Raible Designs

2025 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 16:15:01 -0700

What a year 2025 has been! From Trish's continuing recovery to Abbie's graduation and Jack's 21st birthday, from epic summer travels to family gatherings across the country, this year has been filled with gratitude, growth, and gorgeous moments.

From last year's review:

I have only one goal for 2025: be grateful.

This goal felt crucial given Trish's injuries at the end of 2024. Her wrist and ankle healed gradually, and by spring she was back to skiing and living life to the fullest. Watching her resilience and determination reminded me to be grateful for our health.

I'm gonna review 2025 using the following perspectives:

Personal

We kicked off 2025 with an incredible family trip to Puerto Rico in early January. Trish went to high school there and had been wanting to take me for years. Abbie, Jack, and my parents all joined us for the adventure. We celebrated my mom's 75th birthday before we left. She's a queen!

The island was everything Trish promised and more. We explored Old San Juan and El Morro, hiked through the El Yunque rainforest (the only tropical rainforest in the U.S. National Forest System!), and kayaked through bioluminescent waters in Fajardo. The trip was paradise, and Trish reconnected with her roots. You can read more in my Paradise in Puerto Rico blog post.

The 2024-2025 Ski Season

The ski season started slowly due to Trish's injuries and a lack of snow. I didn't get out for cross-country until mid-January after we returned from Puerto Rico. My stats for the year: 10 days of cross-country and only 7 days downhill. Not my best season, but every day on the snow contributes to my happiness.

My first day on the slopes wasn't until February 8th, when I skied with my good friend, Matt Good (aka the Professor), at Winter Park. In March, our nephew James visited for spring break, and we hit the slopes together.

You can read more in my Farewell to the 2024-2025 Ski Season post.

21 Years with Hefe the Bus

April marked a special milestone. Twenty-one years ago, I bought a 21-window VW Bus minutes after DU Hockey won a national title. Hefe has been part of countless adventures since then.

Today, 21 years ago, I bought a 21-window VW Bus minutes after @DU_Hockey won a national title. I'm pumped they're trying for another one this weekend! https://t.co/X2emVbkoN8 #GoDU #VWBus #HefeTheBus pic.twitter.com/9OPwjZeGPw
— Matt Raible (@mraible) April 10, 2025

Jack's Internship Search

In April, I shared Jack's search for a summer internship on LinkedIn. The response was overwhelming and heartwarming. Jack is a junior at CU majoring in information science. He just got a job scouting college basketball teams and gathering stats. He's really excited for the opportunity!

Nuggets Playoff Game

In early May, we had a blast at a Nuggets playoff game with the family. Game night was so much fun!

Game night with the family was soooo much fun!! 🤩 #GoNuggets pic.twitter.com/U4jmLad6Tu
— Matt Raible (@mraible) May 4, 2025

Abbie Graduates!

In May, Abbie graduated from the University of Colorado with her degree! We couldn't be prouder of her accomplishments. She had already secured a job as a Product Analyst at Spectrum after an amazing summer internship in 2024. The future is bright for our girl!

Abbie moved back in with us after graduation, bringing her adorable pup Gracie along. Having both of them home has been wonderful, even if Gracie does wake me up every morning for walks!

The Summer of Travel

This summer was absolutely epic. We were only home three weekends between Father's Day and the last day of summer! I wrote a whole blog post about it called The Summer of Travel (2025 Edition), so I'll hit the highlights here.

I moved up to Fraser for the entire month of June with the zoo (two dogs and a cat), enjoying the Fraser River Trail daily. Those Fraser sunsets never get old.

Father's Day brought the fam together for gorgeous golf at Pole Creek. The kids got me a "Best Dad Ever" t-shirt that made me a little emotional.

We rafted Ruby Horsethief Canyon (it took us 8 hours to go 8 miles on day two - next time I'm bringing a motor!), enjoyed Blues From The Top in Winter Park, and loaded up our Suburban for the entire month of July in Montana. My parents' place hosted 15 people for the 4th of July celebration!

We moved to The Last Best Place for the month of July! ??#Montana pic.twitter.com/KQri4NSuT9
— Matt Raible (@mraible) July 1, 2025

The annual Pirates at the Pumphouse rafting trip on the Colorado River never disappoints. Captain Trish commanded Pepples through the rapids like a pro.

Stout the Syncro made it to Del Norte for Rhythms on the Rio and BusCamp. Ed, Karen, Bridget, and the Professor joined us for the weekend of VWs and music.

Next, we headed to Cape Cod, where Trish was in her happy place with family. We celebrated Joe's birthday at New Seabury and enjoyed happy hours on the Spit. Then we moved on to Little Sebago Lake in Maine to visit with Kidder and Norm, my pledge class brothers from 1992!

The highlight of the summer was a five-day raft trip through Desolation Canyon on the Green River in Utah. Dawn, Erik, Chris, Brice, and the whole gang made it unforgettable. We had a wet start but the weather turned gorgeous. This is the kind of trip that reminds you what really matters: time with loved ones, connection with nature, and nights spent under the eternal stars.

We returned from rafting and went straight to Red Rocks the next night for Billy Idol. Trish and Jen are huge fans!

Jack Turns 21!

We headed to Vegas in late August to celebrate Jack's 21st birthday in style. We gifted him five laps in a Lamborghini at Dream Racing on the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Watching Jack drive that Lambo around the track was pure joy.

The Professor and Dr. Laura joined us for Smalltown for the Cause in Salida afterward. We enjoyed excellent bluegrass music. As summer wound down, we made it back to Fraser to catch the fall colors.

Jack even got a job working Broncos games for ESPN, and we spotted him on TV!

Abbie's 23rd Birthday

In November, we celebrated Abbie turning 23. She's adjusting to life as a young urban professional and bringing joy into our lives every day. Her company has been treating her well, from yoga on Tuesday mornings to golf lessons on Wednesday afternoons. She even got to play in a tournament at Arrowhead Golf Club!

Thanksgiving in Montana

For Thanksgiving, we flew to Montana for quality time with my family. My parents hosted, and we spent the week visiting with great friends, cooking, enjoying the sauna, playing pool at Mike and Mai's, relaxing, visiting local shops, and soaking up mountain time together. My Dad had heart surgery the week before Thanksgiving to put in a cow valve in his heart. He sometimes moos now. 🐮

December Skiing and Winter Fun

December brought snow to Colorado and family time on the slopes at Winter Park. We like to embrace fun, and Abbie joined us by buying a onesie too!

Christmas in Naples with Trish's Family

We wrapped up the year by heading to Naples, Florida to spend Christmas with Trish's family. After all the mountain time, the beach was a welcome change of scenery. The weather was perfect. Sunny and 75 degrees. Our kids got golf clubs for Christmas, so we played golf a lot. We also visited the Revs Institute (an incredible automotive museum), enjoyed many spectacular sunsets, and had quality time with the whole McGinity Clan. All 15 of us, plus three dogs!

You can see more photos from our Thanksgiving in Montana, December skiing at Winter Park, and Christmas in Naples in the Winter Begins 2025 album on Flickr.

Hefe the Bus and Stout the Syncro

Our beloved VWs continued to bring adventure and joy this year. In April, Stout the Syncro saved my life on the way up to Winter Park. I was cruising along in 2WD when the rear wheels started slipping on black ice. We started drifting at 70 mph, first to the left, then to the right, and eventually sideways. As we headed toward the guardrail, I thought, "Oh my, this is going to hurt!" That's when we hit ice again and the back end flipped around. We went down into the ditch backwards and landed with no harm done. The dogs barely noticed.

Stout also loved camping on the Colorado River for Pirates and posing for photos under the spectacular starry night.

Stout made the trip to Del Norte for Rhythms on the Rio and BusCamp, looking magnificent against the Colorado backdrop. The VW community came out in force, and it reminded us why we love these vehicles so much.

Hefe the Bus had a quieter year after his clutch went out at the end of 2024. I wasn't able to get him into the shop until just before we left for Montana in June, and didn't get him back until late September. By then, we'd missed most of the summer shows. But he's back on the road now and ready for adventures in 2026!

The year ended on a high note when Hefe was featured in the Readers' Showcase of the February 2026 issue of Hot VWs magazine! It's an honor to have him recognized by the VW community in one of the most respected magazines in the scene.

Professional

Professionally, 2025 was my first full year at CrowdStrike. I continued to work on developer.crowdstrike.com, creating blog posts, sample apps, and improving documentation about Falcon Foundry, Fusion SOAR, and Next-Gen SIEM. I got the opportunity to speak at Fal.Con 2025 in Las Vegas, which was nicely timed with Jack's birthday celebration.

The work has been rewarding, helping developers understand how to leverage CrowdStrike's APIs and SDKs. I've learned a tremendous amount about cybersecurity, Python, and the Falcon platform. I appreciate the opportunity to work with such talented people at one of the top cybersecurity companies in the world.

Community

I continued my role as co-lead of JHipster, helping shepherd the project through several releases throughout the year. We shipped JHipster v8.10.0 in March, v8.11.0 in May, and ended the year with the v9.0.0-beta.0 release in December. The community remains strong with consistent downloads and active contributions.

On GitHub, I had 2,935 contributions in 2025, with 44% dedicated to code review, 42% to commits, 13% to pull requests, and 1% to issues. I contributed to CrowdStrike's Foundry sample repositories and 73 other open source projects. It's gratifying to see JHipster continue to thrive after all these years. 🤓

The Denver JUG meetings continued regularly, providing a space for Java developers in the Denver area to connect and learn. Even though I wasn't traveling to conferences as much, staying connected to the local community remained important.

2026

Looking ahead to 2026, I'm excited about what's to come. Professionally, I want to push deeper into the Falcon platform's capabilities and help developers solve harder problems. Getting back on stage at Fal.Con and a few other conferences would be the icing on the cake.

Personally, we're looking forward to more adventures. We hope to visit the Ski Chalet frequently throughout the winter and spend the summer riding, rafting, and visiting friends and family in our favorite places. We're heading to the second weekend of Jazz Fest in New Orleans in the spring!

I have only one goal for 2026: live fully.

Living fully means showing up for every moment, whether it's a powder day at Winter Park, a raft trip on the Colorado, seeing live music, or a fun evening at home cheering for the Nuggets with Trish. It means saying yes to adventures, absolutely to friends, and investing in community relationships by showing up. At this stage of life, with the kids building their own paths and our freedom to explore, I want to squeeze every bit of joy and meaning out of each day. Yes, Trish, it’s time for your RV dreams to come true.

I'm grateful Trish is back in the game. Proud of Abbie for launching her career and Jack for chasing his passion. Thankful for family time in Montana and Florida, for gorgeous Colorado and our mountain retreat, and for friends who join us on the slopes, rivers, and at concerts.

If you'd like to stay in touch, please connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on Flickr where I share photos from our adventures.

Here's to 2026! 🥂

Happy Birthday, Abbie!

Matt Raible — Fri, 7 Nov 2025 15:57:57 -0700

Abbie turned 23 this week and is adjusting to life as a young urban professional. She moved back in with us to save on rent, which means we got two new roommates: our daughter and her dog. They both bring a lot of joy into our lives.

Gracie likes to wake me up with a lick on the face at 6 a.m. sharp. She barks at me when I don’t walk her by 8. It’s been good for my mornings, but it can be rough on the weekends.

Abbie's company has been treating her well, from learning opportunities to yoga on Tuesday mornings, to Rockies games with her team, to golf lessons on Wednesday afternoons. She even got to play in a tournament at Arrowhead Golf Club as part of a work event!

This week, we celebrated with a family dinner at A Perfect Landing on Wednesday, then capped it off with the Broncos game last night.

Happy Birthday, Abbie! I’m looking forward to shredding the slopes with you this winter! ⛷️

The Summer of Travel (2025 Edition)

Matt Raible — Wed, 29 Oct 2025 16:23:41 -0600

This summer was filled with beautiful views and remote work from the mountains to the sea. We were only home three weekends between Father's Day and the last day of summer! From living in Fraser for a month to rafting Utah's remote canyons, Montana family time to music festivals, we packed it all in.

Fraser Living in June

I kicked off the summer by moving up to Fraser for the entire month of June. I brought the zoo (two dogs and a cat) with me. The Fraser River Trail became my daily escape, with gorgeous views and warning signs about a local moose. We got a new singletrack trail too, which made the mountain biking even better. Those Fraser sunsets never get old.

Father's Day Golf and Family Time

Father's Day weekend brought the fam together for a hike and some gorgeous golf at Pole Creek. The kids got me a "Best Dad Ever" t-shirt that made me a little emotional. Pole Creek really does have the best views with Byers Peak in the background.

Ruby Horsethief Canyon

Rafting season began with a trip to Ruby Horsethief Canyon on the Colorado River. The first day was beautiful with stunning red rock canyons and perfect conditions. The second day? The worst day of rafting ever. The winds were so strong we and many others had to stop for an hour or more. It took us 8 hours to go 8 miles. Next time, I'll bring a motor.

Blues From The Top

Blues From The Top in Winter Park brought the music and the wildflowers. Daisy was in her element—literally in the daisies. Trish's Dad visited, and we enjoyed hanging out all weekend listening to blues at elevation. The stage setup with the mountain backdrop is hard to beat.

Montana for the 4th of July

We loaded up our suburban and drove to Montana for the entire month of July. My parents' place was home base, and we had 15 people celebrating the 4th together. Abbie and Gracie even marched in the Condon parade!

We explored Holland Lake with views of the Mission and Swan Mountains, hit up Glacier Park from the north, and generally soaked up The Last Best Place.

Pirates at the Pumphouse

The annual Pirates at the Pumphouse rafting trip on the Colorado River is always a highlight. Chris's pirate ship never disappoints, and Captain Mama Tried was in full effect. Great friends, epic river, unforgettable times.

Rhythms on the Rio and BusCamp

Stout the Syncro made it to Del Norte for Rhythms on the Rio and BusCamp. This year they added a community lounge, which we immediately put to good use. The VW scene came out in force, and the music was stellar. Ed, Karen, Bridget, and the Professor joined us for the weekend. Nothing beats good community, excellent music, and tasty beer along the Rio Grande.

Parker Brewfest

I volunteered at the Parker Brewfest with Erich and Ryan for A Bit Twisted in early August. Nothing like serving great beer to happy people all day. Cheers!

Cape Cod and Maine

Next up: the East Coast. We headed to Cape Cod where Trish was in her happy place on the water. We celebrated Joe's birthday at New Seabury, spent happy hours on the Spit, and then moved on to Little Sebago Lake in Maine. Completely different vibe from Colorado, but that's exactly why we love it. Have water? We'd like to visit!

Desolation Canyon

This was the big one: a five-day raft trip through Desolation Canyon on the Green River in Utah. We had a wet start but the new motor on the boys' boat was smooth as silk. The weather turned beautiful on day two and stayed that way. We found old homesteads in the middle of nowhere, the Swifties serenaded us, Starlink even worked on the river (of course it did), and the breakfast crew kept us well-fed. Dawn, Erik, Chris, and the whole gang made it unforgettable. This is the kind of trip that reminds you what really matters.

Billy Idol at Red Rocks

We returned from rafting and went straight to Red Rocks the next night for Billy Idol. Trish and Jen are huge fans, and Red Rocks always delivers.

Las Vegas - Jack Turns 21!

We headed to Vegas to celebrate Jack's 21st birthday in style. We gifted him five laps in a Lamborghini at Dream Racing on the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Trish got behind the wheel of a sweet 911, and watching Jack drive that Lambo around the track was pure joy. Vegas Birthday Crew for the win!

Smalltown for the Cause - Salida

The Professor and Laura joined us for Smalltown for the Cause in Salida. We stayed at a very convenient Airbnb a 1/2 block from the venue. The bluegrass was excellent!

Fall in Fraser

As summer wound down, we made it back to Fraser to catch the fall colors. The leaves were peaking in Winter Park with a fresh dusting of snow on the mountain. The mountain sunsets kept delivering right through October.

Jack even got a job working Broncos games for ESPN. We spotted him on TV within the first few minutes of the broadcast!

Looking back, I'm exhausted just thinking about it all. But that's the thing about summer, you have to make the most of it while it lasts. We certainly did. Our rigs got plenty of miles, the dogs got plenty of adventures, and we made memories that'll last a lifetime.

I hope you get a chance to enjoy fall, football, and the Halloween season! 🎃

You can see the full photo album about our Summer of Travel on Flickr.

Happy Birthday, Jack!

Matt Raible — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 12:36:26 -0600

It's hard to believe Jack is 21 today. He had a summer internship writing code for an outfit in the UK and now has a part-time job at CU. He switched his major from trying to get into the Engineering school to Information Science. He still plays basketball quite a bit, but also has a new favorite person in his life: Alex.

They've known each other for a couple of years, and they became a couple last November. She's into photography, skiing, and Jack, matching our family values quite well. They spend so much time together, we call them Jalex.

I visited Jack in Boulder this morning to give him some birthday cards and the mini keg of Fireball his grandma gave him. He sure is a handsome fella!

Happy Birthday, Jack! We can't wait to celebrate with you in Vegas in a couple of weeks! 🥳

Farewell to the 2024-2025 Ski Season

Matt Raible — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 09:47:22 -0600

The 2024-25 ski season was a bit delayed due to Trish's injuries and a lack of snow. I didn't even get a cross-country day in until mid-January, shortly after we returned from Puerto Rico. My stats for the year: 10 days of cross-country and only seven days downhill.

My first day on the slopes wasn't until February 8th, when I skied with my good friend The Fesser.

In March, our nephew James visited for his spring break. We had a beautiful afternoon on the Fraser River Trail before hitting the slopes the next day.

James inspired Trish to try skiing for the first time since she broke her ankle and wrist in October. She found it didn't hurt at all, except for the $200/day price tag, because she pushed her pass to next year. We had a lot of fun times with friends in March and April. These are typically our best months for snow in Colorado, and this year didn't disappoint. We experienced many powder days at Winter Park and Mary Jane.

We traveled up to Winter Park for our last weekend of ski season a week ago. On the way up, I had quite the experience. I wrote about it on Facebook the next morning:

I'd like to thank Stout the Syncro for saving my life last night. As I was leaving Idaho Springs, the roads were dry and I had it in 2WD.

A mile before I turned off for the Winter Park exit our rear wheels started to slip and all of a sudden we're drifting at 70 mph on I-70.

First to the left, then to the right, and eventually sideways.

As we were heading towards the guard rail, I thought, "Oh my, this is going to hurt!"

That's when we hit ice again and the back end flipped around. We went down into the ditch backwards and landed with no harm done. The dogs barely noticed.

A tow truck stopped to help us out as we had just passed him. He wasn't necessary.

I put it in 4WD and drove out. Yeehaw! 😁 ❤️

The corduroy that morning was epic!

Trish and I both had our Nuggets gear on that day for their first playoff game. We thoroughly enjoyed their victory that afternoon!

The highlight of the weekend was seeing a couple of moose walk by while we were hot tubbing. Click on the image below to watch a video of the event.

This was the first season that we didn't ski with Abbie and Jack. I guess they're finally all grown up. 🥹

For more ski season photos, see my 2024-25 Ski Season album on Flickr.

Paradise in Puerto Rico

Matt Raible — Sat, 1 Mar 2025 16:49:37 -0700

My parents live in northwestern Montana, where the winters are cold, and seldom does the sun shine. To combat the winter doldrums, they have an affection for "chasing the sun" trips in mid-winter.

Trish went to high school in Puerto Rico. She has fond memories of her family, friends, and equestrian competitions there. I've been begging her to take me to Puerto Rico ever since we met almost 15 years ago.

This year, she finally took me! Abbie, Jack, and my parents joined us for the grand adventure in early January. My mom's 75th birthday landed on the weekend before we left. We celebrated with much pomp and circumstance! 🎊

We had a direct flight from Denver to San Juan that took just under six hours. Our hotel, Isla Verde, was conveniently near the airport and the beach.

When staying at a resort, Trish and I like to start our vacations with a pool day. The kids and my parents liked the idea of relaxing in the sun. Trish had only been walking for two weeks because of her ankle. The swimming, mermaid floatey, and Fernando the enthusiastic pool host made for a fun day.

That evening, I introduced Jack to blackjack at the hotel casino. We walked to a nearby casino for better luck and gambled until the wee hours of the morning.

Wednesday was full of exploring. We drove our rental van to see El Morro, a legendary fort from the 1500s, and marveled at its history.

That evening, we dined at Marmalade and were amazed by the cuisine and service. The bill was incredible too. We didn't expect to set a personal record. 😅

Thursday, we ventured to El Yunque National Forest. It's the only tropical rainforest in the U.S. National Forest System.

We hit the club with the kids that evening.

