Raible Designs

Rafting the Salmon River in Idaho

We are a rafting family. We solidified that when we bought a raft five years ago. Since then, we've had many adventures, on many rivers, and met a plethora of good friends along the way. We call these friends our "river family". Our river family gathers every January and chooses where we want to apply for river permits. We wait for a couple months until permits are granted. A person or two usually gets a permit granted, then the planning begins!

This year, we were granted a permit to float the main fork of the Salmon River in Idaho. We started our journey just over a week after rafting, hiking, and enjoying life in Montana. It was a long drive (878 miles / 1448 km) from our house. It took two days to drive there and we stopped in Pocatello, Idaho to rendezvous with my dad along the way. He brought our raft from Montana and we wanted to leave his truck so we wouldn't have to pay $500 to shuttle it. Yep, that's right - the trek from our put-in (Corn Creek), to take-out (Carey Creek) was so long (383 miles / 616 km) that the shuttle company charged $500 per vehicle!

We had 28 members in our river family on the Salmon. There were more children than adults, and something like 15 watercraft in total. It was epic, it was joyous, it is the source of many lasting memories. I think the kids might've even enjoyed it as much as the adults. Their "gossip circles" where a highlight for them, as was floating in their duckies, and the river romances that developed along the way.

This story is best told with Trish's photos, where you can see the many smiles, the clear water, and how the good times flourished.

Happy Birthday Jack!

Thirteen years ago today, my son was born. Jack has grown up to be a wicked smart and fun kid to be around. He started the 7th grade this year and is into Xbox, basketball, hanging out with his friends, and exotic cars. He dreams of driving a Lamborghini one day and enjoyed pretending he owned a bunch of Ferraris a few weeks back.

This weekend, I cleaned up Hefe to chauffeur Jack and his buddies to Dart Warz for an afternoon of fun with Nerf guns.

As expected, the boys had a great time. A few of his friends had a sleepover Saturday night and competed to see who could stay up the latest. They made it pretty late, but no one saw the sun rise.

My parents drove down from Montana to help revel in Jack's birthday. We had a wonderful time visiting with them and celebrating with his mom and her husband, Dave. Thanks to Julie and Dave for being such awesome co-parents!

Happy 13th Birthday Jack!

Driving, Rafting, Hiking, and Enjoying Life in Montana

I wanted to spend our summer vacation driving our VWs up the California coast, on a mammoth 3500-mile road trip over two weeks. However, when a landslide happened near Big Sur, I knew it was probably best to move this road trip from my yearly goals to my bucket list. Instead, we opted to drive to Montana and spend a couple of weeks vacationing in my childhood playground.

Our journey began with a bit of work involved. Trish's company was sponsoring a family movie night event in Sandy, Utah. We found out that my company was sponsoring as well, so we decided to take the scenic route to Montana. We left Denver at 9 pm on Thursday, June 29, and arrived in Grand Junction, CO at 2 am. Trish needed to be in Sandy for a lunch meeting, so we woke up promptly at 6 am and got back on the road.

The event in Sandy was super-fun. We enjoyed talking to customers, handing out swag, and watching the Despicable Me 3 premiere with everyone.

We high-tailed it to Montana after that, spending two days driving along scenic I-15 through Utah, Idaho, and Montana. We arrived at the Raible Homestead on Sunday afternoon.

Devoxx Poland: A Huge Conference in a Beautiful City

It's been a little over six years since I first ventured to Kraków, Poland. I have fond memories of that trip, mostly because Trish was with me and we explored lots of sites. Last month, I visited Kraków for GeeCON, but only stayed for one night.

Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting a third time for my first Devoxx Poland. I was excited to travel internationally again with my favorite travel shirt on. This caused a funny conversation with TSA just before my departure.

I arrived in Krakow on a beautiful day and took an Ubër to my hotel next to the venue. I took a stroll along the Vistula River to enjoy the sunshine.

Speaking Adventures at J-Spring, Devoxx UK, GeeCON, and Spring I/O

As a Developer Advocate at Okta, I'm expected to travel up to 25% per month to speak at conferences and meetups. This May was more like 50%! I had opportunities to contribute to a number of cool conferences in exotic cities that I was eager to accept.

My adventure began on Monday, May 8 when I flew to Amsterdam to speak at the J-Spring conference. It was the first time the NLJUG hosted this conference in several years. I marveled at the venue and especially liked the outdoor area it offered during breaks. The walk from/to the train station was pretty nice too.

I spoke about Microservices for the Masses with Spring Boot, JHipster, and JWT. Feedback I received mentioned it was a bit too fast and I crammed too much into the 50-minute time slot. I do tend to mention everything I know about topics when I speak, so I apologize for trying to cram too much in.

Farewell to the 2016-17 Ski Season

The 2016-17 Ski Season was a fun one for the Raible Family. Abbie and Jack are good enough that they can zoom down the mountain without looking back. Their preferred runs are now blacks and they're no longer intimidated by moguls. We spent most of the season skiing at Mary Jane and Winter Park, but also had some trips to Crested Butte, Steamboat, and Montana.

Angular and Cloud Native PWAs at Devoxx France

Devoxx France is one of my favorite conferences. As you might know from my post about Jfokus, I thrive on a sense of community and the memories created by conferences. Last week in Paris, I experienced a passionate community and created several memories, with many good people and friends.

