How do you approach learning new technology? Google it? Buy a book? Go to training? Start using it for your work?
Well, I figured that the answer to that would depend on the technology itself. And although I bought a Grails book, and spend sometime googling and building little Grails POC projects, and actually used it for work, I still felt that something is missing, that there is that gap between me and Grails.
That is when I discovered that the best way to learn Grails, to understand its guts, is to contribute to it.
Normally, in order to get a commiter status to a mature open source project you would have to open lots of JIRAs, provide many patches, donate many ideas, etc… In case of Grails, it is actually extremely easy and fast. Here are three easy steps to see you code posted on “grails.org”:
- Come up with a cool idea that is not yet implemented
- Package your idea into a grails plugin
- Ask uber grails developers for an invitation to join the club and a permission to release your idea to the world
For more logistics refer to the official grails create plugins guide. But that is really it! That is how easy it is to join Grails developer community, and grow from a Consumer to the Creator.
I got lucky and saw a live presentation by Jeff Brown at Groovy on Grails One Day Seminar in Philly. That is when I got excited, and started to work on my own plugin during the seminar’s hackathon. Two days later I had a 0.1 version of plugin commited to github, three days later released it to grails.org. Just think about it – three days from scratch, and you can become a creator of an official Grails plugin – how cool is that?
Now go and create that plugin!