Friday was our last full day in Puerto Rico, and Trish saved the best adventure for last. A night kayaking trip in Fajardo's bioluminescence bay! It was a bit challenging to see the water sparkling because of a bright half moon, but we were grateful for the light as we paddled through the narrow canals to get to the bay. Jack and my Dad never saw any colors because they didn't realize splashing was required. The rest of us giggled with delight as the streaks of light formed while splashing. The guides put tarps over the group to help suppress the light of the moon.

We woke up Saturday refreshed and proud of the new memories we had created. Puerto Rico was fabulous and often felt like paradise!

Trish had a ball reconnecting with her roots. She started chatting with her high school crew again because of the trip, and she already has her next trip to Puerto Rico planned. Spending a week with family on vacation is wonderful, and we look forward to the next chasing-the-sun trip!

For more tropical photos and a few videos, see my Puerto Rico 2025 album on Flickr.

2024 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 08:44:59 -0700

Last year brought a few challenges and misfortunes. From changing companies to broken bones, Trish and I learned more about ourselves and our abilities than we ever anticipated. I had seven months off from the beginning of February through the end of July. Trish returned to her passion for horses and started competing near the end of my funemployment. A few months later, her saddle malfunctioned, and she found herself with a broken wrist and a broken ankle.

From last year's review:

I only have one goal for 2024: breathe.

I had plenty of time to breathe, so this turned out to be an excellent goal. Whether it was on the ski slopes or mountain biking, I had lots of heavy breathing in the first half of the year thanks to a nice severance package and a zest for adventure.

I'm gonna review 2024 using the following perspectives:

Personal

The year started with a trip to Cabo San Lucas. Trish and I have a friend with a condo down there, so we joined them for a weekend in mid-January. I stayed the following week, working remotely. Another friend flew in, and we golfed on some of the most beautiful courses I'd ever seen: Palmilla and Solmar. Both were all-inclusive, which I didn't even know existed. It basically means that all drinks and snacks are included. On Sunday, we went deep-sea fishing and caught a couple of Marlin. You haven't experienced forearm pain until you've spent 45 minutes trying to reel in a huge fish. The first one got away at the end, but we successfully landed the second one.

Shortly after, my funemployment began.

I started looking for a new gig in April. Since finding a job is often about who you know, not what you know, I flew to Atlanta for Devnexus and networking. There, I attended the JUG Leaders Summit and the Java Champions Summit before the conference. I spoke about micro frontends with JHipster and stayed for the speaker festivities after. You can read about this experience in A Delightful Trip to Devnexus.

The following week, I did a marvelous road trip to the Utah JUG in Stout the Syncro. I skied at Copper, mountain biked at Fruita and Moab, and skied at Snowbird and Alta before my talk. Then, I hit Steamboat and Winter Park on the way home.

We attended our niece's graduation from Michigan in May, watched the Nuggets lose to the Timberwolves in the playoffs, almost won a fowling (bowling with a football) tournament, and my job search started heating up. At one point, I had 15 interviews in one week and interviewing felt like a full-time job.

We did some fun rafting trips on the Colorado River in June. Our rafting family didn't win any permits in the lottery, so there were no week-long trips.

I wrote about our ski season in late June. My only trip outside the Rockies was to a friend's birthday celebration in Sugarbush, Vermont. The conditions were less optimal than I'm used to. When it snowed a foot on the last day, the power went out and the lifts didn't work. 😅

July brought a trip to Montana, my 50th birthday celebration, and Trish started competing with horses again. I started a new job with CrowdStrike at the very end of the month. You can read about these happenings in Life Update: New Job, Same House, and Same Awesome Family!

Jack turned 20 in August. He didn't try out for the CU basketball team, but still plays a lot. Near the end of the year, he made things official with a love interest and is experiencing a whole new range of emotions.

Abbie celebrated 22 in November. It's her senior year at CU and she shocked us over the Christmas break by breaking up with her boyfriend of five years. Her puppy, Gracie, has been a good emotional support companion.

Hefe the Bus and Stout the Syncro

We rested Stout the Syncro again for most of the year, save for my Utah JUG road trip and a weekend adventure to Rhythms on the Rio in southern Colorado. They had a VW-only camping section right next to the stage, which made the community aspect all the more enjoyable.

Hefe the Bus kept truckin' along. He didn't win any trophies at VWs on the Green this year, but we still had a great time.

We did a cruise to Red Rocks with the Colorado VW Bus Club.

And I replaced our mailbox with something more stylish.

Professional

With a new job at CrowdStrike, most of my time was spent getting up to speed on cybersecurity and CrowdStrike's Falcon-related products. I created developer.crowdstrike.com (powered by Hugo) in my first month. I've been practicing Go and Python and published two blog posts:

I've started working on screencasts too, but none have been published yet.

I studied for and achieved a CCSK (Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge) certification. I also got my CCFA (CrowdStrike Certified Falcon Administrator) certification last week, but technically that didn't happen in 2024.

Speaking

According to TripIt, I took 13 trips to 15 cities in two countries. Only two trips were for conferences: Devnexus and KC/DC. Normally, I'd say they were work-related, but since I was unemployed at the time, community-related is probably a better term.

Community

I continued helping the Denver JUG find speakers and a venue for our meetups. We switched to meeting in south Denver, at Thrive Centennial. This was mostly my decision because they have a larger room and it's closer to my house. We return to Thrive Cherry Creek when the Centennial location is booked.

Projects

The main open source project I worked on in 2024 was JHipster. I became a project co-lead in the spring, mostly to help do releases in a timely manner. JHipster had 10 releases and ~2 million downloads in 2024 (up 700K from 2023). Our most downloaded release was JHipster 8.7.3 on November 1st. We started updating and releasing blueprints before announcing releases.

I love the new website we published on August 28th and releasing JHipster 8.8.0 (with Spring Boot 3.4 and Angular 19 support) on Christmas Eve was a nice way to end the year.

2025

Professionally, I'll be writing (and helping others publish) more blog posts about CrowdStrike's Foundry, Fusion, and Next-Gen SIEM. I might speak at a conference or two. I've submitted to a couple of CFPs and got accepted, but getting approval to speak has been a challenge. As one of the top cybersecurity companies, we traditionally make our documentation and tutorials only available to customers. When folks talk about our APIs and (open source) SDKs, it's at one of our Fal.Con conferences.

My leadership team would prefer I do talks and workshops about Foundry, Fusion, and Next-Gen SIEM. Since these are products we sell, I feel like any talk I'd do about them would be a vendor pitch, even if I live-coded the whole time. This is a no-go for most developer conferences. It should work nicely for Fal.Con, though. And that might be all that's required since it sells out every year.

Personally, our big family vacation already happened with a visit to Puerto Rico in early January. I'll write about that in a blog post shortly. Abbie graduates from CU in May and starts her career this summer. We'll be celebrating, supporting, and planning some adventures with her when she moves back in. We hope to work remotely from Winter Park in June and Montana in July. We figure if we can work East Coast hours, we can have some fun rafting/biking/golfing adventures in the afternoons and evenings.

I have only one goal for 2025: be grateful.

I have a lot to be thankful for with an awesome family, a gorgeous place to live, adventurous hobbies, and fun VWs to drive. And, Trish got us VIP tickets to Dead & Company at the Sphere in May! She started following the Grateful Dead in the 90s with multi-day shows and wanted to finish her long strange trip in a similar fashion.

If you want to stay in touch, please connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on Flickr.

Life Update: New Job, Same House, and Same Awesome Family!

Matt Raible — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 09:31:40 -0700

It's been over eight years since I wrote a life update blog post. At that time (2016), we'd just moved into the "Raible Ranch", the bus was finished, and the kids were in high school. I'd just started one of my few-and-far-between full-time jobs at Stormpath.

Fast-forward to today. Our kids are in college at the University of Colorado during the Coach Prime Era, we're empty nesters with an affection for live music, and our pet zoo is cuter than ever.

You probably know me. But in case you don't, my name is Matt Raible, and I'm married to a fabulous woman named Trish McGinity. She's been a hero in my life ever since I met her in 2010. She dazzled me so much, I asked her to marry me at Versailles in 2011. We married in my hometown (Condon, Montana) in 2013, on the most beautiful lake you've ever seen.

When I met Trish, I was an independent consultant, and she was in cybersecurity sales. On a fateful night in 2010, on a friend Jarvis's birthday, I asked her what she had done for a living. She said, "Have you ever heard of OWASP?"

My heart lifted and I felt a moment of joy. This woman was speaking my language! 14 years later and Oh My!, Trish has had an incredible influence on my life and career.

You might think of me as the AppFuse guy, the JHipster promoter, or some dude who talked about Okta a lot. I'm cool with that, but it's irrefutable to say that Trish hasn't influenced my career. She encouraged me to lean into cybersecurity and constantly said I was "doing it wrong" with my carefree attitude toward security.

These days, I'm a Senior Cloud Engineer at CrowdStrike, the foremost cybersecurity company in the world. My previous gig was with Okta, where I spent seven years educating developers about OAuth and OpenID Connect.

I'll admit, I had a lot of anxiety about joining CrowdStrike. In late June, after enjoying funemployment, I had three excellent offers from FusionAuth, Yugabyte, and CrowdStrike. It's the first time in my life that I've had more than one offer at the same time.

The first two opportunities were excellent. But, both had maybe equity. As an old fogey in the twilight of my career, I thought guaranteed equity was a better opportunity. I chose the company trajectory over my passion for open source and Java. I accepted the CrowdStrike offer on July 3rd as we were departing for a 4th of July trip to Montana.

At that time, I felt totally confident about my decision. I was taking the path less traveled and abandoning all my Java celebrityism for a skyrocketing company that was kicking ass and taking names. You're supposed to do things outside your comfort zone, right?

Take the road less traveled.

I was a little worried about the equity though. After all, CrowdStrike's stock price was at an all-time high.

I turned 50 on July 16th. We hosted a backyard party at the ranch the weekend before (July 13th), complete with a local Grateful Dead band. Shakedown Street was excellent and everyone had a good time.

The Incident

On my birthday, while blowing out candles, I wished for CrowdStrike's stock price to drop.

On Friday (July 19th), I woke up to more unread texts than I received on my milestone birthday. A lot of friends were aware that I'd accepted a new job at CrowdStrike and were texting me about an incident.

Apparently, CrowdStrike had just caused a worldwide computer outage. If you were flying that day, you were probably affected. I received more text messages that morning than on my birthday.

My response was positive: this situation will be very good for my equity grant's strike price!

I quickly realized that CrowdStrike was way bigger than I originally thought. There were computer issues at the golf club I ventured into that morning. Their systems were down and they apologized. I smirked, apologized back, and mentioned I recently accepted a job offer from CrowdStrike.

I started working for CrowdStrike on July 29th. 10 days after the incident. I quickly realized that making developers aware of CrowdStrike wouldn't be a problem. Everyone knew about us because of July 19th. In a sense, it was a blessing in my DevRel journey at CrowdStrike.

I worked at Okta for seven years and there were a couple of incidents. CrowdStrike's response was waayyyy different than Okta's.

First of all, CrowdStrike's incident wasn't a breach. It was a bug that they shipped. It was totally their fault. Okta had a full-on breach that they didn't disclose for a month. Regardless of the incident details, as a tech worker for said company, it's a severe morale hit when it happens to you.

That's been one of my biggest struggles. I was extremely proud to join CrowdStrike as a Senior Engineer. Heck, I passed the coding test using Java, and they were a Go shop! When this all happened in June, I was so proud of my non-traditional path to excellence in the tech industry.

I wasn't hired as a senior engineer who cranks out code, maintains functionality, and implements new features. Instead, I was hired as a "Senior Engineer - Cloud" that's focused on DevRel. I'm still a developer advocate, but my title indicates I can still sling some code.

I've been coming up to speed on Go and Python as fast as I can. I've also been doing a lot of CrowdStrike Foundry tutorials, finding/fixing issues, and improving our learning materials as fast as I can. I even published my first CrowdStrike blog post!

Get Started with Falcon Foundry

Now that I've filled you in on the life of Matt Raible, I feel like I've ignored the best parts of my life: Trish, Abbie, and Jack.

Trish continues to excel as the Head of Cybersecurity Communications at Empower. Yes, the Empower that has the naming rights to the Empower Field at Mile High where the Denver Broncos play. We haven't experienced box seats yet, but we're still hopeful. Trish is the star of her team, and it's her favorite job, ever. She's delighted at the fact that I'm asking her if SIEM and SOAR are acronyms or just fancy industry terms.

You're probably wondering if we're evil parents at this point. You've learned about Trish and me, but what about the kids, the pets, and our parents? I mean, this is a life update after all!

The kids are doing great. As a casual blogger, I still managed to post about both of their birthdays this year. Jack and Abbie are thriving!

They're still in school at CU Boulder and enjoying the Coach Prime Era. Abbie's a senior and already has a job. That's quite an accomplishment, and we're very impressed!

Jack's thinking about dating. He didn't try out for the CU basketball team, but he's still interested in making it happen.

The pets are currently spoiled. Trish's best friend, Caroline, has moved in. She takes the two dogs (Daisy and Kai) on daily walks. I tend to like the same activity, and they're very good at pretending it's their first walk of the day with both of us!

Our parents are thriving too! I recently attended Trish's Dad's 85th birthday celebration. He's doing splendid and likes to swim and play tennis daily.

My parents are still loving life in Montana. A friend of theirs has a photo trap set up for wildlife on the homestead. He captures some amazing photos! Check out his website for more fabulous shots.

Trish has more to her story. She's experienced some of the most extreme ups and downs of her life. In July, shortly after we celebrated my birthday, we spent a week in Estes Park. The reason was simple: she wanted to compete in a horse show and I wanted to support her, explore the nearby trails, and visit the local breweries.

We decided to make her lifelong dreams come true and leased the most kick-ass horse she could find. His name is Athos, and he was the horse she competed with in Estes Park. He's 18.2 hands tall, which means he's 6' at the saddle. Trish is only 5'1". They won Reserve Champion on their first collaboration!

Trish and Athos were a match made in heaven. Until they weren't.

A month ago, Trish fell off Athos after a jump in a training lesson. It was a tack failure while demoing a new saddle, and the stirrup strap slid right off. She almost saved it, but proceeded to fall and injure herself badly in the process. When I met her at the ER (Emergency Room), her pain level was 9.5/10 for her wrist and 3/10 for her ankle. She broke both her wrist and her ankle in the same accident. It wasn't Athos' fault, but rather a faulty stirrup bar.

Since this happened, we've learned I'm a terribly grumpy caregiver, she's had her wrist surgically repaired, and her ankle had surgery a week later.

Breaking two bones at the same time really limits your mobility. I wouldn't wish it upon anyone. Trish is optimistic that she'll compete with horses in the future, but she's also realizing it gets harder as you get older.

What's Next?

Trish, Jack, and I have all had midlife crises this year. Trish cranked things up a notch to be a world-class eventer with horses, then got hurt. Jack was going to be an aeronautics engineer, then took a helicopter flight over Glacier National Park and changed his mind. I abandoned all my Java experience and chose CrowdStrike, a Go and Python shop.

Abbie's a senior in college and already has a job. I think she's winning the family badass contest!

We have no idea what's next. But we're proud of Abbie for securing her first job.

As for the rest of us? We'll figure it out. Raibles and McGinitys are known for thriving in the face of adversity. 💪😃

For a photo and video experience of our summer adventures, see my Summer Adventures 2024 album on Flickr.

Happy Birthday, Abbie!

Matt Raible — Tue, 5 Nov 2024 19:37:36 -0700

Abbie turns 22 today and is thriving through her senior at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Happy Birthday, kiddo! 🥳

She's enjoying the Coach Prime Era and has even secured a job after she graduates. This summer, Abbie had an internship at Spectrum in DTC. It went so well that she got an offer to be Product Analyst in August and accepted it a few days later. She's living the good life and we're extremely proud of her!

Abbie is also a Dog Mom as of Mother's Day. Her Mom and Grandpa helped make it happen and we got to re-experience the challenge of living with a puppy this summer. I thoroughly enjoyed watching Gracie playfully attack the older dogs on our walks. 😅

Gracie moved in with her cousin when Abbie moved back to school. It's been a bit quieter around here since then. We can't wait to reunite with them over the holidays.

Happy Birthday, Abbie! We love you and your zest for life!! ❤️

Happy Birthday, Jack!

Matt Raible — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 22:23:57 -0600

Jack is growing up fast and today marks his 20th birthday. He's a sophomore at CU and loves to play basketball. In early July, we made a trip to Montana where he learned how to wakeboard and took a helicopter ride with Abbie and Baba (my dad).

He amazed us with his perseverance on the basketball court and at the gym this summer. He frequently exercised six hours a day! This could be one of the defining years of his life if he walks on to the CU basketball team. Either way, his dedication to the craft is awe-inspiring. He's in the best shape of his life. I'm impressed!

We believe in you, Jack. Happy Birthday, awesome one! 🖤💛

Farewell to the 2023-2024 Ski Season

Matt Raible — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 09:30:45 -0600

This year's ski season was delightful! This was largely due to our acquisition of a new condo in the mountains, lots of free time to ski, and some epic powder days with friends. I achieved 30 days of skiing, with 19 being alpine and 11 being cross-country. The season started for me on October 30 when we got enough snow to go cross-country skiing in our backyard.

We didn't make it up to the mountains for downhill skiing until mid-December. That's when we closed on our condo, nicely coinciding with Trish's birthday weekend.

Happy Birthday to my winter-loving Wonder Woman, @TrishPhoto! 🎉❤️ pic.twitter.com/1Ec60gLlN4
— Matt Raible (@mraible) December 17, 2023

I started my Funemployment experience on February 1st and spent the following week in Winter Park, skiing with glee and my newfound freedom. I skied nine days in February, mostly during the week.

In March, I flew to Vermont and went skiing at Sugarbush for a friend's birthday.

We frolicked in Winter Park and Steamboat during Spring Break.

I threatened to not purchase the kids' ski passes for next year if they didn't ski four days. They both fulfilled that obligation in April and we had some fun family weekends on the slopes.

I did a marvelous road trip to the Utah JUG, hitting Copper, Snowbird, Alta, and Steamboat along the way.

We celebrated our final weekend of skiing with a tailgate in the parking lot at Mary Jane on Saturday and a bluebird day on Sunday.

Now we're in the dawn of summer and I'm excited for car show, mountain biking, golf, and rafting season. Hefe looked smashing at the VWs on the Green car show in May!

It's showtime at VWs on The Green! 😃 #vwotg #vwbus #HefeTheBus pic.twitter.com/VG0QcEgvYF
— Matt Raible (@mraible) May 19, 2024

I especially like this photo I captured that afternoon.

We went rafting a few times on the Upper Colorado in June. On Father's Day weekend, the CFS was above 5300!

The mountain biking has been excellent in the high country and the views are magnificent.

I ❤️ Colorado! For more ski season photos, see my 2023-24 Ski Season album on Flickr.

My Marvelous Road Trip to the Utah JUG

Matt Raible — Wed, 22 May 2024 09:35:09 -0600

I have many fond memories from speaking at the Utah JUG over the years. I fell in love with Utah when I worked at Overstock in 2011 and experienced the greatest snow on earth. It's wild to reminisce about 2018 too. I spoke at the Denver JUG on Wednesday, then woke up early on Thursday and drove eight hours (through multiple snow storms) and made it 15 minutes before my talk. I lost a windshield wiper in the process and didn't have time to replace it, so it permanently etched a line in the vehicle's windshield. In February 2020, I did a Rocky Mountain JUG tour with Ray Tsang. That's when I learned that Ray is really good at pool.

Because of these experiences, I always jump at the opportunity when I'm invited back. This year, I decided to take my time and do a road trip in my trusty VW Vanagon (Stout) to Utah. I planned to mountain bike in Fruita and Moab along the way, then ski at a couple Utah resorts before returning home.

I was pleasantly surprised when I saw a storm coming the night before my departure on April 16th. I quickly altered my plans and fell into an 18" powder day at Copper Mountain on Tuesday morning.

That afternoon, I drove to Fruita and went for a mountain bike ride on 18 Road. There are not many places where it's possible to have an epic powder day and do an awesome mountain bike ride in the same day. I love Colorado!

I camped in Stout that night and woke up to a beautiful desert morning. After some coffee and oatmeal with raspberries and walnuts, I headed for Moab.

I stopped at Klondike Bluffs for a 16.2 mile ride that took me 3½ hours. I was gassed at the top but thoroughly enjoyed the views.

I finished driving to Salt Lake City on Wednesday afternoon. I'm always impressed with how close, and gorgeous, the mountains are to the city.

On Thursday morning, I released a new version of the Micronaut blueprint for JHipster, then hit the slopes at Snowbird. The weather was fantastic for spring skiing.

I made sure to get some runs in at Alta too.

