Looking For Part-Time Groovy/Grails Work

As you can see from my LinkedIn profile, I'm an experienced Java developer (starting with 1.0 and 1.1 in the Fall of 1997), who's done some work with Groovy and Grails.  Although I love Java the Platform, I've decided (like many others I know) to gradually shift my emphasis away from Java the Language.  I've decided to focus on Groovy for now, but I can easily imagine adding Scala to my portfolio as well.
So, here's my challenge: I have the good fortune to have long-term Java work for a client that takes up most, but not all of my time.  That means that if I were to take on new Grails (or straight Groovy) work, it would have to be part-time.  That really limits my options.  If I can't find paid part-time work, I'll probably try to contribute to an existing Grails plug-in.  I already author an open source Groovy project, but it's so small that it doesn't really push me to improve my skills.
Any other suggestions?

Update: I found just what I was looking for with Wingu, a startup in stealth mode creating next generation science applications on the web.  Last week, I started working for them a day a week.  I'm looking forward to some Groovy/Grails/Gradle goodness. :)  (reference to mrhaki only slightly intentional)
By the way, if you're looking for something similar and you live in the L.A. area, I just saw a post show up on LinkedIn.  If you're not a member of LinkedIn, here are the details (PDF) on the Extremely Heavy Industries website.  I'm not familiar at all with the company, so make sure to perform your standard due diligence.

Update (Mar. 2, 2010): Things with Wingu didn't work out. :(  I'm back to looking.  This time around I'll try to do a better job of figuring out whether I can perform useful work for the client with the limited number of hours I have available.

Update (Sept. 1, 2015): I took a full-time job with CarGurus.com back in June of 2013 and I've been very happy here. If you're in the Boston area, I highly recommend it as a place to work.

Merger Madness & One Sample App To Rule Them All

VMware ---	SpringSource ---	/---G2One
		\---CloudFoundry
Terracotta ---	Ehcache
Oracle ---	Sun

With all the mergers and acquisitions happening in the Java world, I thought I'd suggest a sample app someone could build to bring them all together.

Here it is: a Grails app using an Oracle DB with distributed caching provided by Terracotta and Ehcache, all running in a VMware cloud, with deployment and management handled by CloudFoundry.  I think that covers all the bases.  I have no idea what it will do yet, but let me know if I've missed anything. :)

Note: I actually have a lot of respect for all the technologies and people involved, I'm just feeling a bit overwhelmed with all of the recent consolidation!

Attending SpringOne 2GX in October!

After much thought, I finally decided last night to register for the SpringOne 2GX conference running from October 19 through 22 in New Orleans.  The deadline for the super-early bird pricing is this Friday (July 31), so I thought I should make my decision.  I've been to talks on Groovy and Grails at NFJS and JavaOne, but I'm really looking forward to an entire conference devoted to those topics.  I hope to see you there!

Boston Grails Users' Group!

Last night, I watched an interview with Dave Klein done by Scott Davis of ThirstyHead at JavaOne 2009, in which they discussed Dave's upcoming book, Grails: A Quick-Start Guide. At the end of the interview, Dave mentioned that one of his kids had put together a site called g2groups.net, which helps people find and start Groovy/Grails user groups. I visited the site and was very excited to see that Boston has a newly formed group and that their first meeting is on Thursday! I have a conflict, but this is important enough that I plan to drop my original commitment to attend. See you there!

Grails Demo Webinar

I just found out yesterday that Graeme Rocher, SpringSource's Head of Grails Development, will be giving a Grails demo webinar on Thursday, March 19. It will consist of building a Twitter clone using Grails. I've seen similar demos at SpringOne 2008 and JavaOne and I'd highly recommend "attending" if you're interested in seeing what Grails can do.

Groovy and Grails

Since I'm interested in increasing my RAD repertoire, I've decided to spend some of my research time on Groovy and the associated Grails web app framework, in addition to Scala. One nice thing about Groovy for an experienced Java developer is that its syntax is closer to Java than Scala's, while still running on the JVM and integrating nicely with Java. While familiar syntax isn't everything, it definitely can make your first steps into a new language a little easier. Grails follows a similar philosophy to that of Ruby on Rails, a well-known "coding by convention" web app framework, but integrates with established Java technologies like Spring and Hibernate. I wish they hadn't chosen a knock-off name like that, but it still looks pretty interesting. In order to learn Groovy, I decided to buy the book Groovy in Action, after seeing a lot of positive reviews for it on Amazon. I'm also checking out various articles I can find online, including the following:

• Jeff Brown on Groovy for Java Developers
• Mastering Grails: Build your first Grails application
• Grails Framework Reference Documentation
• Graeme Rocher on the Grails Plugin Architecture
• IBM DeveloperWorks Series: Practically Groovy
• Groovy Zone (at Developer Zone)
• About Groovy

Any other suggestions for me?