James Daugherty and Mattias Reichel Named 2026 Grails® Community Rock Stars
February 3, 2026
The Grails Community is thrilled to kick off 2026 by recognizing two outstanding volunteers for their exceptional contributions. As we continue to build on the momentum from Grails 7 and look ahead to future innovations, it's community leaders like these who drive the framework forward.
This year, we're proud to award the Grails Community Rock Star honors to James Daugherty and Mattias Reichel. Both have demonstrated unwavering dedication through code contributions, build improvements, documentation, plugin development, community support, and leadership in advancing Grails. Without their thousands of hours of volunteer work, Grails 7 and the successful transition to The Apache Software Foundation would not have been possible.
Mattias Reichel
Mattias Reichel has made significant impacts across key repositories, including grails-core, grails-spring-security, grails-redis, grails-static-website, and many more. His technical contributions span critical areas of the framework, from security enhancements to performance optimizations and modern tooling integrations. He brought deep historical knowledge of the framework's architecture and design principles to help guide our work.
Mattias played a crucial role in Grails 7 development, contributing to dependency updates, build system improvements, and feature enhancements that strengthen the framework's foundation. His work on Geb, Gradle, Develocity, and GitHub Workflows moved all of those areas significantly forward.
As a volunteer contributor, Mattias consistently supports the Grails community through thoughtful code reviews, comprehensive testing, and detailed issue reporting. He actively participates in technical discussions and weekly community meetings, offering insights that shape the framework's direction. His ability to identify and address edge cases, propose feature improvements, and open well-researched issues in grails-core demonstrates both technical depth and a user-focused mindset.
Beyond code contributions, Mattias helps maintain the project's infrastructure and documentation, ensuring that the Grails ecosystem remains accessible and welcoming to developers at all levels. His collaborative approach and willingness to mentor others make him an invaluable community member.
We're deeply appreciative of his passion, technical excellence, collaborative spirit, and leadership in making Grails stronger for everyone.
James Daugherty
James Daugherty has been a pivotal force in the Grails ecosystem, particularly in driving Grails 7 development. His technical expertise shines through in numerous contributions to grails-core, asset-pipeline, grails-quartz, grails-github-actions, grails-gradle-publish, grails-website, and many more, including critical updates that make the framework modern and robust.
James played instrumental roles in Grails 7.x releases, streamlining dependencies, enhancing performance, fixing critical issues, and supporting features like reproducible builds, SBOMs, and the comprehensive build system overhaul. His deep understanding of the framework's architecture enables him to tackle complex challenges that benefit the entire community.
As a volunteer leader, James exemplifies how leadership naturally emerges from dedicated contributors. He serves as a caring and supportive steward of the technology, guiding technical discussions to productive outcomes even when opinions differ. In community channels like Grails Slack and mailing lists, he provides guidance on migrations and integrations, answers user questions with patience and clarity, and actively mentors developers navigating complex scenarios.
James' contributions extend far beyond code, demonstrating exceptional leadership and character in fostering the project's success. His efforts boost productivity across the ecosystem and position Grails for long-term success. We're deeply appreciative of his commitment to both the codebase and community, making him a true Grails leader and an invaluable teammate.
Thank You, James and Mattias!
On behalf of the entire Grails community, thank you, James and Mattias, for your passion and tireless dedication. Your contributions in code, collaboration, and innovation make Grails stronger for everyone. You are true Grails leaders and invaluable assets to our community. Please keep up the fantastic work!
We invite the entire community to join us in congratulating James and Mattias. Share your thanks on the mailing list, GitHub, Grails Slack, LinkedIn, or X.
If you're inspired to contribute to Grails, check out our contribution guidelines and help shape the future of the framework!