I dressed up as an old-fashioned Java developer on Thursday evening and headed to the Utah JUG meetup at Lucid's Global HQ. I was pleasantly surprised to see a full room of Java enthusiasts. Before my talk, Jason Porter announced that it was his last meeting as President of UJUG. He served in this role for 11.5 years and was amazing at it. Congratulations on your retirement, Jason!

I spoke about Micro Frontends for Java Microservices and used JHipster to demonstrate how it all worked.

Kudos to all the fabulous developers who attended the @UtahJava meetup tonight and listened to me ramble on about micro frontends and @jhipster. You can find my slides on @speakerdeck:

🏔️? https://t.co/Kp19jjOG8E #microfrontends #jhipster #react #modulefederation pic.twitter.com/W7tF7pUxpt
— Matt Raible (@mraible) April 19, 2024

My slide deck was similar to the one I delivered at Devnexus the previous week, with minor enhancements.

I received a lot of positive feedback on LinkedIn after my talk, particularly from college students that Jason had invited from his alma mater. This put a smile of satisfaction on my face well into the evening.

On Friday, I woke up early to get a start on my road trip home. I was originally planning to ski another mountain in Utah, but realized I could make it to Steamboat by noon, and chose that route instead. Stout's red-blinky-light alerted me that something was wrong when I stopped at the gas station. Two quarts of oil fixed things and I was on my way. The open road with minimal traffic was wonderful.

I arrived at Steamboat around noon, just in time for spring skiing in a t-shirt.

After Steamboat, I headed to our Ski Chalet in Winter Park for the weekend. Friends joined us for an end-of-ski-season celebration in Mary Jane's Challenger lot on Saturday morning.

Sunday was a sunny, bluebird day. The kids and I ended our ski season with a final run down Trestle and a stop at the treehouse.

More photos on Flickr → Road Trip to Utah JUG 2024

I arrived home late Sunday night. I'm proud of Stout for successfully completing the trip. Now I have even more fond memories of speaking at the Utah JUG. Thanks to Jason Porter, Don Bogardus, and Jonathan Bronson for the opportunity! 😊

A Delightful Trip to Devnexus

Matt Raible — Sat, 11 May 2024 10:27:21 -0600

Devnexus is one of my favorite conferences in the world. I have many fond memories of attending over the years and some awkward ones, too. My first memory is when Micah Silverman and I worked at a Stormpath booth there in February 2017. Okta had just acquihired us and we weren't allowed to talk about it. We encouraged folks to sign up for our service even though we knew signups would shut down at the end of the week.

It's funny how life comes full circle. My employment with Okta officially ended the week before this year's Devnexus. I tried to cancel my talk when I first got the news, but Vincent and Pratik convinced me to go, and I knew it would be good for networking. I'm glad I did because I had a blast! It all started on Monday, April 8th.

The @devnexus adventure begins! pic.twitter.com/J3bfOQrh8k
— Matt Raible (@mraible) April 8, 2024

I was in a tremendously good mood when I took this photo. I was sporting a new DU hat in anticipation of their NCAA Frozen Four victory the following weekend. And I was on my way to what seemed like a college reunion. I've been a part of the Java community for over 20 years, and many of the speakers are old friends whom I've made a lot of memories with.

Tuesday, April 9

The first day started off with a JUG Leaders Summit. The two presentations I really enjoyed were from Jorge Cajas and Ari Waller. Jorges talked about getting students and younger people involved in JUGs (Java User Groups) and encouraged beginner talks.

Advice from @cajasmota for getting students involved with JUGs:

- Offer beginner topics
- Organize meetups oriented to students
- Keep in touch with professors
- Don't forget that they are kids#devnexus #jugleaders #java pic.twitter.com/Bg76D8goGb
— Matt Raible (@mraible) April 9, 2024

The Denver JUG used to have two talks at every meeting. The first was a basic concepts talk, and the second was more advanced. Over the years, we did away with the first talk in favor of one main talk and more networking afterward. Jorges pointed out we often expect developers to know Java frameworks when many of the younger developers have never used them.

Ari talked about an AJUG initiative to support qualified global JUGs by providing a paid Meetup Pro account. This is also part of an effort to bring visibility to the greater Java community and it will be called the Devnexus Java Community Meetup Pro Network. I'll update this post when I have more information.

That afternoon, we had a Java Champions Summit. We discussed many topics, and we've since scheduled more time to talk virtually later this month. The photo below from Ken Fogel captures that we had a lot of Java leaders in attendance!

Wednesday, April 10

Pratik and Vincent kicked off the <dev/>olution on Wednesday morning. Amazingly, they've been doing it for 20 years!

I did an interview with Baruch Sadogursky at Gradle's Build Propulsion Lab after the opening keynote. We talked about developer productivity, open source, Develocity, and JHipster.

I also did an interview with Melissa McKay at the DevOps Speakeasy. We talked about my session, Micro Frontends for Java Microservices.

That afternoon, Sharat Chander's keynote about moving Java forward together contained wisdom he learned from his father.

"Speed, at a certain point, becomes harm. Instead, move thoughtfully and build things." -- @Sharat_Chander at #Devnexus #Java pic.twitter.com/fYatiUX5cu
— Matt Raible (@mraible) April 10, 2024

I talked with Sean Phillips the night before. He dazzled me with his enthusiasm for fighting back against bad actors with his Trinity project. I was not disappointed during his talk and thoroughly enjoyed all my conversations with him and his lovely wife.

This was an awesomely energetic talk by @SeanMiPhillips! I enjoyed it immensely. Check out his Trinity project which can detect AI-generated audio in minutes. Built with JavaFX.https://t.co/X9EuhNEmIg

Release for @devnexus: https://t.co/cHnChwLUIY https://t.co/yiBEEx06aV
— Matt Raible (@mraible) April 10, 2024

Seeing so many old friends at the conference before the social activities that evening was awesome.

A lot of good friends and #usualsuspects are at #Devnexus this year! ❤️ pic.twitter.com/7poa8ARQh2
— Matt Raible (@mraible) April 10, 2024

Thursday, April 11

I prepped for my talk Thursday morning, practiced my demo, and dressed up as an old-fashioned Java developer. My talk had a full room and I finished right on time. The demo worked flawlessly, so I was quite pleased. You can find my presentation on Speaker Deck.

That afternoon, I hung out with Josh Long and met Chris Bono. We had cocktails at White Oak and had a fun time talking about Spring, life, and our fantastic children. From there, I reunited with former colleagues Brian Demers, Randall Degges, Micah Silverman, and others at Cuts Steakhouse. I sat next to Jonathan Schneider from OpenRewrite and learned a lot. I was impressed to learn that OpenRewrite is used to upgrade applications between major releases, and some folks have used it to migrate from one Java framework to another.

Friday, April 12

The conference ended on Thursday, and Friday was a designated Speaker Day. We gathered at Cabbagetown Park for a few hours of volleyball, reminiscing, and recovering from the week of intense social activities. That evening, we headed to The Painted Duck for some duckpin bowling. It was a lot harder than regular bowling, yet fun was had by all.

Fun times duckpin bowling with @devnexus speakers! 🦆pic.twitter.com/JMz2zChMST
— Matt Raible (@mraible) April 12, 2024

If you ever get a chance to attend or speak at Devnexus, I highly recommend it. It's a well-run show, and the community vibe is wonderful. Thank you, Pratik, Vincent, and the Atlanta JUG team!

Funemployment 2024

Matt Raible — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 11:02:06 -0600

On February 1, I woke up to an unexpected email from my employer.

"Today, Okta made the decision to eliminate a number of positions across multiple organizations. Unfortunately, your position has been eliminated as part of this reduction."

Not exactly the kind of email you want to read when you first wake up. But, I'm excited for the future!
— Matt Raible (@mraible) February 1, 2024

I laughed out loud at first, then smiled and felt an overwhelming sense of freedom. I went through a wide range of emotions that morning, but despair was never one of them. As a high performer on my team, I did not expect to be laid off. However, looking back over the last several months, there were a few indicators that it might happen.

I quickly realized the bright side of my situation:

It was the middle of ski season, and
I had nothing to do.

I was laid off on a Thursday morning and was scheduled to leave for Jfokus that Saturday. I was supposed to do a workshop, a talk, and help at the Okta booth. Since my talks used Okta products and it'd be weird to represent a company that just laid you off, I had to back out of the conference. It just didn't feel right.

The reason I had nothing to do is all of the activities I did on my computer were Okta-related. I didn't even have a personal computer. I did all my work on the company laptop and all of my open source contributions had a relationship to my work.

I received many inquiries from my tweet above and my LinkedIn post with the same message. I told everyone I was going to take a couple weeks to process things and skiing was my top priority. I've been unemployed in the past, but I never received any sort of severance, let alone one that lasted for months. I knew that this was the opportunity of a lifetime. Funemployment is the condition of a person who takes advantage of being out of a job to have the time of their life. This is my funemployment story.

First, I headed to Winter Park to stay at our Ski Chalet. There were several powder days and a few friends that joined in the festivities.

I returned home that Friday to attend a local Chi Phi Fraternity reunion in downtown Denver.

Then, Trish and I enjoyed a Pitbull concert at Ball Arena and I sent back my laptop and stickers.

My parents came to visit for 10 days in mid-February. We hung out with Abbie and Jack a few nights, including a night at Casa Bonita, the self-proclaimed "Greatest Restaurant in the World!"

I got a couple more powder days in at the end of February.

My sister proposed we go to Spring Training in Arizona and I leapt at the opportunity. I'd never been before and it seemed like fun. I highly recommend it if you've never been, especially the one in Scottsdale, Arizona. There are several baseball games every day, they're all within driving distance, and the weather is gorgeous.

Before flying home on March 5th, I made sure to announce my plans for the rest of the month. All these trips had been planned for months, except for Spring Training.

Hello, March!

⚾️? Spring Training in Arizona with my sister
⛷️? Celebrating a friend’s birthday in Vermont
🌴 Visiting @TrishPhoto’s family in Florida
☀️ Spring Break with friends in Cabo San Lucas
☃️ Spring Break Part II in Winter Park and Steamboat
— Matt Raible (@mraible) March 5, 2024

My friend Chris Morse's birthday at Sugarbush was outstanding. I expected a bit more snow, but we had fun anyway.

Then, I joined Trish in Naples, Florida for St. Paddy's Day with her family.

We teamed up with Bruce and Janene Snyder for Spring Break. They're empty nesters like us, our kids are both at CU, and shared the same Spring Break. When we originally planned our trip to Cabo San Lucas, we expected our kids might join us. We didn't mind going without them when they declined.

After a week in Cabo, we returned to Colorado and spent the weekend skiing at Winter Park and Steamboat.

20 years ago today, I bought a VW Bus

Matt Raible — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 14:46:44 -0600

On this day, 20 years ago, I bought a 1996 21-Window VW Bus. That morning, I found the listing on eBay and decided to buy it if the University of Denver (my alma mater) won the national college hockey championship.

Hmmm, if I could buy my dream car today and DU wins the National Championship tonight...

Update: Woooo HOOOOO - DU WON!!! I told myself earlier today that if they won, I'd buy the bus. So w/in 2 minutes of the win, I bought it! What a day. ;-)

10 years ago, it was still being restored.

The project is still progressing and it still feels like it'll be done soon. When I bought the bus 10 years ago, I thought I'd drive it a lot sooner. Then again, my expectation was that I'd incrementally improve it through the years and eventually get to something spectacular. Now we're on the cusp of spectacularity.

On March 7, 2018, Hefe was finally finished! I call him Hefe because it's a short version of Hefeweizen. He's from Germany, and his pain scheme looks like a nicely poured beer.

How it started:	How it's going:

I've driven him around 7000 miles since he was completed. It’s been a wonderful adventure! 🥳

2023 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Sat, 6 Jan 2024 18:16:02 -0700

2023 started with a celebration of love in the Philippines. Trish and I traveled with friends to El Nido and Manila to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. It was a two-week trip that filled our souls with lasting memories.

2023 was a milestone year for our family. It's the year Jack graduated from high school!

Then, the Denver Nuggets won the NBA Championship, Jack started college at CU, and we became empty nesters. It was quite the year!

From last year's review:

I only have one goal for 2023: be present.

I live where I work, so this was easy enough on a physical level. However, I was forced to be even more present in Q4 of the year. My manager asked me to step up and be more present on my team in October. Then, sickness struck me down in mid-November after seven weeks of travel, allowing for some quality one-on-one time with Trish.

I will look back on 2023 using the following categories.

Personal

The ski season was excellent with trips to Winter Park, Devil's Thumb Ranch, Crested Butte, and Steamboat.

We celebrated my sister's St. Paddy's Day birthday with a week in New Orleans. We visited my parents in Montana for Mother's Day.

Recharging in the backwoods of Montana with family. Started the day with coffee, mimosas, and huckleberry pancakes. ☕️🥂😋

Happy Mother's Day to all the incredible moms out there! ❤️? pic.twitter.com/sjmChuzNpo
— Matt Raible (@mraible) May 14, 2023

We jumped for joy during Jack's High School Graduation at the end of May!

We celebrated our son Jack's high school graduation this week and had a fabulous time with family and friends. Here are a few of my favorite photos.

See the full album on Flickr with Julie and Trish's awesome photos: https://t.co/XSoUZnjOSk

Congratulations, Jack! 🥳 pic.twitter.com/1Ea1LZrFML
— Matt Raible (@mraible) May 27, 2023

The Nuggets playoff run was magical, and our half-season tickets came in quite handy. The Denver Nuggets won the NBA Championship on June 12th. Crying from joy is a wonderful feeling. 🥹

I took a long summer vacation for the fourth year in a row. Thanks, Okta's unlimited vacation policy!

In 24 hours, I'll be starting my summer vacation. @okta has an unlimited vacation policy, and I'm taking full advantage with a month off! 😃

What will I do?

⛳️ Golf, raft, and bike
🛶 Live down by the river in a van
⛰️ Shoot the breeze in Montana
🌊 Tour Cape Cod#LifeAtOkta
— Matt Raible (@mraible) July 13, 2023

I wrote about my summer vacation adventures in Summer 2023: Colorado, Montana, and Cape Cod.

Jack started college at the University of Colorado on his birthday. We loved the Coach Prime and CU football experience in September, while the Broncos were terrible. When CU started sucking at halftime during the Stanford game, the teams seemed to swap fates. We relished in the Broncos winning streak in October and November as our CU football fandom waned.

Abbie turned 21 in early November. We celebrated at the CU vs. Oregon State game and again in Las Vegas the following weekend.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Matt Raible (@vwsforlife)

The last months of the year were dominated by real estate transactions. We sold our rental house near the University of Denver in early November.

And we bought a new ski chalet near Winter Park in December. It has mountain views with a river nearby and close proximity to many miles of mountain bike trails. We plan to rent it most of the time. We've experienced many misty-eyed moments of joy in it already.

We spent Christmas in Florida with Abbie, Jack, and Trish's whole family. The sunsets were gorgeous.

Hefe the Bus and Stout the Syncro

We gave Stout the Syncro a lot of rest this year. We bought a relatively new Chevy Suburban as a new tow vehicle for our whitewater rafts. We celebrated our 10-year anniversary by rafting on the Upper Colorado River with both vehicles.

Hefe the Bus purred along with no issues. He won runner-up in his class this year at the Colorado Bug-In!

Professional

For those stumbling upon this post with no context, I'm an open source developer that works at Okta. My title is officially "Developer Advocate Architect" and all the code I write is open source.

This year, my main focus was leading the Java Community team as part of Auth0 by Okta Developer Relations. I worked with Deepu K Sasidharan and Jimena Garbarino to come up with ideas, write blog posts, and author tutorials for the Auth0 Developer Center.

My Americas Developer Relations team has one main function: cultivating relationships with developers via events. Personally, I like creating content more than events, yet I've also found they go hand-in-hand. The content I create often gets turned into conference talks, so I find it important to create new content if I want new talks. I mention this because it's not my main job to produce content. There's another team that does content, but they currently have no Java specialists.

I published two blog posts on the Auth0 blog:

We used the microservices post as the basis for Deepu and my Securing Spring Boot Microservices with OAuth and OpenID Connect workshop at Devoxx Belgium.

On the OktaDev YouTube Channel, I created four screencasts (down from 12 in 2022).

My most popular video was Spring Boot + Vue, with 8.6K views.

My Use React and Spring Boot to Build a Simple CRUD App screencast has 22K views, but it was published on December 29, 2022, so it doesn't count for 2023.

While at Devoxx Belgium, Deepu and I interviewed a bunch of Java community legends.

We had a lot of fun interviewing @errcraft and @Stephan007 at #Devoxx Belgium. 🤩 pic.twitter.com/XtIij77YI8
— Matt Raible (@mraible) October 7, 2023

I did a couple more interviews with the OpenFGA team at KubeCon.

I updated and released new versions of the JHipster and Angular Mini-Books with the help of InfoQ and awesome tech editors.

InfoQ allows publishing them on other sites after six months, so they're both available online at jhipster-book.org and angular-book.org.

Speaking

According to TripIt, I took 21 trips to 37 cities in eight countries. Nine trips were work-related; the rest involved traveling to see family or attending Celebration of Life events. That's three fewer trips than in 2022, and I had 109 days on the road (-14 from 2022). United 1K was enjoyed; I did not qualify for it in 2024.

My Speaker Deck profile shows 18 presentations at 17 events. Thirteen of those were in person. I also attended KubeCon to help the OpenFGA project. My most-viewed presentation was Comparing Native Java REST API Frameworks from the Chicago JUG in August. It had 1.2K views.

While the Midwest and Northeast JUG tours were a lot of fun, the highlight of the year was interviewing James Gosling at Devoxx Belgium.

Digging into all things @Java with the founder himself, James Gosling!

Developer Advocate @mraible had an insightful chat covering @Devoxx, Java and everything in between! 🚀 pic.twitter.com/2pfRIlZVhi
— OktaDev (@oktadev) November 27, 2023

Community

We stopped live-streaming Denver JUG meetups because we wanted to encourage folks to join us in person and grow our community. We're grateful to the folks at Thrive Workplace for donating their space. We hope to start meeting at their new downtown location near Union Station sometime this year.

Projects

I continued to maintain OktaDev Schematics in 2023. The project had four releases. According to npm-stat.com, it had ~42K downloads in 2023 (-20K from 2022).

I updated my Bare Bones Angular tutorial for Angular 17.

I updated my Bare Bones 🦴 Angular tutorial to use #Angular 17.

?? https://t.co/7fsyzOOaNP

It includes:

✅ New syntax for control flow
✅ Standalone components
✅ Unit, e2e, and CI testing
✨ Bonus: Angular Material, Bootstrap, and @auth0

I hope you find it useful!
— Matt Raible (@mraible) December 4, 2023

I also helped with the JHipster project. It turned 10 in October.

Can you believe that @jhipster is 10 years old today?!

Happy Birthday, JHipster! And congratulations to its proud Papa, @juliendubois! 🎊

⭐? 21K stars on GitHub
🤝 52.4K used by
❤️ 696 contributors

It's been an excellent adventure! 🤓 https://t.co/VqZdoDRtBS
— Matt Raible (@mraible) October 21, 2023

JHipster had eight releases and ~1.3 million downloads in 2023 (down 200K from 2022). Our biggest release was JHipster 8.0.0 on November 2nd. We released 8.1.0 in early December, and I updated my Get Started with JHipster 8 tutorial to use it.

My Getting Started with JHipster 8 tutorial is now available!

🤓 https://t.co/6nBfPR33Dk

Features:

🌹 Enhanced UI with Angular
🔐 Increased security with ownership checks
💜 Deployment to Heroku
🤠 CI/CD with GitHub Actions#jhipster #java #typescript pic.twitter.com/xE8Ra9E9w6
— Matt Raible (@mraible) December 14, 2023

I also published a screencast of the tutorial just before Christmas.

2024

Professionally, I'm starting the year with two of my favorite conferences, Jfokus and Devnexus. Then, I'm doing a JUG tour in April to Salt Lake City, Dallas, Tampa, Nashville, and Detroit. I'm trying to make Spring I/O and JNation happen too. September's dev2next is sure to be a fun conference in Denver. You can see where my whole team will be on our events page.

Personally, Trish and I hope to visit the Ski Chalet frequently. The mountains are calling, and we must go. I'll be a half-century old in July. That's sure to be a good party, especially if it's during another month-long summer vacation.

I have only one goal for 2024: breathe.

I often pause, breathe, and smile when I'm skiing, mountain biking, rafting, and frolicking in the great outdoors. Sometimes it's nature's beauty that causes this, but often it's my own satisfaction with the situation.

If you want to watch me connect with developers and opt outside, please follow me on Twitter. I also post pictures of my favorite moments on Instagram and whole albums on Flickr.

Goodbye, DU House. Thanks for all the memories!

