Well, I started 2012 with list of tech goals for 2012, and since it’s Jan 1st, it’s probably time for a small retrospective to see how I went.

  • Grails 2.0 Deep Dive. Did ok on this one. I’ve spend most of the year working full time on a big commercial Grails application, and this year I definitely levelled up my commercial development. In particular, I’ve done a lot of work with evolving schemas in a deployed commercial product using the db migrations plugin, written a truckload of Spock tests, and applied some tricky corner cases in Spring Security Active Directory integration. Also did lots with the new Resources plugin, and had plenty of fun with Elastic Search.  Somewhere in there I wrote the first half of Grails in Action 2nd Ed, and am looking forward to knocking off my remaining chapters early this year. In terms of going deeper, have really enjoyed reading Burt’s hardcore book, and Jeff and Graeme’s new book should be out soon too..
  • GUI Applications. I had a couple of Swing client projects slated for this year, but only one of them happened. Turns out Swing was just as complex as I remembered it :-). To be fair, if Java SE had the Events stuff from CDI built in, I think I’d find things a lot more attractive.
  • Integration Testing. Did some tinkering with Geb this year, but didn’t really make it to the place where I wanted to get to. Need to circle back on this one this year.
  • JBoss. Yes indeed. Really connected with our local Aussie JBoss folk this year, and they are an awesome bunch. Really strong hacker culture in that org, right down to the grass roots. Going to be doing a lot more with them in 2013 and really looking forward to connecting up with a few more of the players in that space. And to play with Arquillian in anger.
  • MongoDb. Didn’t happen this year. I’m really excited about the schemaless model of Mongo, just didn’t come across a project this year that would have had significant benefit from it. Might be time to cook up a hobby project in 2013, just to get dirtier hands.
    So, overall, I learned a ton this year, but didn’t really end up targeting the area I thought I would. All part of the journey, eh?

In the next post, I’ll outline what’s on my learning list for 2013. But I’m still stewing on what I’m going to commit to… but I think the theme will all be around “lean” and stripping things right back to basics.

Hope you all have an Amazing 2013 filling the world with awesome software!

Glen.