I had two speaking events at the conference:

• The Ultimate Getting Started with Angular Workshop
• Building Cloud Native PWAs with Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and Angular - Part Deux

For the workshop, I intro'd Angular, had the class create an Angular application, then talked about testing Angular. In additional, I showed them a number of demos:

• Integrate Angular Material
• Integrate Bootstrap 4
• Deploy to Cloud Foundry
• Deploy to Heroku
• Continuous Integration with Jenkins
• Authentication with OpenID Connect and Okta

Update: Videos of Josh and my Cloud Native PWAs talks have been published to YouTube. Hope you enjoy!

Let the Okta and Devoxx Journeys Begin!

It's been almost a month since Stormpath joined forces with Okta. My first day at Okta was on February 27, and I was only briefly in the San Francisco headquarters. I had to fly out at noon on my second day, so I hunkered down in the Okta Pub and cranked out a presentation for a talk with Micah Silverman at the Kansas City Spring User Group.

That's right, Okta has a pub in their SF HQ. When I first heard about this, I knew it'd be a good fit for me!

Now properly fortified, I finished the presentation and headed for the airport, where I rejoiced in my clothing choices for the day.

The whirlwind of ramping up at Okta hasn't died down yet. Last week, I figured out how to authenticate with Okta's API using Spring Boot and SAML. I also got an OAuth 2.0 example working. Then I moved onto Angular and got an example working with OpenID Connect (OIDC), Okta's Sign-In Widget, and the Okta Auth SDK. I was especially pumped when I got an Angular client working with OIDC and a Spring Boot + Spring Security backend. This week, I wrote up my findings as tutorials and recorded a couple screencasts to accompany them. These will likely show up as blogs posts on Okta Developer Blog over the next few weeks.

While the first couple of weeks at Okta has been exciting, I'm more excited about the upcoming Devoxx conferences I'll be speaking at.

Next week, Devoxx US will be happening for the first time! As a member of the program committee, I promise you this is going to be a great show! We had an incredible number of high quality submissions and it shows in the agenda. I'm especially looking forward to Janelle Klein's What is Identity? keynote. I'll be doing talks on JHipster, Asciidoctor, and how NOT to restore a VW Bus.

Speaking of the bus, Hefe sure looks good, doesn't he?

After returning from Devoxx US, Trish and I are taking Abbie and Jack on the spring break trip of a lifetime. I've never been to Big Sky, so we're heading there for a week of skiing, frolicking, and playing in the snow. I might even go phoneless for the week to fully embrace the serenity that Montana provides.

I'm off to Devoxx France the following week. I'm really looking forward to this conference because my talks are all about Angular. I'll be doing a hands-on lab on getting started with Angular, as well as developing a PWA with Josh Long.

To make things even better while I'm on the road, I'm getting some work done on both VWs. We're getting Stout the Syncro painted and having a stereo installed in Hefe. With any luck, Stout 5.0 and Hefe 3.0 will be released in April, just in time for the car show season.

So yeah, life is pretty darn good right now. Let me know if you'll be in Tahoe, San Jose, Big Sky, or Paris when I'm there. I'd love to chat about authentication, open source technologies, VWs, or good beer.

A Jolly Good Time at Jfokus 2017

I like speaking at conferences. I don't enjoy the stress of creating a new talk and delivering it for the first time, but I do enjoy delivering talks, and I love the feeling after. It's even better when the conference provides an atmosphere that creates lasting memories.

I've been to many conferences in my career. A conference with a sense of community provides one of my favorite experiences. Not just for the people that attend, but for the people that speak. I've been to several conferences that provide this experience and I'm happy to say I just attended one of my favorites: Jfokus 2017.

I flew from Denver to Stockholm last Monday and performed my first talk on Testing Angular Applications just a few hours after I arrived on Tuesday. Usually, I take a day or two to recover from jet lag, but this time I figured I could clutch up and make it work. Going to sleep on the plane at 6pm Denver time certainly helped and I think the talk went well. For the live coding part of the presentation, I used the second half of my Angular and Angular CLI tutorial. I posted my slides for this talk to SlideShare and Speaker Deck. You can also view them below.

Tuesday night, there was a conference party. I met many new people and put some names to faces with a vibrant community of conference attendees and speakers.

2016 - A Year in Review

When I wrote my 2015 year in review blog post, I was certain my '66 VW Bus would finally be finished. AND IT IS! Do I need to even write this year's post? Yes, because I want to tell you how awesome it is to own this incredible-looking, awesomely-fast, mean machine.

But first, let's review the year using the following categories.

• Professional
  • Speaking
  • Devoxx4Kids
  • Projects
• Personal
  • The Ski Bus (aka Stout)
  • The Porsche Bus (aka Hefe)
• 2017

Professional

I had two different clients in 2016: CA Technologies and Stormpath. I worked full-time for CA in January and February, helping them adopt AngularJS. To help them learn about Angular 2, I rewrote my AngularJS getting started and testing tutorials for Angular 2. The first versions were published at Getting Started with Angular 2 and Testing Angular 2 Applications. I refactored both tutorials to use Angular CLI in August and published Getting Started + Testing with Angular CLI and Angular 2 (RC5). Since then, I've been maintaining an up-to-date version on GitHub.

In April, I started working half-time for CA and half-time for Stormpath. For Stormpath, I worked on their Java SDK and helped them launch their Java SDK 1.0. I really enjoyed working with the team at Stormpath. This led to me think about my priorities in life. I realized that I wanted to work remotely, get paid to speak at conferences, and get paid to work on open source. Stormpath provided me with all of these opportunities and I started working full-time for them on September 26, 2016.

In May, I joined the board of the Denver Java User Group. I've been helping organize meetups, find speakers, and secure location sponsors. If you're interested in speaking at DJUG in 2017, please let me know!