Matt Raible — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 13:08:26 -0700

On the weekend before I joined Stormpath as a full-time employee in 2016, we bought a house in the countryside and moved out of the city. We'd been looking for a while and finally found a place we loved. Trish liked that it was rigged for horses, with two pastures, a barn, and an outdoor riding arena nearby. I was happy because it had six garages, and I wanted a place to store Hefe the Bus now that he was finished. It's a beautiful place, and we're delighted to be here. The sunset dog walks in the backyard are spectacular.

The only downside of moving to the Raible Ranch was we had to sell our mountain views in Fraser to afford it. We tried to sell our house near the University of Denver (DU) for a few months, but it didn't work. We decided to keep it as a rental instead. There was part of me that hoped one of the kids would go to DU (my alma mater) and they could stay there. When Jack started at CU Boulder this fall, we decided it was time to try and sell it again. My favorite feature of the DU house was the sauna my parents and I built in the basement.

We recruited our friend, Michelle Addison, to help us sell it in early September. Not only was she instrumental in making the house look warm and wonderful, she created a bidding war, and we were under contract within days of listing it. We were thrilled! Thanks, Michelle!!

We closed on the DU house last week and are already under contract for a new place in Fraser. We're doing a 1031 exchange, which requires the new home to operate as a rental most of the time. We're excited to have a place in the mountains again! It has mountain and river views and is a short walk to the Fraser River Trail. We're due to close on it in mid-December. I'll make sure and write another post after we move in. 🥳

Happy Birthday, Abbie!

Matt Raible — Sun, 5 Nov 2023 22:44:01 -0700

Our oldest child turned 21 today! She's a junior at the University of Colorado in Boulder, living in an apartment with three roommates. Abbie is a joy to be around because she's always smiling and cracking jokes.

We journeyed up to Boulder this weekend to join her for the CU vs Oregon State game. We had a nice family dinner, celebrated the big event at her uncle's tailgate, then watched the game. We tried to take advantage of the time change after the game and do some bar hopping, but Jack couldn't get in anywhere.

Her Mom, Julie, surprised her today by giving her a new car for her birthday. Abbie had no idea and was delighted with her first VW!

Next weekend, we'll celebrate some more in Vegas. Trish and I will be going, along with Abbie, her boyfriend (Joseph), and Joseph's parents.

Happy Birthday, Abbie! We love you to the moon and back!! 🥰

Summer 2023: Colorado, Montana, and Cape Cod

Matt Raible — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 23:45:21 -0600

I've been remiss in writing about my month-long summer vacation. Mostly because life moves pretty fast with Jack heading off to college, things getting busy at work, and lots of wonderful weekends along the way. I'm finally looking around and sitting down to write this post at the end of October. Now is better than never!

This year, I took a month off from mid-June to mid-August. How did I take so much time off? Okta has a magnificent unlimited vacation policy.

In 24 hours, I'll be starting my summer vacation. @okta has an unlimited vacation policy, and I'm taking full advantage with a month off! 😃

What will I do?

⛳️ Golf, raft, and bike
🛶 Live down by the river in a van
⛰️ Shoot the breeze in Montana
🌊 Tour Cape Cod#LifeAtOkta
— Matt Raible (@mraible) July 13, 2023

The adventure started with a birthday golf tournament that Saturday to celebrate my 49th.

We had a nice family dinner at Sushi Den on Sunday.

For the two weeks after that, I went on bike rides and worked on a 10-year anniversary present for Trish: a book about our wedding and honeymoon. I wrote about these events in previous blog posts.

Matrimony in Montana

Because of these posts and pictures, writing the text wasn't difficult, but finding high-res images was. In the end, I succeeded by getting Trish's credentials to her website and finding the photos in her archives.

I wrote the book using Blurb and you can buy a hardcover version of The Good Life, Volume II. I'm proud to say I finished the rough draft just hours before she arrived home from a trip the evening before our anniversary.

The weekend before our anniversary, I went on a father-son rafting trip with Jack and friends.

We made it home in time to show Hefe at the Colorado Bug-In at Bandimere on July 23rd. We ended up winning runner-up in our class! There were lots of magnificent VWs at this event, so I encourage you to checkout my summer vacation album.

We celebrated our anniversary by rafting on the Upper Colorado River with the Pirates of the Pumphouse.

I visited Montana the next week and had fun with my fabulous family and their wonderful homestead.

Our last adventure was to Cape Cod to spend a week with Trish's family. We marveled at the sunsets, went on many boat rides, and appreciated each other's company.

These photos are just a sampling of the 100+ that I polished and published. I think photos are a great way to tell a story, so I added captions to all of them in my Summer 2023 Album.

Happy Birthday, Jack!

Matt Raible — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 12:06:33 -0600

Today is a monumental day in the life of Jack Raible. Not only is today his 19th birthday, but it's also his first day of classes at the University of Colorado. He moved in last week and had a week to settle into his new surroundings.

He's been playing hoops for 1-2 hours a day on our basketball court for the last six months. We recently asked him why he was playing so much, and he mentioned he wanted to play on CU's team before he graduates. I love it when someone dreams big! We'll be rooting for your success, Jack!

The whole family traveled to Boulder yesterday afternoon to celebrate his birthday. Today, both kids sent a picture before their first day of classes began.

We're so proud of you, Jack, and hope you have a wonderful college experience. Happy Birthday, buddy! 🥳

Farewell to the 2022-2023 Ski Season

Matt Raible — Fri, 7 Jul 2023 08:26:24 -0600

You can tell your Spring is a whirlwind when you don't have time to write your end-of-ski-season post until July!

My ski season started way back in October, on Halloween at A-Basin, to be precise. It ended with an Okta + Gradle Developer Ski Day on April 13th. I'm proud to say I achieved 39 days of skiing, with 15 being alpine skiing and the rest being cross-country skiing. A lot of the cross-country skiing was done in our backyard, on the neighborhood bridal trails. We got lucky this year because it snowed in early January and stuck around until February. That's rare in our neck of the woods.

The highlight of the ski season was celebrating Trish's 50th birthday at A-Basin. We rented a few spots on the beach, invited a bunch of friends, and had a blast.

The onesies were Trish's idea. 😅 You can buy your own from Tipsy Elves.

Other big moments include skiing with the Morse family and friends in Winter Park, cross-country skiing in Crested Butte during Winter Tech Forum, and skiing with Jack in Steamboat during his Spring Break.

I partnered with my friend, Brian Demers (now at Gradle), for a Developer Ski Day at A-Basin. He was in town speaking at the Boulder and Denver JUGs, and we're thankful our management approved the event!

After we put away our skis for the season, Jack celebrated his last prom with friends, I took the kids to a Denver Nuggets playoff game, and we got Hefe ready for show season.

We visited my parents in Montana for Mother's Day.

Recharging in the backwoods of Montana with family. Started the day with coffee, mimosas, and huckleberry pancakes. ☕️🥂😋

Happy Mother's Day to all the incredible moms out there! ❤️? pic.twitter.com/sjmChuzNpo
— Matt Raible (@mraible) May 14, 2023

And we celebrated Jack's High School Graduation at the end of May. Congratulations, son!

We celebrated our son Jack's high school graduation this week and had a fabulous time with family and friends. Here are a few of my favorite photos.

See the full album on Flickr with Julie and Trish's awesome photos: https://t.co/XSoUZnjOSk

Congratulations, Jack! 🥳 pic.twitter.com/1Ea1LZrFML
— Matt Raible (@mraible) May 27, 2023

June was fun too. We traded in Trish's Tesla Model X for a Chevy Suburban because the latter is a much better tow vehicle for our whitewater rafts.

Jack and I got to go to NBA Finals Game 2. We had a great time, even though it was the only loss by the Nuggets in the Finals.

We were afforded this luxury because we bought Nuggets half-season tickets this year. What a year to start being a season ticket holder! The Denver Nuggets won the NBA Championship on June 12th. I may have gotten misty-eyed a few times after they won. 🥹

Now that it's summertime, we're getting back on the river, polishing our VWs for shows, and excited that both Abbie and Jack are going to CU Boulder in the fall. Next ski season, we're looking to get a place in the mountains again. I can't wait to see what the future holds!

For more ski season photos, see my 2022-23 Ski Season album on Flickr.

The Angular Mini-Book 3.0 is now available!

Matt Raible — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 05:44:05 -0600

I'm excited to announce that the Angular Mini-Book 3.0 is now available! You can download it in PDF and EPUB formats from InfoQ.

About this book

Spring Boot is a popular framework for building REST APIs. You'll learn how to integrate Angular with Spring Boot and use security best practices like HTTPS and a content security policy. What about deploying your Angular app to the cloud? Yep, it covers that too!

What's new?

This new edition uses Angular 15 and Spring Boot 3.0. Some other fun facts:

Tech reviewed by Angular expert Alisa Duncan. She improved many of the code samples, and I'm grateful for her help. You should follow her on Twitter!
First commit on 3.0 version: Feb 16, 2023
Files changed since 2.0: 558
Build date: June 9, 2023

You might say this book is outdated on launch. However, I created a GitHub Action to upgrade all the examples to use Angular 16 and Spring Boot 3.1. This action proves all the code should work if you create apps with the latest Angular and Spring Boot versions. 😊

To send us feedback or issues, e-mail InfoQ at feedback@infoq.com, email me at matt@raibledesigns.com, or hit me up on Twitter @mraible.

The JHipster Mini-Book v7.0 Released!

Matt Raible — Tue, 7 Mar 2023 15:43:37 -0700

The JHipster Mini-Book v7.0 is now available as a free download from InfoQ. Get it while it's hot! 🔥 You can read more about this release on the JHipster Mini-Book blog.

The source code for the application developed in the book (21-Points Health) is available on GitHub.

Thanks to the InfoQ publishing team, Jeet Gajjar for tech editing, Maureen Spencer for copy editing, and Ana Ciobotaru for publishing it to production.

And most of all, thank you Asciidoctor for making the publishing process so easy!

2022 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 09:34:31 -0700

When 2022 started, I was excited to start traveling again. We started things off with a trip to Mexico and worked remotely from the Cabo San Lucas marina for a couple of weeks. In March, the kids and I ventured to the Cayman Islands for spring break. We arrived home to a red-hot DU hockey team and followed them all the way to the Frozen Four. I went to college at DU, aka the University of Denver, and I'm a proud alumnus.

I made my way to Boston to work on a presentation with a co-worker, nicely coinciding with the Frozen Four tournament. A few friends and I had the time of our lives watching DU win the NCAA championship. After staying up late and celebrating, I felt awful the next day. I flew home and still felt terrible on Monday. Figuring it was a bad cold from over-indulgence, I took a COVID test, tested negative, and hopped on a plane to Devnexus on Tuesday. That week did not end well.

I tested positive for COVID this morning. I'm so sorry to all the people and friends I came in contact with at @devnexus this week. I feel like such an ass.

I thought I was OK because I tested negative Tuesday morning and never lost my sense of taste and smell. https://t.co/lR5tdOM2gP
— Matt Raible (@mraible) April 15, 2022

From last year's year in review:

I only have one goal for 2022: smile more.

I rediscovered one of the things that makes me smile a lot: in-person meetups with friends. I had so much fun at Devnexus seeing old friends from the conference circuit. This continued at Spring I/O in Barcelona and at JavaOne in the fall. Being with family always makes me smile too. A trip to Alaska to celebrate my parent's 50th wedding anniversary was a highlight of the year!

I will look back on 2022 using the following categories.

Professional

For those stumbling upon this post with no context, I'm an open source developer that works at Okta. My title is officially "Developer Advocate," but all the code and words I write are distributed as open source.

This year, I focused on creating YouTube videos more than blog posts. On the OktaDev YouTube Channel, I created 12 videos (same as 2021). My most popular video (11K views) was based on a blog post I wrote in January called Full Stack Java with React, Spring Boot, and JHipster.

I published the Angular Mini-Book 2.0. When writing blog posts, I focused mostly on Java, REST APIs, and JHipster, with a bit of JavaScript too. I authored 11 blog posts on the Okta developer blog:

I published four blog posts to the Auth0 blog.

Last year, I was celebrating new teammates Deepu K Sasidharan, Alisa Duncan, E. Dunham, and Tanay Pant. This summer, I moved to the Auth0 DevRel team and have a plethora of new teammates to collaborate with. I'm excited to help grow Auth0 usage in the Java community, and I'm pumped to work closely with Deepu to make it happen.

I continued to stream meetups for the Denver/Boulder JUG and Denver Open Source Users Group (DOSUG). We used StreamYard and YouTube to broadcast our meetups. We published nine videos to the Denver JUG YouTube Channel. We only published two videos to the Denver Open Source Users Group Channel, but we did meet in-person! We're grateful to the folks at Thrive Workplace for donating their space.

Denver JUG is now up to 3,688 members. Our most popular video in 2022 was from Gordon Weakliem on Coding Interviews for Java Developers.

Speaking

According to TripIt, I took 24 trips, to 45 cities, in 11 countries. 13 trips were work-related, and the rest involved traveling to see family. That's 11 more trips than in 2021, and I had 123 days on the road (+46 from 2021). United 1K was achieved.

My Speaker Deck profile shows 12 presentations at 12 events. 11 of those were in-person. I missed Devoxx France because I caught COVID in April at the NCAA Frozen Four tournament. I later live-streamed my presentation on Comparing Native Java REST API Frameworks. This was also my most-viewed presentation on Speaker Deck with 3.1K views.

I had a full room of attendees for my talk on Reactive Microservices at Spring I/O in Barcelona. Even the overflow room was packed!

My @jhipster talk at @spring_io had a lot of awesome people in it! Thank you all for your enthusiasm and smiles. 😃 pic.twitter.com/u4pOtOSbkl
— Matt Raible (@mraible) May 26, 2022

I had a lot of fun doing a September JUG tour in Ireland. My folks tagged along. It was a fast-moving trip with new hotels most nights. At their age, they'll unlikely join me for a JUG tour again. 😅

We stopped by the @okta Dublin office this morning in the Bloodstone building. Great location with a fun vibe about it. 👍 pic.twitter.com/vvaeswAvT0
— Matt Raible (@mraible) September 29, 2022

JavaOne returned in October and was held in Las Vegas for the first time. I spoke about Micro Frontends for Java Microservices and loved spending time with the Java community.

The community at #JavaOne is amazing! pic.twitter.com/IwOdr3V7gx
— Matt Raible (@mraible) October 19, 2022

Late October brought me to the UK for another JUG tour. It was a lot of fun hosting it at the Okta office there.

It was a pleasure talking with the @ljcjug tonight about web app security for Java developers. The #Java community is strong in London! 💪

Thanks to @OctopusDeploy for sponsoring and @okta for hosting. It was fun to see a full house with all the seats filled by the end. 😃 pic.twitter.com/SmtvRgw1Jh
— Matt Raible (@mraible) October 27, 2022

I originally planned my UK JUG tour to coincide with the Broncos playing in London, but their record was so bad by then that I flew home early. Coincidentally, they won that weekend.

Oktane followed soon after. It was the first time meeting some of my teammates in-person. I wore an { okta } cape and thoroughly enjoyed the developer track we assembled.

Excited for the developer keynote at #Oktane22! pic.twitter.com/Jy2XPDoIxx
— Matt Raible (@mraible) November 9, 2022

In December, we had our first in-person Denver JUG meetup since the pandemic began. It was awesome seeing everyone again!

Had a blast at the @denverjug holiday party tonight! Thanks to all the local @java folks that joined in the fun. 😀 pic.twitter.com/sI9tsbrlk7
— Matt Raible (@mraible) December 15, 2022

We've had a couple of meetups since then but are still looking for a nice venue to gather. Frank Delporte recently interviewed the organizers for the Boulder and Denver JUGs on the Foojay Podcast. Check out Episode #13 if you're interested in hearing about our group's history.

Community

In the past, I used this section to talk about meetups I've started, like Developer Ski Days and Devoxx4Kids Denver. We didn't host any events in 2022, but I might organize a developer ski day soon. Right before COVID hit, we had a ski train to Winter Park adventure planned. It was supposed to happen right after Venkat's dev.next conference. I'd love to try and do that again.

Projects

I continued to maintain OktaDev Schematics in 2022. The project had five releases. I added support for Auth0's SDKs, which helps ensure I know how to use the latest versions. According to npm-stat.com, it had ~62K downloads in 2022 (+2K from 2021).

My other projects are related to JHipster. I helped upgrade the main generator to Spring Boot 3 and did a lot of QA for micro frontends. We had eight releases and ~1.5 million downloads in 2022 (down 300K from 2021). We've worked hard on JHipster 8 and hope to release an alpha version soon.

I spent most of the year (in fits and spurts) working on the JHipster Mini-Book.

My author *finally* finished updating my intro and chapter 1 for @jhipster 7. He started working on this PR in March!https://t.co/R0h09xXle2

What took so long? 🧵
— The JHipster Mini-Book (@jhipster_book) December 2, 2022

I sent the book to tech editing just before Christmas vacation and got it back from the copy editors at InfoQ this week. Hopefully, it'll be available for download by the end of this month!

I helped create the JHipster Native blueprint in early 2022 and wrote about how to use it in Introducing Spring Native for JHipster: Serverless Full-Stack Made Easy. We converted Ionic for JHipster into a blueprint and updated JHipster React Native. I wrote about them both on the OktaDev and Auth0 blogs:

Personal

We started the year with a trip to Cabo San Lucas with my parents and sisters. My parents like to do a "chasing the sun" trip in the midst of winter because they live in the backwoods of Montana, and the sun doesn't shine a whole lot.

I had difficulties getting my passport renewed in March, but succeeded after learning a local government official can help expedite things. Once I got a new passport, Abbie, Jack, and I had a blast with Trish's brother's family in Grand Cayman.

The 2021-2022 ski season was pretty good. This year is shaping up to be much better! I already have 24 days in, and we're only halfway through the season!

For the third year in a row, I took a long summer vacation thanks to Okta's unlimited vacation policy.

In 24 hours, I'll be starting my summer vacation. @okta has an unlimited vacation policy and I'm taking full advantage with a month off! 😃

What will I do?

🏔 A week in Alaska
🤠 A RV trip to Montana
🛶 A week-long rafting trip
🤘 Def Leppard / Mötley Crüe concert#LifeAtOkta
— Matt Raible (@mraible) June 16, 2022

Celebrating my parent's 50th in Alaska was fantastic!

And so was the Colorado Avalanche's Stanley Cup victory. 🥳

We managed to go rafting a lot in July. Five nights camping on the Green River was our favorite trip.

I celebrated 20 years of blogging in August. Jack turned 18 at the end of the month.

I took the kids to the first game of the Broncos' season in Seattle. Their stadium had a sweet view of the city. We did not expect to lose that game.

We enjoyed a beautiful @Broncos sunset in Seattle last night. 😊 pic.twitter.com/OVchzB6zYe
— Matt Raible (@mraible) September 12, 2022

The fall was filled with a disappointing Broncos season, Abbie's 20th birthday, and an even more disappointing CU Buffaloes football season. We have elevated hopes for both the CU Buffs and the Denver Broncos in 2023!

We had a blast celebrating @AbbieRaible's birthday this weekend! 🥳 pic.twitter.com/69AKuDOp17
— Matt Raible (@mraible) November 7, 2022

In the meantime, we're big Nuggets and Avalanche fans and are excited for their playoff runs this spring.

Trish and I ended the year celebrating love in the Philippines.

Hefe the Bus and Stout the Syncro

Stout the Syncro's Subaru engine died in February. Because of this, I decided it was a good time to restore him like Hefe with a new paint job, interior, and other improvements. We hauled him to our favorite Vanagon mechanics, Mr. Mechanic, to install a new Subaru Outback engine. Trish bought me a temporary Tesla to tide me over because we figured the restoration might take six months to a year. I named it White Lightning.

As luck would have it, we couldn't find anyone to do the bodywork and paint, so we ended up getting it back with a new engine in June. After experiencing several expensive adjustments after the new engine, I'm still driving my temporary Tesla, and Stout is parked in our barn. Trish wants to trade White Lightning for an RV (a 20-year dream of hers), while I'm hoping to swap it for an ID Buzz.

The year's VW highlight was the Colorado Bug-In at Bandimere Speedway. Stout won runner-up in his class, while Hefe won the whole kit and kaboodle: Best in Class, Best Interior, and Best of Show!! 😆

I'm back from summer vacation today and feeling fantastic! #HefeTheBus won Best of Show, Best Interior, and his class at the Colorado Bug-In yesterday!!

Winning Best of Show at the Bug-In was a bucket list item for me when I bought him way back in 2004. So proud! 🥳 #vwbus pic.twitter.com/Vm4p1KQNcl
— Matt Raible (@mraible) July 25, 2022

We're still featured on the Bandimere website as the Best of Show winners.

