First year as ACE Associate and 2016 goals

02 January 2016

Another year is gone and as you can see in the look of the blog, I have a lot of new goals for this year :-). In short, 2015 has been a quite good year, with interesting projects in Brazil, business trips to cool cities as London, Paris, Krakow, Barcelona or Lisbon. Also time to mature the team, learn new technologies and evolve our solutions. But now it's time to look to the future. Goals for 2016:

DevOps, DevOps, DevOps: in some way, I have been involved in DevOps all my professional life. Jumping from development to project management to system administration depending of the needs of the moment... the only things has been always there are Oracle Comms and how much I like to work with Linux, scripts, deployments and so on. I worked with Solaris Zones (precursor of Docker) and proposed to Vodafone in 2008... 8 years ago! And because of this, I'm always more focused in development and/or product/project management: those areas are not so natural for me and there is more room for improvement. Well, this has to change. There are a lot of new stuff now related to that and I want to learn more. This will mean start to use sshoogr (Ansible-like but using Groovy), improve our Docker and Amazon AWS usage and, most important of all, integrate everything to work smoothly.
Groovy as center of our universe: Groovy is becoming a very important part in Oracle Comms Services Gatekeeper and Oracle Comms WebRTC Session Controller. We've embraced this change, and now we are working with Gradle for deployments and with Spock for unit and integration testing. Also, as you can see, I have migrated the blog from Octopress to Hexo to JBake, a blogging framework based in Java and Groovy. It's cool to publish your post using gradle :-)
Became even more fluent with Java: I have started to use Intellij Idea and learn the shortcuts, read some books as Netty in action, made three Android courses in Coursera and more activities. I have to continue focusing on this, it's not easy because most of the development I'm able to do is out of the office in pet projects, training or peer reviews. I have been working with Java since 2007 but the only way to continue being fluent in a language is practice, practice, practice...
Oracle Comms and ACE: Become ACE Associate has been a great achievement. Also the participation in different events with Oracle Comms, launch this blog, write some articles, videos and other stuff. I'm quite happy but there is still a long way...
Improving the team: our workflow is effective but there is a point we have to improve: it's quite complex for newcomers. That's the reason I've started a new book in Leanpub titled Development workflow for agile teams focused in our workflow. This should help to solve the gap.
Don't use the mouse: yes, I'm a vim fan and a linux user. My goal is just stop to use the mouse for all the task I do. I feel quite confident with Intellij Idea now and the IdeaVim plugin, Firefox vimperator for browsing and the Linux console for most of the tasks. My main problems are with the email, calendar and some webs as Waffle and Feedly...
A pet project: that's something I have been looking for some time without luck. I would like to build something using Java/Groovy and WebRTC, working with others in something not too complex to start with / greenfield. Well, I hope 2016 is the year for this.

That's all! Happy and prosperous 2016!!.