tl;dr I am a consultant now.
It's a quite late, but I did make some new year's resolutions. One was a personal fitness resolution to run a mile every workday. The other was a professional resolution to "get out there" more and contribute more to the Groovy/Grails community. For most of 2010 I felt as if I were under a rock and not able to contribute to the community more and so I've made a couple of drastic moves.
My first drastic move was to step-up my fitness routine. I have been working out 3 times a week now for a few years. This year I have stepped it up to 5 times a week. Yes. 5 times a week. My warm up is a 1 mile run.
So far this year I've managed to run one mile every weekday (I give myself Saturday and Sunday off from running). So far, I haven't missed a day. I was inspired by my son's devotion to his Cross Country training and I have set myself some small goals for my running to try and achieve over the next few years. My big goal is to eventually run a Marathon. This seems utterly absurd to say, I have so very far to go before I can do something like that. Barring any medical reasons I fully intend to achieve that goal.
My results this last month are encouraging. I started the year with a mile time of 15:44 (fifteen minutes and forty-four seconds) and I've managed to bring this down to 11:24 or so on my best day. I typically complete the mile now between 11:30 and 12:30 now. My goal is to make a 12 minute mile an easy run for me. If I can do that then I will begin increasing my mileage over time.
The other one of those drastic moves was quitting my job at a company I dearly loved working at and really respected. It was a very hard decision to make but I decided that I wanted to invest more directly in the Open Source community and open source efforts. I believe strongly in the cause of Open Software and if I believe in it I should put my whole being behind what I say. So I've joined forces with Open Software Integrators which is a young Open Software consultancy based here in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. We have a strong match for vision and attitude toward software development and I look forward to working with the team here to help companies reap benefits from Open Source software and toward making solid contributions back to the Open Source community.
There have been a lot of preparations going on in making these transitions so I've not been as active here in this blog as I intended. I have made a resolution to also post more regularly here. It was this blog that enabled me to get published in GroovyMag, create the plugins that have taught me so much about living with open source software projects, and introduced me to so many of you.
I hope that I can find a way in my new role to make a real positive impact on the open source community and fill a need that is currently under served. As always I'm open to your feedback and I find your comments valuable. I am currently looking for conferences that would be open to me speaking so your pointers will be welcome. Obviously, I can't attend them all but I will make a real effort this year.
Thank you for reading and I hope I get meet some of you in person this year too!