2023

Professionally, I hope to do some JUG tours in the US this year. I joined the Auth0 product unit at Okta in August, and they're much more regionally focused than my former OktaDev team was. This is largely because we have developer advocates worldwide, and it's more sustainable if Deepu hits the Java conferences in Europe while I focus on the US. If you're interested in seeing where my team will be in 2023, see developer.auth0.com/events.

This will be a big year for our family. Jack graduates high school in May, and we'll become empty nesters in August. He got accepted to CU a couple of weeks ago and will join his sister up in Boulder! With Coach Prime on board, we're hoping for some good CU football games this season. Because it's his last six months at home, I'm skipping conferences that happen while he's at our house.

I only have one goal for 2023: be present.

I've noticed that this is easy if I'm playing with friends or visiting family. Putting down my phone, listening, and paying attention on Zoom calls is my jam this year.

If you want to follow along on my adventures, please follow me on Twitter. I also post pictures of my favorite moments on Instagram and whole albums on Flickr.

Celebrating Love in the Philippines

Matt Raible — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 11:26:45 -0700

About a year ago, our friends Aris and Jen mentioned they were going to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary in the Philippines. Trish and I said "we'll go!" before they even invited us. Not only were Aris and Jen celebrating, but Aris's parents were also celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. We were excited to join in the festivities and booked our flights last September.

Our journey began the day after Christmas, in the early morning. We started with a flight to San Francisco.

Our flight was a bit delayed, as was our from San Francisco to Honolulu. We missed our connection to Guam, so got to spend the night in Honolulu on United.

The next day, we flew to Guam. This was fun because Trish was born in Guam. Another flight to Manila and we were able to rest for the night. Since we were delayed by a day, we missed our flight to El Nido and had to book a new one to Puerto Princessa instead. Puerto Princesa is the capital of Palawan, the island where El Nido is located. We took a five-hour private shuttle from Puerto Princesa to El Nido. The number of dogs, people, and motorbikes on the road was incredible. We were glad to finally arrive at our hotel, the El Nido Garden Resort.

The next day, we took a boat island hopping with our whole crew of 16. We visited a few beaches, a cave, and some folks went kayaking. It rained most of the day, but it wasn't cold and we had a blast anyway.

That evening, Trish and I joined Aris and Jen for dinner at the place they were hoping to renew their vows. To get there, we took a path that turned into a muddy trail, that ended with a walk on two-by-fours over an alligator farm. We gladly accepted the restaurant's offer for a speedboat ride back to El Nido after dinner.

Massages were 10 USD, so we enjoyed as many as we could. Some people even got two in the same day. We celebrated New Year's Eve together complete with illegal fireworks on the beach.

We gathered the next afternoon to renew Aris and Jen's vows. It was a small ceremony with family + Trish and I.

Trish took a gorgeous photo of the sunset that evening.

We did another island hopping tour in El Nido, spent some time at Lio Beach, and splashed around in the resort's pool. We also had several more massages and delicious meals.

We took a flight to Manila for the second half of our vacation. We stayed at the Manila Marriott, where we received lounge privileges thanks to all my travel last year. This was awesome because they had a full breakfast buffet, afternoon snacks, and evening cocktails. We also had a great view of the golf course from our room.

Our hotel was far from the rest of our crew, but it was kinda cool that it had a mall and casino attached to it. We spent a morning exploring it, and I even doubled my money at the Blackjack table one evening.

In the evenings, we'd meet up with the Velasquez family for dinner and entertainment.

One evening, we rented a private karaoke room and spent several hours singing and laughing. Another, we went to Aris's aunt's house and marveled at her rooftop patio with a basketball court.

Finally, we gathered at Gazebo Royale for the 50th wedding anniversary celebration.

We ended the night at a relative's house nearby, where Jen did what she does best, singing her heart out!

It was incredibly fun to travel to the other side of the world with friends. Trish and I've traveled the world together before, but this was the first time we've traveled with so many friends. We're already planning our next trip together in 2025.

For more photos, see my Aris and Jen's 25th in the Philippines album on Flickr.

Thank you soooo much for including us, Aris and Jen! We loved celebrating love with you and your family in the Philippines!! ❤️

Questions about JHipster, JHipster Lite, and Spring Boot 3

Matt Raible — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 08:07:27 -0700

I'm a big fan of LinkedIn. I'm biased because I worked there from 2007-8, have alumni privileges like a free pro account, and learned how to unsubscribe from all their emails over a decade ago.

I communicate with a lot of developers via LinkedIn. I recently received a message from Raymond Meester about the JHipster project. Raymond asked many poignant questions, and I thought it'd be helpful to share my responses with y'all. Of course, I got permission from Raymond before posting this. You can find his blog on Medium.

Hi Matt,

I was reading through some threads on the dev mailing list:

https://groups.google.com/g/jhipster-dev

I'm not part of the dev team, but I thought I just share some of my thoughts with you.

On the mailing list, there is an interesting discussion about JHipster vs JHipster Lite. Personally, I don't fully understand the debate. In my opinion, there could be one base that could be used for several kinds of generators. Say:

- Catered (default)
- A la carte (lite)

As far as I can see (at least that's the case for myself), I have more use cases for the first than the second. Just a generator with a few questions on what type of application and then the frameworks to choose (like Spring/Quarkus/Micronaut for the backend and Angular/React/Vue for the frontend) is enough in most cases.

Now that I am more experienced, I definitely want to use lite as well. It's an exciting project with some smart choices, but I don't think that it will become the majority of the users.

I do think JHL can be a new base for the normal JHipster as well. Only the generator (whether it's the CLI or GUI) on top of it will be different.

JHL could also provide a simple generator where I have the top three choices for a specific technology. Of course, when the architecture of JHipster Lite is set up well, it will be easy to add other choices (by blueprints) or change the default top 3 when popularity of a frameworks changes.

Currently, as far as I can see, there are two separate teams improving both JHipster and JHipster Lite. Good to try out different directions, but in the end, a waste of resources.

What I currently miss in JHipster (the main project) is regular updates. As an end user, I just want the latest versions when generating a new application, but lately there are huge gaps of three months between releases.

I really would like to see a monthly minor version with just dependencies updates (I understand that there is more to be done for major versions like the transition to Spring Boot 3. But even when nothing big changes it is good to have the latest libraries).

I agree with how Julien originally set up JHipster as simple as possible for end-users. But currently, Deepu seems one of the few that still stresses this point.

JHipster as it evolved is not only practicable to try out different frameworks, but also as a base for further development. Contrary to what seems to be the current belief about JHipster, it's not the speed, ease of use or the choices of generation that is the most important feature, but more that for the generated application the architecture is sound, a lot of best practices are used and the code is clean. This saves so much time for me as developer later on.

I also have a question about JHipster Native now that Spring Boot 3 has arrived. Spring removed the Spring Native library, which is not part of the framework itself. What does this mean for JHipster Native?

Keep up the good work!

This was a heavy message to receive early on a Tuesday morning. It was heavy because Raymond's questions were exact, and I thought they deserved a similar response.

> Currently, as far as I can see, two separate teams are improving both JHipster and JHipster Lite. Good to try out different directions, but in the end, a waste of resources.

Possibly, but as far as I can tell, the same people aren't working on the same project. I believe that JHipster Lite was created because Pascal and others understand Java better than JavaScript, and they were lost in the JHipster codebase and wanted a Java version. JHL also emphasizes DDD and is not interested in CRUD, AFAICT.

In reality, I think many of the contributors have had difficulty figuring out how things work. However, we've always had JavaScript heroes to bail us out. In the beginning, Julien knew everything, so he could fix things quickly. Then, it was Deepu - who has admitted to me he rewrote the JHipster core a few times when he was super active. Now it's Marcelo, and I think he's doing a great job.

I don't really look at the JHipster Lite project. I haven't even watched Julien's video from Devoxx, though I've been meaning to.

Marcelo, myself, and many others have done a lot with JHipster in 2022. I've focused on getting popular blueprints in good shape rather than the core. We've released the Spring Native blueprint this year and updates for Ionic and React Native. There's also been quite a bit of work done on the Quarkus and Micronaut blueprints, and I believe those are just a few hours away from new releases.

> What I currently miss in JHipster (the main project) is regular updates. As an end user, I just want the latest versions when generating a new application, but lately, there are huge gaps of three months between releases.

Three months between releases seems pretty good to me! If you're just looking for dependency updates, you should be able to do some of those in your project w/o relying on a new version of JHipster.

I started updating the JHipster Mini-Book in March of this year, and the current 7.9.3 version is the first version that's bug-free enough for me to complete the updates.

> What does this mean for JHipster Native?

It means it's only necessary for JHipster apps with Spring Boot 2.x. JHipster 8 apps will have native support by default since it's built-in to Spring Boot 3. Related to Spring Boot 3: we started upgrading in late September, and I believe we've made great progress. In the past, it's taken us six months to a year to upgrade between major Spring versions. I tweeted our current status recently.

Raymond and I had a bit of back and forth regarding upgrades.

I also think you missed my point on upgrading JHipster on a regular basis (say, a monthly interval).

My idea behind this is as follows:

1. Creating/Generating a new project happens only once, while upgrading happens dozens of times over the lifecycle of the software.
2. Applications (and also JHipster-generated apps) have a lot of dependencies. I rather don't want to manage those dependencies by hand (even with stuff like Dependabot).
3. It's important to be on the latest version for security, fixes, and to make dependencies work with modern frameworks (say JDK17).
4. Dependencies must work together well, and this must be tested.

I work mostly alone on my open source projects. It's my goal to work as much as I can on the 'business code/specific use cases and not be bothered too much about technologies and dependencies.

That's why I think it's so critical to start a project with the latest available dependencies when starting a new project, but also for using the latest versions when upgrading.

I let JHipster upgrade hundreds of dependencies for me. By this I am ensured that they work together and are safe to use, while I only need to focus on upgrading JHipster, instead of single dependencies.

Upgrading JHipster is btw not always that easy. Though I developed some scripts for it now. That's also why I discussed this topic at the beginning of the year on the discussion board of JHipster Lite:

https://github.com/jhipster/jhipster-lite/discussions/512

For now, both JH and JHL focus on generating new projects and not so much on upgrading projects made with older versions. That's fair, but I believe there is still a gap in the market here, just as significant as JHipster once filled for generating projects.

For me, the monthly releases could be just patch releases with only upgrades of minor dependencies (so nothing fancy like a major upgrade to Spring Framework 6/Spring Boot 3). Those major or even minor upgrades (with some added functionality and fixes) could be every three months (minor) or yearly (major).

I know JHipster is a community project, but I think that, for example the predictability of a release every six months with LTS releases is very nice.

I agreed that making upgrades seamless is not our strong suit. I've struggled many times when trying to upgrade 21-Points Health with npx jhipster upgrade. Sometimes, it works. Often, it does not. I think this is difficult to test because it can only be done after releases have happened. I wish I had a better answer. I suggested Raymond use some of his learnings to improve our upgrade sub-generator.

My responses are my opinions. I wanted to see what the JHipster project leads thought of my perspective, so I sent them a draft of this blog post. Pascal Grimaud responded with several excellent points.

> Possibly, but as far as I can tell, the same people aren't working on the same project. I believe that JHipster Lite was created because Pascal and others understand Java better than JavaScript, and they were lost in the JHipster codebase and wanted a Java version. JHL also emphasizes DDD and is not interested in CRUD, AFAICT.

Sorry Matt, but it's wrong. I didn't start JHLite because of technologies, Java or Javascript. It's the same; I don't care. I started JHLite to solve these problems I mentioned more than one year ago.

Problem #1: too many generated files.
Problem #2: hard to customize. Only a few users (less than 10) in the world maintain a blueprint. I know dozens of companies using JHipster (generator-jhipster). And none of them uses a blueprint.
Problem #3: too many options, too hard to maintain, so no new contributors for months. For an open source project, it's really sad.
Problem #4: complex templates.

A real story between a dev and me:
- dev: I found a bug in the SecurityConfiguration class. There is a missing line of code --> "xxxxx".
- me: Nice! We should apply it to our projects. Can you contribute back to generator-jhipster, too, please?
- dev: Good idea, it will be my first contribution to an open-source project! Let me try.
(hours later ...)
- dev: I don't understand. What's this f*cking SecurityConfiguration.java.ejs file?
- me: It's the template for managing security configuration for all existing options.
- dev: Should I apply it for JWT, too? for Session? Should I apply it for reactive too? Should I apply it for microservice?
- me: Yes, and you should test each config, please.
- dev: I don't care about these options, and as it's too complex, I gave up. As you're in the core team, you can do it yourself.
- me: OK, let's apply it only to our projects.

Problem #5: Too many projects, resulting in complex releases.
Problem #6: Yeoman, maintained only by Marcelo.

I started JHLite because:
- I don't use generator-jhipster anymore for my real projects, for real customers, because it doesn't fit.
- JHLite allows me to design my applications around BUSINESS instead of infrastructure.
- Modular approach, so it fits my needs.
- The quality of code, as each module is small, it's easy to have the best quality possible.

> In reality, I think many of the contributors have had difficulty figuring out how things work. However, we've always had JavaScript heroes to bail us out. In the beginning, Julien knew everything, so he could fix things quickly. Then, it was Deepu - who has admitted to me he rewrote the JHipster core a few times when he was super active. Now it's Marcelo, and I think he's doing a great job.

It's a big single point of failure! A big open source project like JHipster needs a community + contributors, not a hero.

Related to JHipster, I recently asked ChatGPT to write a poem about it.

I also asked it to compare JHipster versus JHipster Lite.

Wow, I'm impressed with both answers! 🤩

If you have additional questions about JHipster, hit me up on LinkedIn or ask your question on Stack Overflow with a jhipster tag.

Happy Birthday, Abbie!

Matt Raible — Sat, 5 Nov 2022 08:31:40 -0600

Our awesome daughter, Abbie, turns 20 today! She's a sophomore at the University of Colorado in Boulder and lives in her sorority house this year. There are around 100 girls living in the house, and she recently ran for president. She didn't win but became the VP of Operations as a consolation prize. We're very proud of her for reaching for opportunities and taking full advantage of college life.

The photo below shows Jack, Abbie, and Abbie's boyfriend, Joseph. I took it just before the Broncos vs. Seattle game to start the season. We were all pretty optimistic about the Broncos back then. 🥴

Today, we'll be reuniting (and adding Trish) in Boulder for the CU vs. Oregon game. Our expectations are low, but our spirits are high! After all, they won when we attended the last game for parents' weekend! Yes, that was the only game they won this year.

Happy Birthday, Abbie! We can't wait to celebrate with you!! 🥰

Happy Birthday, Jack!

Matt Raible — Sun, 28 Aug 2022 23:40:58 -0600

Our youngest child turned 18 today. He's embarked on his senior year of high school and has a good group of friends he likes to hang out with. They celebrated his birthday last night at the Kid Cudi concert followed by an after-party with additional friends at the ranch. Trish had fun decorating our downstairs with his friends and surprising him when he arrived home.

Tonight, we celebrated with a family dinner, had lots of laughs, and enjoyed solving a puzzle together for a good hour. Thanks to my sister, Kalin, for sending such a fun gift!

Happy Birthday, Jack! We hope you have a wonderful senior year of high school and make many lasting memories. 😊

20 Years of blogging!

Matt Raible — Tue, 2 Aug 2022 13:09:09 -0600

This blog was started on August 1, 2002 — 20 years ago yesterday! It's amazing to look back at my first month of blogging and see how many times I'd post per day. Most posts are only a sentence or two with no comments because Roller didn't have that feature yet.

Other fun facts:

This blog has used Apache Roller and Tomcat from day one.
I've had the same hosting provider, KGB Internet Solutions, the whole time.
I've authored 3,284 blog posts over the years and received 13,970 comments.
Stats show I still get around 5K visits per day, serve up 30-40 GB per month, and receive over a million hits per month.

Thanks to all of you that have read this blog over the years. I appreciate you!

Summer 2022: Family Adventures in Alaska, Montana, and Colorado

Matt Raible — Mon, 1 Aug 2022 23:00:00 -0600

For the third year in a row, I took a long summer vacation thanks to Okta's unlimited vacation policy.

In 24 hours, I’ll be starting my summer vacation. @okta has an unlimited vacation policy and I’m taking full advantage with a month off! 😃

What will I do?

🏔 A week in Alaska
🤠 A RV trip to Montana
🛶 A week-long rafting trip
🤘 Def Leppard / Mötley Crüe concert#LifeAtOkta
— Matt Raible (@mraible) June 16, 2022

We started by traveling to Alaska with my sister and parents. My parents are celebrating 50 years of marriage this year and chose Anchorage as the celebratory destination.

The week we were in Alaska happened to coincide with the Colorado Avalance hockey team being in the Stanley Cup. We watched the games and cheered together, loudly.

We returned home to Colorado and watched the Avs win the whole kit and kaboodle. That was a fun day as was the Avs Parade in downtown Denver.

The next day, I played one of my best golf games ever and Trish rejoiced in renting a badass RV for a week in Montana.

We were super excited to get on the road the next morning. Our enthusiasm was dampened quickly when we found the RV didn't have any hookups for trailer lights. Since we planned to take our rafts with us, this quickly upset the flow of the morning. In a rush to get on the road, I decided we should take Trish's Tesla X as the tow vehicle. A full charge lasted us a mere 75 miles, so we pivoted to towing with the RV and using the Tesla as a tailing car to make up for no trailer lights.

On the 4th of July, it rained quite a bit so we were happy with our RV porch for the fireworks.

Trish enjoyed her remote office in the RV that week; Abbie opted for an office on the porch.

The water was higher than normal in Montana this year, so we got to enjoy some swift days on the river. We floated the Blackfoot one day and the Middle Fork of the Flathead (near Glacier Park) the next.

Our last night gave us a beautiful sunset before we endured the 21-hour drive home. Normally, it's around 16 hours. Charging the Tesla every few hours really slowed things down; we didn't get home until 4:15am. Jack was a real trooper and drove the many hours through Wyoming all by himself.

We were home for two days, just enough time to pack up for a week-long rafting trip down the Green River, starting at Gates of Lodore in Dinosaur National Monument. This time we took Stout the Syncro as our tow vehicle. He got a new engine a few weeks prior and successfully got us all the way across Colorado.

Five nights of camping on the river gives one a good perspective of the world. We were super proud of Jack for rowing through a class 4 rapid and Abbie for rowing through a class 3. I lost an oar at the top of the class 4, and we recovered it a few days later when a fellow rafter responded to our post on Mountain Buzz.

For the grand finale, we attended The Stadium Tour with Mötley Crüe, Def Leppard, Poison, and Joan Jett at Coors Field. We had a blast singing along and hanging out with our friends from Montana, Owen and Dana.

I thought the concert was my vacation's grand finale, but what happened that weekend is something I dreamed of since I first started restoring Hefe. He won Best of Show at the Colorado Bug-In! Not only that, but he won Best Interior and Best in Class too!!

I'm back from summer vacation today and feeling fantastic! #HefeTheBus won Best of Show, Best Interior, and his class at the Colorado Bug-In yesterday!!

Winning Best of Show at the Bug-In was a bucket list item for me when I bought him way back in 2004. So proud! 🥳 #vwbus pic.twitter.com/Vm4p1KQNcl
— Matt Raible (@mraible) July 25, 2022

These photos are just a sampling of the 100+ that I polished and published. I think photos are a great way to tell a story, so I added captions to all of them in my Summer 2022 Album. I've also embedded it below.

Farewell to the 2021-2022 Ski Season

Matt Raible — Tue, 24 May 2022 11:10:55 -0600

I had a lot of fun this ski season, but I didn't make it to the mountains as much as I thought I would. I bought both the Epic and Ikon passes with high hopes at the beginning of the season. The rest of the family had Ikon. The ski season started for me on Nov 24, 2020 with a backyard cross-country ski. It took me another month until I ventured up to the high country. A-Basin didn't have a whole lot of snow on Dec 23.

I got to ski with the Makofsky family at Copper on New Years Eve.

The next day, Trish and I enjoyed a fresh blanket of snow to ring in the new year. 🎊

There was a boys trip to Jackson Hole in late January.

And more nordic skiing with our pups, Daisy and Kai.

We skied with the Morse Family and played with the Snyders in Steamboat.

And closed out the year with a day off the internet at Mary Jane.

My stats for the season:

15 days downhill
11 days cross-country

26 days combined is a far cry from last year's 51! It makes a big difference when you rent a place in the mountains like we did last year.

There weren't that many ski days with Abbie and Jack this year. Abbie ended up skiing a lot with friends from CU Boulder. Jack is looking as handsome as ever. Here's his prom photo with friends.

Trish was the fantastic photographer for the big night.

