It’s a little late for new years resolutions, but I have some promises to myself for this year strongly connected to this blog and my life as a developer. One of my biggest goals for the year is to take the next step in being a more active contributor to the groovy and grails community. To put the pressure on myself I decided to share those goals here, so here they are:

Be active on the grails mailing list

Up until now I haven’t been that active on the mailing list, and I really don’t know why that is. I’m a frequent reader and it has been of great help many times. From now on I will try to answer at least one question everyother week and ask questions for all problems I can’t find a quick answer for.

Blog and tweet more

I’ve started a couple of blogs during the years but I have never really got up to speed with blogging any time. This is something I really would like to change. So, my promise is to write at least one blog post every month about something related to Groovy/Grails.

Speaking at conferences

In december last year gave my first presentation ever on a conference at the Groovy and Grails exchange. I think I did ok and learned a lot from the experience. I feel that I have a lot to share and I’m not short of ideas for presentations. My goal is to speak at at least 2 conferences 2012 about at least 2 topics. The gr8conf call for papers is open and I have at least two talk proposals in the making for it.

Advocating Groovy more active in Sweden

3 years ago me and Leonard Axelsson founded SweGUG and we’ve had a handful of meetings since with between 8 and 20 attendees. Leonard has done a great job doing most work with organizing thoose meetings. For 2012 I will try to take a more active part in that again. I also hope that we will find someone more who would like to take an active part in this. My personal goal for SweGUG is that we should have at least 5 meeting during the year with one meeting with at least 30 attendees.

With the help of my employer FindOut Technologies I will try to give a free seminar about grails.

Contributing

I’ve written a few grails plugins for internal use during the years, but besides doing the CSS for the navigation plugin I’ve never contributed anything that’s been made public. This year I will try to write one public plugin.

I will also try to contribute to the grails documentation whenever I find something wrong or missing.

Personal

While doing all the above I will also try to spend more time off the computer. 2011 has been a great year when it comes to work and I hope that 2012 will be an equally great year but with one big difference, not that much overtime but instead spending more time with my lovely family without a macbook pro in my lap.