really like this Eclipse t-shirt. No vendor logos. T-shirt driven marketing can certainly help if markets are conversations.