Hefe the Bus is ready for summer, as are we.

We're traveling to Alaska with my folks for their 50th anniversary, Trish just rented an RV for adventuring to Montana, and we have a week-long rafting trip starting at the Gates of Lodore. I hope you get a chance to opt outside in the next few months too. Giddyup and get out there! 🤠

How to Renew Your Passport Quickly (aka The Cayman Islands Spring Break That Almost Wasn't)

Matt Raible — Tue, 5 Apr 2022 11:22:02 -0600

tl;dr Call your member of Congress or Senator if you need help getting a passport appointment.

When we renewed our kids' passports in October 2021, it only took a few weeks for their new ones to arrive in our mailbox. Trish and I sent our passports for renewal in late November, expecting a similar quick turnaround. I received mine back a couple of weeks later because I'd forgotten an essential item - the check to pay for it. Trish didn't receive hers in December, so she set up an appointment at the Colorado Passport Agency. We're very fortunate as this office is just seven miles away from us.

The only appointment Trish could get was on the same day as our flight to Cabo San Lucas in early January. Her appointment was at 9am, and our flight was at 11:25am. She found out during her appointment that she didn't receive a new passport in December because our dogs scared off the delivery driver. She'd ordered expedited delivery; that's why they tried to deliver to our front porch instead of dropping it in the mailbox.

The passport office was able to turn things around quickly and she arrived at the airport, new passport in hand, at 10:45am. 40 minutes wasn't enough time, according to the checkin counter, so she had to reschedule her flight for the next day. This was unfortunate since we waited at the gate for 45 minutes due to delays.

Mexico was fabulous.

I didn't opt for expedited delivery when I re-sent my passport for renewal in late January. I was worried that delivery might fail because of the dogs, everyone else had gotten their passports in a few weeks, and I had no international travel scheduled. February came and went. I realized in early March that we didn't have any plans for Spring Break. As a father with a teenage son flying solo at home and Trish off to ski with a friend during his Spring Break week, I felt obligated to schedule something fun. I contacted Trish's brother, confirmed a niece and nephew had the same Spring Break, and we started planning. We had lodging and flights booked for a week in the Cayman Islands within a few days.

That's when I realized I didn't have my passport back yet. Ten days before our flight, I called the Colorado Passport Agency and tried to get an appointment. I didn't realize you were supposed to call ten business days before your flight. Regardless, I dialed in at 8am EST and was on hold for 2.5 hours before giving up. I kept calling every so often for the next week. I slipped into a funk about a week before our flight. I'd booked this cool trip with Jack, and it looked like I'd be unable to join him. Good job, Dad.

This funk lasted a couple of days as I kept trying to get an appointment and failing. I think it was Wednesday of that week when I changed my attitude. Our flight was the following Tuesday, at 5am on March 15.

Enter the Law of Attraction

I changed my attitude to one that embraced the Law of Attraction. The Law of Attraction is essentially, "if you believe enough, it will happen." I've only used it once previously in my life. That's when I dreamed up Trish. I texted my in-laws and Trish with my newfound determination and told them it was gonna happen, and they should enjoy watching me succeed. After repeatedly calling on Thursday, I decided to head down to the passport agency on Friday and hang out right by the entrance on the 6th floor. I arrived at 7:45am (they open at 8am) with my lucky Grateful Dead shirt on, hoping that I'd find some sympathy from someone.

There was already a line when I arrived, as well as a woman that was panicking about her flight to Jamaica that night (from Salt Lake City) with her son. She'd recently discovered her son's passport was expired, and she had to get on the flight. She asked if anyone in line would be willing to give up their spot for her. People seemed to know this wasn't an option, and the security guard confirmed she wasn't allowed to do it. I felt the lady's hopelessness, but I also didn't think there was a solution. Around 9am, she walked out of the office with her son. 20 minutes later, she returned, showed her confirmation number to the security guard, and was admitted. "Whoa!" I thought to myself; there's hope!

At around 10am, the Jamaica-bound lady emerged from the office. I asked her how she did it. She said someone in line had told her to call a congress member in Colorado Springs, and they got her an appointment! I received a similar tip moments before I talked to her. I started calling my local congressman and senators frantically, as well as the person she called. I spent the next hour calling folks, leaving messages, and filling out website forms. By 11:30am, I had an appointment for 9:30am on Monday!

Later that day, I received a voicemail hours after it'd been left. My local congressman, Jason Crow, had scheduled an appointment for me the same day at 1pm. Unfortunately, I didn't receive the message in time. All of the other folks I called responded too! Senator John Hickenlooper's office called me Monday morning and was willing to make things happen immediately. Ultimately, it was Liz from Colorado Springs that made it happen. In hindsight, all the others did too!

I was ecstatic. The Law of Attraction had worked once again!

We enjoyed the heck out of Grand Cayman. Abbie even joined us at the last minute. Thanks to my in-laws, Matt and Eva, for planning such a fun trip and letting us tag along!

P.S. We also found it quite convenient that we could take at-home COVID tests before traveling to and from the Caymans. AZOVA made it easy to schedule our tests. They observed us via webcam when we took the tests and emailed us the results as a PDF within minutes.

The Angular Mini-Book 2.0 is now available!

Matt Raible — Fri, 18 Feb 2022 08:24:39 -0700

I'm pumped to announce that the Angular Mini-Book 2.0 has been released! You can download it in PDF and EPUB formats from InfoQ.

About this book

What's new?

This new edition (2.0) uses Angular 13 and Spring Boot 2.6. Some other fun facts:

First commit on 2.0 version: Nov 19, 2021 { Thanks to James Ward for his help upgrading to Knative 1.0! }
Upgraded the book's project to use Gradle 7: Dec 2, 2021 { I appreciate you Guillaume Grossetie! }
Upgraded to Angular 13 and Spring Boot 2.6.1: Jan 7, 2022
Detailed QA of all the code: Jan 27 - Feb 10, 2022
Files changed since 1.0: 244
Build date: Feb 17, 2022

For more information about this book, please read my post about its 1.0 release.

To send us feedback or issues, e-mail InfoQ at feedback@infoq.com, email me at matt@raibledesigns.com, or hit me up on Twitter @mraible.

2021 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Sun, 2 Jan 2022 22:38:01 -0700

I didn't expect to travel much in 2021, mostly because of my promise to myself to take a year off. When I got fully-vaxxed in April, I expected things to return to normal and we'd all be traveling to conferences again by early fall.

I'm happy to announce that I'm #FullyVaccinated. Had 2nd @pfizer shot on Apr 14. I feel lucky 🍀 to have experienced no symptoms other than extreme joy. 🥳@TrishPhoto and I just finished a 23-day sugar detox too. We're feeling good!! ✌️ pic.twitter.com/6chqkFbPB7
— Matt Raible (@mraible) April 28, 2021

2021 was a milestone year for our family. It's the year Abbie graduated from high school! We planned and executed a fun party with family and friends at the Raible Ranch in early June.

She did it! Congratulations @AbbieRaible!! 🥳 pic.twitter.com/G1Zz3QTHa4
— Matt Raible (@mraible) June 4, 2021

From last year's year in review:

I only have one goal for 2021: dance more 🕺

When I mentioned this to Trish, she laughed and pointed to our living room, which she recently re-arranged to open up a nice dance floor. I probably danced more in 2021 than 2020, but that's not saying much. My favorite concert this year was Greensky Bluegrass at Red Rocks. It helped that I was with old friends Bruce Snyder and Matt Good and Bruce got us front row seats.

We tried to go to Jazz Fest in October, but it got cancelled because of COVID.

I'm going to look back on 2021 using the following categories.

Professional

This year, I focused on creating YouTube videos more than blog posts. On the OktaDev YouTube Channel, I published 12 videos (-8 from 2020). My most popular video (13K views) was based on a blog post I published in January called Reactive Java Microservices with Spring Boot and JHipster.

I only published five blog posts to the Okta developer blog. You can see that I focused on Spring Boot, JHipster, and GraalVM.

It's interesting to look back and see I didn't author any JavaScript topics. I like to think that's because I spent all my JavaScript time working on the Angular Mini-Book. I smiled a lot after finishing v1.0 in November.

The Angular Mini-Book 1.0 is now available! 🥳

🅰️ https://t.co/JEKxQ2A9hr #angular #typescript #springboot #kotlin pic.twitter.com/MYcXH5fQ1i
— Matt Raible (@mraible) November 17, 2021

My team published 12 JavaScript-related blog posts in 2021. To compare, we published 20 Java-related posts. We hope to publish more posts for both topics and many others in 2022. I'm super excited to work with new teammates Deepu K Sasidharan, Alisa Duncan, E. Dunham, and Tanay Pant!

I continued to record meetups for the Denver/Boulder JUG and Denver Open Source Users group (DOSUG). We used StreamYard and YouTube to broadcast our meetups. We published 10 videos to the Denver JUG YouTube Channel. We only published three videos to the Denver Open Source Users Group Channel, but we did successfully hold two of those meetups in-person! We're grateful to the folks at Thrive Workplace for donating their space.

Denver JUG is now up to 3,618 members. Our most popular video in 2021 was from yours truly on Reactive Microservices with Spring Boot and JHipster. 🥳

In 2020, I published 15 blog posts on the Okta developer blog. In 2021, I only published five. My reduction in content can be explained by a three-month gap in publishing where I worked on updating 200+ blog posts to use the Okta CLI (because our admin UI changed). My lack of thought leadership posts didn't help either. We publish two types of blog posts: thought leadership and conversion. Thought leadership posts tend to be about a hot topic, while conversion posts are usually tutorials. They're usually quicker to write, and I plan to write more in 2022.

Speaking

According to TripIt, I took 13 trips, to 15 cities, in one country (USA). Only a few were work-related. That's three more trips than 2020, and I had 77 days on the road (-8 from 2020).

My Speaker Deck profile shows 16 presentations at 14 events. Four of those were in-person, the rest were virtual.

jChampions Conferences with Ray Tsang
Richmond JUG
JavaLand
Colorado Springs Open Source Users Group
St. Louis Java User's Group
Denver Java Users Group
SpringOne with Brian Demers

Denver Open Source Users Group
The San Francisco Java User Group with Josh Long
ÜberConf
Joker<?> with Brian Demers
Connect.Tech
The Progressive Web Experience
Garden State Java User Group with Josh Long

My most-viewed presentation was Java REST API Framework Comparison from the Progressive Web Experience with 3.1K views.

My favorite conference experience was Summer Tech Forum in Crested Butte. My involvement was inspired by James Ward.

Look ?? -- I found @_JamesWard in the woods today! #CrestedButte #Singletrack #Colorado #SummerTechForum pic.twitter.com/rKbSMbbOa9
— Matt Raible (@mraible) August 18, 2021

I thouroughly enjoyed traveling to San Francisco to speak with Josh Long at the San Francisco JUG. It was a virtual event, but we spoke together from his home.

Let the games begin with @starbuxman! #Java #SpringNative #JHipster pic.twitter.com/0KSRTd89e5
— Matt Raible (@mraible) September 28, 2021

I hope to do more of this in 2022. ÜberConf, Connect.Tech, and the Progressive Web Experience were also in-person. Hanging out with fellow speakers (especially James Ward and Pratik Patel) after speaking was a rejuvenating experience for my soul. 🤗

There's even some #UsualSuspects here! Good to see you @_JamesWard and @knight_cloud. 😀 pic.twitter.com/2CSBTRvG7U
— Matt Raible (@mraible) October 7, 2021

Community

In the past, I used this section to talk about meetups I've started like Developer Ski Days and Devoxx4Kids Denver. We didn't host any events in 2021, but I might try to organize a developer ski day soon.

Projects

I continued to maintain OktaDev Schematics in 2021. The project had 16 releases. Working on it helps me keep up with changes in Angular, React, Vue, Ionic, and React Native and helps ensure I know how to use the latest Okta SDKs. According to npm-stat.com, it had ~60K downloads in 2021.

My other projects are related to JHipster. I didn't contribute anything significant, but I helped QA Micro Frontends support and Spring Boot upgrades. We had eight releases and ~1.8 million downloads in 2021. 🤓

I did not work on the JHipster Mini-Book in 2021, but I hope to update it for JHipster 7 this year. I said that last year, but it's actually on my calendar for February 1. You can watch my progress on GitHub.

Ionic for JHipster had four releases in 2021 and around ~12K downloads.

Personal

My parents are city kids that retired in the backwoods of Montana. They can't explain why they did it, but they know that a chasing the sun trip is part of what makes them happy in the winter. We started doing this family trip in the last few years, starting with New Orleans in 2020 and continuing with Hawaii in 2021.

I was gung ho for ski season last year and rented a condo for six weeks in downtown Winter Park to ski during the week. My stats for the season were decent: 28 days cross-country skiing, 23 days downhill. I had 51 combined days!

Abbie Graduates!

Shortly after ski season is high school graduations. We had a graduate this year and couldn't be prouder of Abbie! Jack was looking pretty suave too.

We enjoyed a rafting trip near Salida on Father's Day.

I took July off and we traveled to Washington, Montana, and Cape Cod.

Abbie moved on to college at the University of Colorado at Boulder. It's been really nice having her close (60 minute drive) and far enough away that she doesn't plan parties at our house. Jack planned his birthday party at the ranch this year. It exceeded all expectations.

We lost one of our cats, Mittens, while we were in Hawaii. Sagan, our crazy border collie, passed away this fall. They both lived full lives and made us smile a lot. 😢

Hefe the Bus and Stout the Syncro

We didn't do much with Hefe and Stout this year show-wise. I did enter both of them in the VWs on the Green virtual show. They both won first place in their respective categories. I have high hopes for more events in 2022! My favorite car-related event of the year was when I talked some fraternity brothers into bringing their cars to a show in my backyard. If you have a classic car and live in Colorado, you should join us next year. Search for "Chenango Car Show". It's typically in early August.

2022

Professionally, I hope to travel a bit this year. Okta is expanding globally, and I'd love to visit Australia and Japan to help make that happen. I have Devnexus, Devoxx France, and Spring I/O on my radar for conferences.

I hope to contribute frequently to JHipster. Microfrontends support works excellent for Angular; I hope to see the same for React and Vue. My Q1 goal is to make Spring Native work with JHipster. I also hope to help integrate GraphQL. I said that last year, but now Spring has official support with Spring GraphQL!

I'll be on summer vacation for a month, once again. It's a tradition I started a couple of years ago to prove that full-time can be as good as contracting (because of unlimited time off). This year's adventure will start with a trip to Alaska to celebrate my parents' 50th anniversary!

Last year, I said I'd like to ski 42 days for both downhill and nordic. Looking back, that seems a bit ambitious. I ended up with 28 days of cross-country skiing and 23 days downhill. That doesn't seem too bad. For 2022, I've purchased both the Epic and Ikon ski passes, and I hope to exceed my stats from last year. Heck, I'll be happy with 20 days of each! The snow conditions have been terrible until two weeks ago.

Last year, we failed to pull any rafting permits. That means we had no lengthy family trips with our rafting family. We had a few day trips, but were often left with a longing for more. Our rafting family is anxious to rendezvous in 2022.

COVID motivated us to become homebodies and our landscaping project turned out quite nice. We now have several beautiful flower gardens, trees, a fabulous fire pit, a basketball court, and a new carport.

I only have one goal for 2022: smile more.

I think that goal will be easily accomplished if I see your smiling faces. I hope 2022 is your best year! 🥳

If you want to follow along on my adventures, please follow me on Twitter. I also post pictures of my favorite moments on Instagram and whole albums on Flickr.

The Angular Mini-Book 1.0 is now available!

Matt Raible — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 14:48:40 -0700

I'm pleased to announce that the Angular Mini-Book has been released! You can download it in PDF and EPUB formats from InfoQ.

About this book

The Angular Mini-Book is a guide to getting started with Angular. You'll learn how to develop a bare-bones application, test it, and deploy it. Then you'll move on to adding Bootstrap, Angular Material, continuous integration, and authentication. Spring Boot is a popular framework for building REST APIs. You'll learn how to integrate Angular with Spring Boot and use security best practices like HTTPS and a content security policy.

This initial edition (v1.0) uses Angular 12 and Spring Boot 2.5. I do plan on updating it for Angular 13 and Spring Boot 2.6. If you have any tips for upgrading, please let me know!

Purpose of the book

I think building web and mobile applications with Angular, Bootstrap, and Spring Boot is a great experience. I'd like to encourage more developers to try it.

Thanks!

I'm incredibly grateful to Trish, Abbie, and Jack. They put up with my late nights and extended screen time while I worked on this book.

To Miško Hevery, thank you for inventing Angular and changing the lives of frontend developers. To the whole Angular team, I appreciate you and all you do for the community. Kudos for making our apps faster with every release!

To Phil Webb and Dave Syer, thanks for creating Spring Boot and simplifying Java for everyone. Hats off to the whole Spring team for their tireless dedication to quality open source projects.

I want to thank this book's tech editor, Deepu K Sasidharan. I looked to him for his deep experience with both TypeScript and JavaScript. Many sections are more streamlined because of his advice.

This book's copy editor, Maureen Spencer, helped correct my grammar and make this book easier on the eyes. I'm thankful for your help, Maureen.

David Neal created the cover image and all of the illustrations. He's awesome! You should consider buying his stuff and follow him for his dad jokes.

Finally, my compliments to you, potential reader. It's a heckuva time to be writing code. Enjoy your learning adventures! 😃

Fun facts

Creating this book was more difficult than I imagined. As you can see from the timeline below, I didn't do a whole lot in 2020. I ramped things up this spring and tried to get 'er done before Angular 13 and Spring Boot 2.6 were released. At the very least, I succeeded on the second goal, even if only by a couple days.

First commit: June 25, 2020
Outline created: September 15, 2020
Started writing: October 3, 2020
Upgraded to Angular 12 and Spring Boot 2.4.1: May 4, 2021
Finished first draft: June 30, 2021
Build date: November 16, 2021
Total commits: 108

This book was authored with Asciidoctor and I appreciate the assistance I received from Guillaume Grossetie.

The source code repo contains all the demos in addition to the book's code. The Count Lines of Code report (excluding generated files and directories) shows that it's mostly words, followed by example code:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                      files          blank        comment           code
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
AsciiDoc                         14           1651             20           5312
HTML                             38            211              0           2349
TypeScript                       86            322            299           2057
JSON                             27              0              0           1346
CSS                              11            265            250           1288
YAML                             10              8             89            654
Kotlin                           18             87              4            499
JavaScript                       12             35             48            355
Gradle                            6             43              4            227
Bourne Shell                      2             50            144            225

I'm proud to have built the v1.0 version of the book on my parent's 49th anniversary. Happy Anniversary Mom and Dad!! 🥳

To send us feedback or issues, e-mail InfoQ at feedback@infoq.com, email me at matt@raibledesigns.com, or hit me up on Twitter @mraible.

Happy Birthday, Abbie!

Matt Raible — Sat, 6 Nov 2021 19:34:30 -0600

Our daughter, Abbie, turned 19 this week. She's having a fun freshman year at the University of Colorado in Boulder. She's in the Business and Computer Science Program, has a good attendance record, and sends me Venmo invoices for good grades every couple of weeks. I had a "proud Dad" moment recently when she told me she wanted to learn Python and asked me how. After getting advice from my co-worker Joël, I sent her Learn Python the Hard Way.

Abbie's sorority had a "Dudes Weekend", so I drove Hefe to Boulder yesterday to participate in the festivities. She gave me a tour of her sorority and we marveled at the views from their rooftop patio.

Next, we gathered up her posse of friends and cruised down to Pearl Street. We had perfect timing to watch some of the Stampede and had a delicious dinner at Avanti. I have fond memories of my friends' parents coming to town in college. It was delightful to be that parent this weekend.

As I was leaving town, I thought to myself, "I should get some gas." I figured I could make it to Louisville, but I was wrong. The view of 36 from Hefe while waiting for AAA wasn't too bad.

Today, Jack and I ventured back to Boulder and hiked the Flatirons with Abbie and a couple of her friends. The trail was super busy and steep, but the views were worth it. We only hiked for three miles, but it took us two hours and 40 minutes. Everyone was pretty pumped when we made it to the top!

Happy 19th Birthday, Abbie! 🥳

Announcing Angular CRUD 2.0

Matt Raible — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 16:29:15 -0600

Friends shouldn't let friends write CRUD apps. At least, not by hand. That's why I used a schematic called Angular CRUD in one of my last Angular + Spring Boot blog posts. That post is kinda old (January 2020), but the combination of Angular and Spring Boot remains popular. That's why I decided to turn the series into an Angular Mini-Book for InfoQ.

The book has five different sections:

Build an Angular App
Integrate Angular with Spring Boot
Beautiful Angular Apps with Bootstrap
Angular Deployment
Angular and Docker

My goal with the book is to show you everything you need to get your Angular + Spring Boot app to production. But, what about JHipster?

