Looking for a new job

There we are. January 19th was a bad day as Pivotal announced that they wouldn’t sponsor the development of the Groovy language, as well as its long time friend the Grails framework, starting from march 31st. As I was paid to work on Groovy, it has a direct consequence for me: starting from April 1st, I am for hire. For you, it probably doesn’t change much as Groovy and Grails existed before Pivotal without corporate funding.

It was hard to keep this secret for weeks, but now that everything is public, it is easier for us. I have been lucky to work full time on the Groovy language for a bit more than 3 years now. Lucky because it was both a great open-source software and my passion. I have implemented major features of the language since Groovy 1.8: static type checking, static compilation, Android support, numerous AST transformations, continous integration…​ I have given talks to various conferences, including world class ones like JavaOne, Devoxx, GR8Conf or SpringOne2GX and it was a fantastic opportunity that wouldn’t have been possible without the support from VMware then Pivotal.

However I feel that I still have a lot to do. So many things are on the list, so much to improve, like for example adding language support for asynchronous programming, improved Java 8 support, a new meta-object protocol, not forgetting, of course, bugfixes…​ I am 100% convinced that the language wouldn’t have reached the level of maturity it has without support from a company like Pivotal. And even though Java is considered mature, it doesn’t mean that the language shouldn’t continue to evolve: it is rather the opposite. People are constantly asking for evolutions, because programming models evolve too.

For those reasons, my #1 choice would be to find a new company securing the development of Groovy and Grails, that is to say willing to pay me and my mates to continue working on them. The Groovy community is huge, there are lots of companies using Groovy in a variety of domains, I sincerely hope this is possible. With more than 4 million downloads in 2014, I can’t imagine how many hours of development have been saved thanks to Groovy and Grails…​ Should you be interested in sponsoring our projects, please write to sponsorship@groovy-lang.org.

If unfortunately we can’t find third parties willing to take over the development of the language and hire us, then I would obviously be available to help you in your projects. For those of you who are looking for someone with a good knowledge of the JVM internals, I am listening. My areas of interest:

In any case if you think a profile like mine is interesting for your company, you can contact me or ask for my résumé at cedric.champeau@gmail.com. Meanwhile, rest assured that we are focused and we will soon release Groovy 2.4 to prove that!