Of course, you can just use JHipster, but I've found that a lot of beginners are intimidated by all the code it generates. That's why I wanted to create a bare-bones Angular guide that uses Spring Boot for its API.

I published the news on Twitter at the end of June.

I'm happy to announce that I've finished the first draft of the @Angular Mini-Book! After the editing process, you'll be able to find it at a local @InfoQ website.

Hopefully, they'll create a better cover for it. 😅 #angular #springboot #asciidoctor pic.twitter.com/el20GCS24s
— Matt Raible (@mraible) July 1, 2021

As part of creating the book, I updated Manfred Styer's Angular CRUD project and released v2.0. The 2.0 release adds support for Bootstrap and Angular Material for CSS framework aficionados, like me.

You can see the getting started tutorial for how to use it in your projects. To inspire you, I've included some screenshots of the new Bootstrap and Angular Material support.

Angular CRUD + Bootstrap

Angular CRUD + Angular Material

This theme is based on Create a responsive sidebar menu with Angular Material by Zoaib Khan.

Introduction to Angular CRUD Video

I also published an Introduction to Angular CRUD video that shows how it works.

You might ask, "When will the Angular Mini-Book be published?"

We're about halfway through tech editing. I hope to finish that in the next month, pass it on to copy editing, and publish before the end of the year.

Keep an eye on InfoQ's Mini-Books and follow me @mraible on Twitter for updates.

Summer 2021: Family Fun in Washington, Montana, and Cape Cod

Matt Raible — Sun, 5 Sep 2021 18:15:14 -0600

July is one of my favorite months. It starts off with a national celebration, always has nice weather, and my birthday is smack dab in the middle of it. I have a habit of taking summer vacation for the month and this year was no exception.

We kicked things off with a journey to Chelan, Washington for the 4th of July. My sister-in-law, Mya, helps run Tildio Winery and we figured it was about time we did some wine tasting there. My parents joined us and we had a blast!

From there, we returned to Colorado and I journeyed to golf with my buddy Cletus in Nebraska. We played 36 holes in 24 hours and enjoyed each other's company thoroughly. I polished up Hefe for a birthday cruise on the 16th.

The 2nd half of July was spent in Montana and Cape Cod. In Montana, we witnessed KeAnna and Cole's wedding and celebrated with old and new friends.

In Cape Cod, we had lots of smiles and water time with Trish's fabulous family.

These photos are just a sampling of the 150+ that I polished and published. I think photos are a great way to tell a story, so I added captions to all of them in my Summer 2021 Album. I've also embedded it below.

You might notice the album doesn't end with Cape Cod photos. That's because August was full of adventures too! I had to return to Montana to get our van, raft, and dogs. My dad joined me for the return road trip and his brother, Jimmy, joined us for a week at the ranch.

Then, I spent a week at the Summer Tech Forum in Crested Butte, complete with a 24-hour trip to Boulder to help Abbie move into CU. After a weekend in Telluride, I returned home, worked on my SpringOne presentation, and got ready for Jack's 17th birthday party.

The party was a success, Abbie joined a sorority today, and we're looking forward to a colorful fall. I love this time of year with the colors, cooler air, and football season. Go Broncos!

Happy Birthday, Jack!

Matt Raible — Sat, 28 Aug 2021 16:20:27 -0600

Jack turns 17 today! He's an ambitious kid these days that's interested in going to a hard engineering school for college. He mentioned this morning that he's going to try to and get into some of the harder ones. If you have suggestions, please leave a comment!

Jack is a junior in high school, the tallest in the family, and works at Code Ninjas teaching kids to code. His sister moved out and started at the University of Colorado last week, so he has the downstairs of the Raible Ranch all to himself.

Happy 17th Birthday, Jack! 😀

I think you're going to have a fun year being the solo kid. We look forward to helping you continue to be the awesome person you are.

Farewell to the 2020-21 Ski Season

Matt Raible — Wed, 2 Jun 2021 13:31:07 -0600

This ski season was interesting to say the least. Because of COVID-19, most Colorado ski resorts required reservations in order to ski. This wasn't too painful because we did most of our skiing during the week.

We recognized that social distancing might be an issue on weekends, so we rented a condo in Winter Park for the season. This allowed us to ski weekdays while working remotely. We didn't have it the whole season, just a week every month.

The ski season started for me on November 24, 2020, with some backyard cross-country skiing.

I was super pumped when I drove our Syncro Westy to the condo and discovered it fit in the garage! My first day on the slopes was Friday, December 4th.

The Fraser River Trail was just across the road from our condo, so it was easy to get some cross-country skiing in too.

That weekend, Trish and Jack joined me and we went Nordic skiing at Snow Mountain Ranch's Nordic Center.

We took the day off on Trish's birthday; skiing corduroy groomers in the morning and cross-country in the afternoon.

I'm normally a big fan of taking two weeks off for Christmas and New Years. Since everyone stayed home for the holidays this year, I chose to work through them. I took off the first week in January instead.

I worked in Stout the Syncro in the C-Lot at Mary Jane when I returned in February. That's the day I learned that four hours of Zoom costs about 7 GB in bandwidth. I tethered on my T-Mobile phone the whole time and only had to buy an additional 10 GB (for $10) at the very end. The fresh powder at the end of the day made it worth it!

Hawaii Adventures in Kauai

My parents like to get away from Montana in the middle of winter. Before the pandemic hit, we ventured to New Orleans. This year, we decided to head to Kauai for two weeks. There were many COVID protocols in place for this trip.

We had to have a negative COVID test 72 hours before departure. We had to show those results when we landed in Kauai. Then we had to quarantine in a "resort bubble" hotel for 72 hours. Next, we had to take another test and receive negative results. After that, we were free to rent a car and start our island adventures. Abbie brought her boyfriend, Joseph, and best friend, Rory, along with us.

We left early for the airport because my parents took an at-home test and hadn't received their results yet. Since they had a 3-hour layover in Denver, we figured I could take them to a local Walgreens to get tested and everything would be good to go.

When we were driving to the airport, Trish's engine light came on in her Tahoe. By the time we arrived at the airport, the vehicle was obviously dying. We called AAA to pick it up and I jumped in a Lyft with my parents. The local Walgreens was hesitant to test without an appointment, but we told them our situation, and a manager there did his best to make it happen.

The manager was successful—I received the results on my phone as the plane was taxiing down the runway!

On our last night, Trish and I saw live music for the first time in over a year!

Trish ordered a new lens for her camera when she saw the Albatross nesting nearby. It arrived just hours before we flew home.

March Madness

When we arrived home in March, I headed back to the condo for our week. I arrived late at night and texted the owner to tell him I couldn't get the hot tub to turn on. He texted me back three times before I woke up the next morning. I had the wrong dates! People were checking in that night, so I had to wash all the sheets and get out of there quickly. I got all my work done in the morning and hit the slopes in the afternoon.

I returned the following week and had a blast skiing with my buddy, Bill Lyons. He's been a ski instructor at Winter Park and Mary Jane for decades and showed me some hidden trails. Thanks, Bill!

We'd just returned from Hawaii, so we figured we might be able to skip Spring Break. Then we learned Abbie had senioritis and wanted to rendezvous with her similarly-minded cousins near a beach. Trish's parents have a place in Naples, Florida. Since they weren't using it, we made a plan, bought some tickets, and spent a splendid week with Trish's brother and his family.

The owner of the Winter Park condo offered us a few free nights in April, so Jack and I headed up for the weekend. Just before leaving, Jack approached me and asked, "Do I have to go? It's so boring up there." I agreed with him. It was boring and I liked that. I told him to bring a good book and get in the van. We cross-county skied and had a beautiful day of corduroy runs to end the season.

My stats for the season: 28 days cross-country skiing, 23 days downhill. That's 51 combined days! 😊

Detoxed and Fully Vaccinated

At the beginning of April, Trish and I started a 21-Day Sugar Detox. Abbie, Jack, and I were fully vaccinated by the end of the month, and Trish was well on her way.

I'm happy to announce that I'm #FullyVaccinated. Had 2nd @pfizer shot on Apr 14. I feel lucky 🍀 to have experienced no symptoms other than extreme joy. 🥳@TrishPhoto and I just finished a 23-day sugar detox too. We're feeling good!! ✌️ pic.twitter.com/6chqkFbPB7
— Matt Raible (@mraible) April 28, 2021

The following week, I rode my bike into Thrive DTC and marveled at their remodeling project.

The Graduate

May came quickly and with it, the end of the school. I snapped photos of both kids on their last days.

Abbie graduates from high school this Friday. My family is flying into town today. Trish's arrives tomorrow. We have the VWs all cleaned up, our landscaping/carport/basketball court project is finishing up, and we're grateful for everything that brought us to this point. 🥰

See all 148 photos on Flickr →

2020 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 16:34:30 -0700

2020 was an interesting year. It started out pretty awesome, then came a global pandemic, a renewed interest in social justice, and lots of political news to keep your blood pressure up. Doomscrolling became a word, and I found myself doing it often.

As a person that travels frequently and speaks at a lot of conferences, there were a lot of changes. The interesting thing is I planned for many of these changes beforehand. From last year's year in review:

I'm going to stop traveling in August for a year. Abbie will be a high school senior and I want to be around for her last year at home.

It seems I timed this quite well! However, I didn't expect most conferences to go virtual. I didn't expect I could still speak at them without traveling. I expected to speak less and have more time for writing. I didn't expect to stay home all the time and have everything delivered. I didn't expect to have to stop hanging out with friends.

I'm going to look back on 2020 using the following categories.

Professional

This year, I focused on creating YouTube videos as much as blog posts. Our YouTube Channel continues to grow much faster than our Twitter followers, so we continue to invest in it. I published 20 videos on the @oktadev channel in 2020. In addition to doing videos about my own posts, I started doing them for posts written by other Java developers. My most popular video was based on a blog post written by Daniel Pereira. In case you're interested, you can watch Java REST API Comparison: Micronaut, Quarkus, and Spring Boot below.

In the first quarter, I continued to record meetups for the Denver JUG and Denver Open Source Users group. This changed quickly with COVID, and we pivoted to using StreamYard and YouTube for our meetups. This made it easier to record sessions because there's no editing involved. Even though it requires less time, I really miss the in-person meetups and after-hours discussions with the community. We published nine videos to the DJUG channel and three to the DOSUG channel.

Denver JUG is now up to 3,608 members. Our most popular video in 2020 was from Venkat Subramaniam on the Qualities of a Highly Effective Architect.

I wrote 15 blog posts throughout the year on the Okta developer blog. We publish two types of blog posts: thought leadership and conversion. Thought leadership posts tend to be about a hot topic, while conversion posts are usually tutorials.

I focused on Angular, Spring Boot, JHipster, Ionic, and the Okta CLI. We added author pages to our blog this year, so you can see all my posts here.

I especially enjoyed writing a four-part series on Angular and Spring Boot:

In particular, I learned a lot from writing the last post. It required collaborating with a lot of folks to make it happen. Kudos to Benoit Sautel for his help with Gradle + Kotlin, Ray Tsang for help with Jib, James Ward for help with Knative, Josh Long for his assistance with Docker + Cloud Foundry, and Joe Kutner for his buildpacks support.

Rather than rewriting this series for new versions every year, I've decided to use it as a foundation for an InfoQ Mini-Book on Angular.

My post popular thought leadership post was Security Patterns for Microservice Architectures. This was a runaway hit shortly after I posted it, and it remains #1 on Google for "microservice security."

Speaking

According to TripIt, I took 10 trips, to 16 cities, in 4 countries. That's 12 fewer trips than 2019, and I had 85 days on the road (-44 from 2019).

My Speaker Deck profile shows 23 presentations at 19 events. Eight of those were in-person, the rest virtual.

Denver Developer Identity Workshop (Okta event)
Jfokus
Jforum Stockholm
Boulder JUG
Denver JUG
Utah JUG
Switzerland JUG
Oktane 20
Frontend Tech Meetup (Sydney, Australia)
All The Talks

Dev Around the Sun
London Java Community
South West Java & JVM User Group (Bristol, United Kingdom)
ATDmag Microservices & APIs Seminar
SpringOne
JHipster Code
JConf.dev
Vaadin Webinar
JHipster Virtual Meetup

I had a lot of fun in February traveling to Sweden for Jfokus and doing a Rocky Mountain JUG Tour with Ray Tsang.

Community

As part of the Rocky Mountain JUG Tour, Ray Tsang and I started a Developer Ski Days meetup. We only had two meetups before COVID shut us down. We were really looking forward to taking the Winter Park Express train after dev.next. I'll make sure to try again when dev.next happens.

We did not host any Devoxx4Kids Meetups in 2020. Since most kids were on screens for school, I didn't feel we should subject them to more screen time. As of this writing, we have 341 members. I sent everyone a survey about doing online meetups in November and only received nine responses. Eight of them were in favor of it, so we might try to do one soon. I'm still looking for someone to help recruit speakers and schedule events.

Projects

I continued to maintain OktaDev Schematics in 2020. The project had 19 releases, added support for Express.js, and made Capacitor the default for Ionic apps. Working on it helps me keep up with changes in Angular, React, Vue, Ionic, and React Native and makes sure I know how to use the latest Okta SDKs. According to npm-stat.com, it had ~36K downloads in 2020.

My other projects are related to JHipster. I helped add OAuth 2.0 support for reactive JHipster apps. I also integrated Spring Cloud Gateway for microservice architectures. We had 12 releases in 2020. I'm blown away that we had almost 2 million downloads. 🤯

I'm proud to see JHipster's ecosystem thriving with blueprints. I try to test them every so often to ensure they have the same quality as the main generator.

I'm proud to say that JHipster 7 is really close to being finished. We had two beta releases in the last month!

I did not work on the JHipster Mini-Book in 2020, but I hope to update it for JHipster 7 this year.

Ionic for JHipster had eight releases in 2020 and around ~7K downloads.

Personal

I got some good ski days in before the pandemic hit with trips to Whitefish Mountain in Montana, Jackson Hole in Wyoming, and Trysil Ski Area in Norway.

I was super excited to travel to JavaLand in Germany in mid-March and hit the slopes in the Swiss Alps with my family after. That was canceled due to COVID, and we took our kids to Florida for Spring Break instead.

In addition to Florida in March, we had several other trips during the pandemic. We road tripped to see my parents in Montana in May. We flew to Boston for our nieces' graduation in June.

I wrote about these trips in 2019-2020 Ski Season, Quarantining for COVID, and a Graduation.

In July, I enjoyed a dream come true and took the whole month off. We enjoyed a family raft trip through Desolation Canyon to begin.

Then, I headed for Montana with my new eBike in tow. I had all kinds of fun biking on my childhood trails, rafting the Blackfoot and the Middle Fork of the Flathead, and golfing with my folks.

My sister and Mya visited, along with Trish and the kids.

Trish and I celebrated our 7th anniversary at a spa in Evergreen. I highly recommend their "Just for Two Escape" package.

I didn't publish many pictures from the rest of 2020, but a lot still happened. Jack turned 16, got his driver's license, and his mom gifted him a car.

Abbie turned 18 and is enjoying her senior year as much as possible.

how it started how it's going pic.twitter.com/iqjpeowFd6
— Matt Raible (@mraible) November 5, 2020

I'll take this opportunity to discuss our COVID close calls. We flew a few times during the pandemic, always wear masks outside our home, and believe in social distancing. We haven't had many close calls until recently.

The first close call was at Abbie's birthday party—a Saturday—in early November. She asked a small group of friends to get COVID tests before the party. They did, but all the results didn't come in. We let her have the party anyway. A positive result came back from one of her friends on Sunday. We thought for sure we'd come down with it since we were exposed. Their school went fully remote on Monday because of the fall surge. All the kids had to quarantine at home. No one caught it except the friend's sister.

Another scare happened a couple of weeks ago when we were up in the mountains. Jack and I ran into some friends on the slopes and joined them for a little après ski after. I hugged a family member that wasn't skiing that day, and they joked, "you don't have COVID, do you?" That was a Tuesday. They tested positive that Friday. Our whole family got tested Saturday, and the results were negative. Phew!

Stout the Syncro and Hefe the Bus

Stout and Hefe didn't get to make the rounds at any car shows this year. However, we did get to do a fun VW cruise with Hefe in early October.

Stout has been a trusty companion when making trips up to Winter Park to go skiing.

2021

Professionally, I don't think there will be any travel this year. Even if there were, I'm not interested until August. I made a pledge to stop traveling last year, and it's easier than ever now. I'm going to try and limit my speaking commitments to one per month and spend more time on mini-books, at least in the first half of the year. I'm still enjoying my 38" monitor and recommend you get one too.

I plan to contribute frequently to JHipster. Now that reactive support is released, I'll be trying to integrate microfrontends support. Why? Because no one wants a monolithic UI fronting their fancy microservice architecture! I also hope to integrate GraphQL, probably as a module to begin.

I'll be on vacation the whole month of July, again. I had so much fun last year; I can't think of a good reason not to do it again. 😃

Last year, I said I'd be skiing, biking, and rafting a lot more. The ski season was cut short, but I've been making up for it lately. I've been cross-country skiing 17 times since Thanksgiving and downhill 14 times. My goal is 42 days for both, but that might be tough if we don't get more snow soon.

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A post shared by Matt Raible (@vwsforlife)

When it's warmer, I'll take my ebike out on some trails and giggle to myself as the wind whisks through my hair while riding uphill. I'll take my Yeti out every-now-and-then to remember how hard mountain biking really is.

Rafting should come easy with our enthusiastic rafting family and vacation in July. We're thinking of renting a place near Salida in June so we can raft the Arkansas River after work. If Trish has to go back to an office, those plans could change quickly.

Last year, I wrote that I wanted to get more headspace, spend more time with friends, and enjoy being home. I did a lot of meditating in May (with the Headspace app). I gave it up with the busy summer and haven't resumed since. I'm mostly going with a "just get through this COVID thing" attitude. I really miss hanging out with friends. I look forward to that being a regular thing again.

I ❤️ being a homebody, and we're making some investments to make it even more fun. We have a 3-point basketball court being installed right now and a bunch of planted gardens that we hope will bloom with beautiful flowers this spring.

I only have one goal for 2021: dance more. 🕺

If you want to follow along on my adventures, please follow me on Twitter. I also post pictures of my favorite moments on Instagram and whole albums on Flickr.

Happy Birthday, Abbie!

Matt Raible — Thu, 5 Nov 2020 13:30:59 -0700

Abbie turns 18 today! Our little girl is now an adult. I couldn't be more proud. 🥳

I can't imagine being a high school student right now in these pandemic times, but she's handled it well. She lost her job at the Gap this spring due to staff reductions, but she's been babysitting a lot to make up for it. She's also back into horseback riding with Trish. They both got back into it this summer at Abbie's request and are leasing a horse from a friend. They've both competed and won in the last couple of months!

Abbie has been applying to colleges for the last year and got an acceptance letter to Colorado State University last week. Her heart is set on the University of Colorado in Boulder, but she's still waiting to hear back from them. At first, I encouraged her to go out of state for college, to get away and explore the world. I reminded her about this a few weeks ago and she brought up that Boulder is the #1 best place to live. I can't really blame her for wanting to go to school in Colorado. I did and I'm still in love with the state!

One of my proudest moments of the last year was reading her essay that she's been using on college applications. It's all about our trip to Devoxx France 2016. Here's how it begins:

As I walked up to the stage of the bustling auditorium, the only sound I remember was of my heart, throbbing in my chest. If I had to define a single moment that matured me, it was my first public speaking event in Paris, France. I was 13 years old in April of 2016, and my dad insisted that I attend the Devoxx France Conference, one of his many computer programming conventions. I was beyond thrilled to experience Paris for my first time and thought nothing of the actual convention… until we boarded the airplane. My father informed me that I would be introducing him on stage. I was an anxious bundle of nerves with fearful thoughts of speaking in front of hundreds of adults from all corners of the world. The previously insignificant convention was now consuming my mind and rapidly becoming the most intimidating experience of my life.

Happy 18th Birthday, Abbie! You're super awesome!! 🥰

Happy Birthday, Jack

Matt Raible — Fri, 28 Aug 2020 13:31:53 -0600

Yeehaw - today is Jack's 16th birthday! 🎉 He's been driving a lot in the last year and has a driver's license driving test this afternoon. If he passes, he'll be getting his license next week. I feel like it's a big milestone because a driver's license has the notion of freedom, especially when you live out in the country as we do.

Jack is a sophomore this year and started school last week. Both he and Abbie attend in-person classes two days a week. They do school work remotely the other three days. Jack was just starting to blossom last March when he joined the track team, but they shut things down before the season really got started. I hope he'll try it again — I really enjoyed doing track when I was in high school. He's an excellent boater and happily rowed a couple of days on our Desolation Canyon trip last month.

Happy 16th Birthday, Jack!

For some photos of Jack through the years, see my Jack Turns 16 album.

July 2020: Rafting, Riding, and Relaxing

Matt Raible — Sat, 22 Aug 2020 14:05:37 -0600

As an American, have you ever wanted to take a month off like the European's do? I'm guessing you have! For the majority of my career, I've been an independent consultant, with unlimited vacation. Vacation as a consultant means you're not getting paid — so it's not exactly unlimited.

A few years ago, I doubled-down and went full-time. The company was called Stormpath and it quickly morphed into Okta. Okta has an unlimited vacation policy. I felt it was my duty to try to make my kick-ass full-time job as cool as my independent consulting gig. Therefore, I asked my boss to take July 2020 off. I requested this vacation in October 2019. He approved! Randall, you're the best!!

If you'd like to read about our April-June 2020 adventures, see 2019-2020 Ski Season, Quarantining for COVID, and a Graduation.

My month-off adventures started with a family raft trip through Desolation Canyon in Utah. We floated down the Green River with 20 members of our rafting family and had a wonderful adventure.

When we first got a raft, I read that Desolation Canyon is an excellent family adventure. We proved that to be true in September 2014 with a number of friends. On July 2nd, 2020, we embarked upon another spectacular rafting adventure with many of the same folks.

We spent five days on the Green River: motoring, floating, and loving the weather. The first day involved strapping the rafts together and firing up motors to get through the flat parts. I brought a boombox for my boat, so we listened to motoring a few times. Days 2-4 were fun with rapids, but it was pretty mellow for the most part.

We always dress up one night on the river. This trip's theme for costume night was disco!

Trish and I had a couple of goals for this trip. We brought two rafts, each with 2-3 coolers. I wanted to have ice on the last day. She wanted to have ice cold water on the last day. I'm happy to say we both accomplished our goals and I'm happy to reveal our secrets. I lined all three of my coolers with dry ice. Trish put a large water-to-ice bag in her cooler and forgot about it. It was solid ice when we started our trip, and ice-cold, delicious water when we ended. She discovered at the very end of our trip (post take-out) and it was the most delicious water ever. She shared it with everyone and we rejoiced with laughter and joy. It was soooo good and the timing was perfect!

July in Montana - 2020 Edition

We took out of the Green on July 7 and I headed for Montana in my Syncro Westy with a raft in tow. I like to name my vehicles. They're also known as Stout and Bam Bam. I had a new toy with me too, a Trek Rail 7 electric mountain bike. I bought it the night before we left Denver.

My eBike is one of my most satisfying and joyous purchases, ever. I cruised all the Swan Valley trails I grew up riding my BMX bike on — with a huge grin on my face. As I cruised up the hills on Rumble Creek road with the wind in my ears, I had tears of joy. I hooted and hollered like it was a powder day as I sailed through the trails along the Guest Ranch road and through Holland Lake campgrounds.

It was, and still is, a magical experience. ✨

Some call electric bikes cheating. I feel like a kid again and can't wait to go riding every day. Call it what you will, but I'm having a blast! I'll write up a full review on the bike in another blog post. Below are some photos from my riding adventures.

When I wasn't riding, I went rafting. My Dad, Daisy, and I spent a gorgeous day fishing on the Blackfoot river.

We did it again with my Mom and long-time family friends, Mike and Mai.

I had huckleberry pancakes for my birthday, watched the dogs frolic in the creek, and golfed in Bigfork with my awesome parents.

I took my buddy Owen and his family rafting near Glacier Park, on the middle fork of of the Flathead.

My Dad brewed an American Pale Ale beer for my birthday and treated me to a private tasting.

My sister, Kalin, and Mya visited for a week. Trish and the kids road-tripped up as well. We golfed, played on the rivers, and enjoyed the heck out of each other's company.

"What about the wildlife?", you might ask. We saw bears on the rivers of Utah and Montana. We saw bald eagles majestically flying along the river banks of the flathead. Spotting deer was a daily occurrence. Being surrounded by nature and its animals was magnificent.

I invited my Dad to join me for the road trip back to Colorado. He obliged and we drove through Yellowstone Park and by the Tetons in Wyoming.

A couple days later, there was a car show in our back yard and Hefe made an appearance. He didn't win anything because we forgot to register. That's OK, he looked really good!

This marks the third time I've taken a month off in my career. I've always ended up in Montana. I wrote about My Summer Vacation in Montana in 2009 and Matrimony in Montana in 2013. It's simply one of my favorite places on earth. I really appreciate that I can always go back home, ride the trails I did as a kid, and bask in the glow of my parent's retirement paradise.

See all 193 photos on Flickr →

Now I'm back in action, the kids are back in school, and live sports are on TV again. Life is pretty good and I'm pumped to hit all the front range mountain bike trails. I hope you've had a chance to relax and recharge this summer like I did. 😊

2019-2020 Ski Season, Quarantining for COVID, and a Graduation

Matt Raible — Tue, 30 Jun 2020 23:51:45 -0600

Every spring, I try to publish a blog post about our ski season adventures. As you can imagine, this year was a little different. This year, the ski season ended abruptly in mid-March due to COVID-19. Nevertheless, I decided it'd be fun to write about the ski season we did experience and our adventures since then.

The 2019-2020 ski season started off looking really good. The snow was good enough in October that I enjoyed a day at A-Basin - my earliest ski day ever! In December, I got a few days in. Skiing at Whitefish Mountain over Christmas vacation was a highlight. When I was a kid, it was called Big Mountain and it's where I learned how to alpine ski.

January came along and we spent the first couple of weeks in New Orleans. Shortly after we returned home, I went skiing in Jackson Hole with some friends.

February rolled in and I was able to make some work trips skiing-oriented. To start off the month, I spoke at Jfokus in Sweden. After Jfokus, the organizers planned a speaker's conference at Trysil Ski Area in Norway. There wasn't much powder, but the groomers were fast, and we had fun challenging ourselves on the 45° double black!

Upon returning home, Ray Tsang and I did a Rocky Mountain JUG Tour, book-ended with Developer Ski Days.

March came quickly and I visited Winter Park to make arrangements for a Developer Ski Day after dev.next. Little did I know it'd be my last day skiing for the season.

Visited @WinterPark today to setup lunch and happy hour ?? reservations for the #DevSkiDay on March 28. Can't wait! ??? #devdotnext #day19 #oktadev pic.twitter.com/S1RBynxkaO
— Matt Raible (@mraible) March 2, 2020

I was scheduled to do a speaking tour in Switzerland and Germany in mid-March. The conferences I was speaking at lined up perfectly with our kids' Spring Break. My family was going to join me in Germany and we were planning on skiing in the Swiss Alps for a few days.

Then, COVID cancellations started happening. We cancelled our European vacation and opted for a Florida vacation instead. We flew to Florida on March 15 and returned March 22. Our flights were full. All restaurants and bars were closed in Colorado on March 16. We rented a house with Trish's brother's family in Marco Island and didn't venture out much.

We knew when we flew to Florida that we might have to drive back. That premonition almost came true on our flight home. Just as we were boarding, the Fort Meyers airport intercom announced that all flights were grounded—throughout the United States. I started looking up rental car rates and almost booked it when they announced it was a mistake. The pilot encouraged everyone to board quickly.

Like most of you, we spent April and May at home. Our dogs loved it. Our cats could've cared less.

Life isn't so bad when your badass sister-in-law works at @TildioWinery! ???? pic.twitter.com/fwszHQux6Y
— Matt Raible (@mraible) April 4, 2020

I met with friends on April 29 for an afternoon of golf. I also stopped drinking for 30 days and got in shape with lots of walks and bike rides.

Summer Arrives

We have a long sequence of graduations in our family between our kids and Trish's brother's family. Starting last year, one of our kids will graduate from high school (or college) for 10 years in a row. Pending gap years, of course.

I love graduations and have fond memories of my own. I hatched a plan in mid-May to drive to Boston for our niece's graduation. I wanted to take our Syncro Westy and spend a week getting there. We'd drive through Canada and check out some sites along the way.

Trish had working-on-the-road and road-trip-bathroom concerns, so she started shopping for RVs. When we proposed this plan to Abbie and Jack's Mom, she said she'd like to take the kids to Florida for a week before we left.

That derailed my whole plan because if the kids were flying on planes during COVID, we might as well do the same. Driving wouldn't make us any safer, we figured.

We decided to fly to Boston at the beginning of June. We'd spend the first week quarantining at Trish's parent's empty house in Cape Cod, then unite with our family to celebrate.

Montana Road Trip

Because we were going to be gone so long—and had a week-long rafting trip planned in July—we decided to make a road-trip to Montana to drop our pets off with my parents. My Dad has COPD, which is a respiratory illness, so we were definitely leary about visiting. We got tested for antibodies before we left. Our test results were negative.

R&R in #Montana pic.twitter.com/4Fq51Ncbps
— Matt Raible (@mraible) May 24, 2020

After dropping off our pets, Trish flew home, and I drove home. I worked, took mountain bike rides, and drove for five days through Idaho and Utah. I rode Blue Mountain, Angel Trail (technically in the Wyoming Tetons), Klondike Bluffs, Slick Rock, and Road 18 in Fruita. Slick Rock was a grueling 10-mile 3-hour ride at 97°F. I made sure to start early at Fruita the next morning.

I mostly stayed in RV Parks, since power was key, and so was internet. I wore a mask whenever I filled up with gas and on my mountain bike rides. I didn't see any masks in Montana, Idaho, or Utah. In fact, I got told to "go home" when filling up at 6am in Montana. In Idaho, I got lots of stares because of my mask, but I felt my camouflage pants kept people from saying anything. Moab, Utah was fully open; restaurants and everything.

I arrived home from my road-trip on Friday afternoon and we flew to Boston on Sunday, May 31st.

Graduation in Boston

We flew Southwest and liked the fact that they did not sell middle seats. Upon arrival, we tried to short-cut the quarantine length by getting tested. Trish and the kids got tested for COVID on Sunday night and had their negative results back in 48 hours. Our Boston family appreciated it, but they weren't quite ready to accept us into their home. We had socially-distant happy hours that week, but did not enter their home.

The Black Lives Matter protests were in full-force that week and changed my whole perspective of America. I've been trying to help with donations and mentoring, but I know I can do more.

On Friday, June 5th, I got a swab-in-your-brain COVID test. It wasn't particularly painful, but it did make my eyes water and feel like sneezing for around five minutes. It cost me $160 USD because I didn't have any symptoms. I was tested in my car and got negative results 15 minutes later. This satisfied everyone's fears and we rejoiced with our east-coast family that evening.

The following week, we worked in the mornings and played in the evenings.

Our nieces' graduation was a really fun event. They had all the graduates and their families gather in a parking lot and watch from their cars. The graduates were called up in groups and accepted their diplomas at a distance from one another. Way to go, Shira!

We were impressed by how many people wore masks in Massachusetts. Almost everyone had them on, and if they didn't, they had one in their pocket they could put on quickly. We returned home on June 16th.

Bring on July Vacation!

As I wrote in my year in review, I'm taking July off. We're starting the festivities with a 5-day rafting trip through Desolation Canyon in Utah. We did the same trip in 2014 and had a blast. This time, we'll have twice as many rafts.

We verified our equipment works on the Upper Colorado River during Father's Day weekend.

After that trip, I'm heading to Montana to hang out with my folks. We'll do some rafting, relaxing, and I plan to mountain bike a bunch. I bought an electric mountain bike this week and I'm looking forward to riding it all over the Swan Valley.

I hope y'all have a nice July. I'll be going fully offline—deleting social and work apps from my phone, including email. I'll use my phone to take pictures and communicate with friends, but not much else. I'm looking forward to recharging. I'll see y'all in August! 👋😀

Secure by Design Book Review

Matt Raible — Mon, 25 May 2020 20:11:22 -0600

I recently finished reading Secure by Design by Dan Bergh Johnsson, Daniel Deogun, and Daniel Sawano. I started reading it shortly after I received it as a gift from Dan Bergh Johnsson at Jfokus 2020.

I scored a signed copy of #SecureByDesign from @danbjson at #Jfokus. Excited to read the wisdom in this one! 🤗 #security pic.twitter.com/q0bxIvIwXF
— Matt Raible (@mraible) February 6, 2020

Secure by Design hooked me from the beginning. Chapter 1 dives right in and shows why design matters for security and how security shouldn't be an afterthought. The authors show how developers will have a difficult time grokking security if you make them remember security-related API calls. However, if you bake security into your design and codify your security practices, developers will be more secure by default.

I liked their Java example with domain primitives so much that I used it in my Security Patterns for Microservice Architectures blog post.

Chapter 1 ends with encouragement to view security as a concern to be met rather than a set of features. Design is the guiding principle for how a system is built and is applicable on all levels, from code to architecture. Well-known security threats should drive design decisions in security architectures.

One thing I appreciate about this book is they summarized each chapter's main points at the end. Writing reviews like this one are much easier with summaries. 👍

In Part 2, there's enough domain-driven design to make you knowledgeable, but not dangerous. In Chapter 4, they cover code constructs that promote security, like immutability and validation. Domain primitives are the smallest building blocks of a secure architecture. They can contain many checks above and beyond validation that will keep your developers cranking out secure code. The next two chapters discuss maintaining the integrity of the state and reducing state complexity.

Yeah, there's a lot to digest in this book. I read it over a few months.

Chapter 8 gets into leveraging your delivery pipeline for security and testing. I love that all the code examples in this section used JUnit 5 and were up-to-date with current Java testing practices. I felt like the book was just released last week!

Chapter 9 is an excellent tour of how exceptions can be used in your architecture to indicate failures. Or better yet, design for availability with resilience, responsiveness, and graceful failure handling. The availability of your data and system should be an important security goal and is part of the CIA acronym (confidentiality, integrity, and availability).

Chapter 10 gets into cloud-native thinking and the twelve-factor app. Once you have your apps running with twelve-factor concepts, you can adopt the three R's of enterprise security: Rotate, Repave, and Repair. In short, having an architecture where everything runs in the cloud allows you to take security to the next level, and:

Rotate secrets every few minutes or hours.
Repave servers and applications every few hours.
Repair vulnerable software as soon as possible (within a few hours), and a patch is available.

Part 3 is all about applying what you learned. How do you adopt domain primitives with legacy code? The authors suggest a few different options. Chapter 13 is all about microservices. I found it especially interesting to learn how logs can leak sensitive data and how logging data can be used after-the-fact to be a 2nd-level attack. The final chapter suggests guidelines for security in code reviews, challenging your design with penetration tests, and making security a source of inspiration.

Recommendation: A Strong Buy

I give Secure by Design 5 stars! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I learned a lot of new information about designing secure systems and look forward to using this knowledge in my projects. Cheers to the book's authors: Dan, Daniel, and Daniel. I think you created an excellent security reference book that will help many developers and companies be more secure by design.

Dell UltraSharp U3818DW 38" Curved Monitor Review

Matt Raible — Sun, 3 May 2020 15:30:43 -0600

A little over a month ago, I purchased a Dell UltraSharp U3818DW 38" curved monitor. Previously, I had two 27" monitors ‐ an Apple Thunderbolt Display and an Asus 4K. I wanted to return to a single monitor and asked Twitter for advice.

Based on recommendations I received, I purchased a Dell UltraSharp U3818DW 38" from B&H on Sunday, March 29. It arrived two days later.

I made a video of the unboxing.

In this video, I said plugging into my Henge Dock didn't work. However, I was plugging into my tethered Stone. Plugging the monitor directly into my Henge Dock with USB-C worked, and I haven't tried another configuration since.

My first impression of the monitor was, "Wow, this is awesome!" The curvedness did take me a few days to get used to, but now I barely notice it. Before I bought the monitor, I used Hammerspoon and hotkeys to snap windows to the right or left based on key combinations. Having something like this is essential when you have an ultrawide, IMO.

I did experience a few issues:

A 2-minute sleep-wake cycle at night
Squishing the screen to 1920 x 1080 for screencasts
Controlling the volume from the keyboard

Fix the Sleep-Wake Cycle on a Dell UltraSharp U3818DW

Pratik Patel warned me about a ~2 minute cycle of sleep-wake that he experienced with his. I didn't believe him at first, and then it happened to me late one night. I fixed this by checking Prevent computer from sleeping automatically when the display is off in Energy Saver settings.

I fixed it! You need to check "Prevent computer from sleeping automatically when the display is off" in Energy Saver settings.

Solution from https://t.co/aTJDsIWUxV pic.twitter.com/blgZb2E1Lc
— Matt Raible (@mraible) April 4, 2020

Record 16:9 Screencasts on a Dell UltraSharp U3818DW

I had a presentation I wanted to pre-record with my new monitor, so I asked if it was possible to record a 16:9 screencast on an ultrawide monitor. Ryan Boyd came to the rescue and recommended SwitchResX. I paid $16 USD for a license and haven't looked at any other options since.

I've only recorded one screencast so far, and I don't see any differences compared to previous ones.

Control the Volume on a Dell UltraSharp U3818DW with Your Mac Keyboard

I don't have nice speakers for my computer because headphones seem to work better if I really want to crank it up. For the last several weeks, when I set the output to the monitor and wanted to control the volume, I just used the volume buttons on the bottom of the monitor. This is kind of a pain because I'm used to controlling the volume with my keyboard controls. This was a nice feature of my Apple display that just worked.

I googled for a solution and found a thread on StackExchange. I installed the recommend MonitorControl and now I can control the contrast, brightness, and volume from my keyboard.

I'm super happy with this monitor and have no regrets. I paid for this out of my own pocket, but recently got reimbursed from my kick-ass employer, Okta. At first, they said I couldn't, but then changed their work-from-home policy to state you can expense "whatever it takes to make you more productive."

Here's a picture of my monitor and desk.

The lights above my monitor are Key Light Air LEDs from Elgato. They're nice for screencasting and live broadcasts. I can adjust their settings from my laptop or my phone.

With the top-side looking so good, I recently cleaned up the cables so it looks good underneath too.

Cable management: before and after. 🤗 pic.twitter.com/gM5nX3bjVv
— Matt Raible (@mraible) April 14, 2020

In summary, if you're thinking about a new monitor and are wondering if you should get an ultrawide, I think you should. It's fricken' awesome! 😆

A Fantastically Fun February at Jfokus 2020 and the Rocky Mountain JUGs

Matt Raible — Sun, 15 Mar 2020 14:24:25 -0600

Jfokus is one of my favorite conferences in the world. It takes place in Stockholm, Sweden, during one of the coldest months of the year. As a native Montanan, I love the winter season and skiing. It was with great pleasure that I returned to Jfokus as a speaker this year, after skipping the last couple of years.

True story: the last time I was at Jfokus was 2017, and Okta had just acquired Stormpath. I negotiated my Okta employment terms in the Radisson Blu lobby!

I gave three talks this year: two on the main stage during Jfokus and one at Jforum Stockholm on Tuesday evening.

You can find my presentations below.

Jfokus also published recordings of my main-stage sessions on YouTube.

After Jfokus, the organizers planned a speaker's conference at Trysil Ski Area. There wasn't a ton of snow, but the groomers were fast, and they had a 45° double black!

I had my GoPro and shot some footage of the fun.

The beer tasting and dinner that evening at Kveik Restaurant & Brewpub was excellent!

Beer tasting at Kveik Restaurant & Brewpub in Trysil, Norway. ?? #jfokus #speakerconf pic.twitter.com/CR8t2fjmR6
— Matt Raible (@mraible) February 6, 2020

Friday was a gorgeous day on the slopes, and Saturday was the opposite.

Yesterday versus today. #whiteout #skiing #jfokus #speakerconf #day15 pic.twitter.com/L7ynGv0Umt
— Matt Raible (@mraible) February 8, 2020

I had a marvelous time at Jfokus 2020! Thanks to Mattias Karlsson and crew for a exquisite experience! 👌

For more photos see my Jfokus 2020 album

Rocky Mountain JUG Tour with Ray Tsang

I flew back to Denver on Sunday, February 9th. The next day, I woke up early for a Developer Ski Day at Eldora. Stout the Syncro was not a big supporter of the event.

Doh! Just when I thought my Syncro Westy was doing great, something breaks. Loud thump like I'd run over something, then a knocking while driving. I'm guessing it's a ball joint in the front.

Currently waiting for a tow from AAA.

Heckuva start to #DevSkiDay! #VanLife pic.twitter.com/2KMUZSTdtX
— Matt Raible (@mraible) February 10, 2020

Once I made it on the slopes, we had a ball with Christina, Ben, Robert, and Joel.

More photos →

On Tuesday, Ray and I prepared for our Rocky Mountain JUG Tour consisting of stops in Boulder, Denver, and Salt Lake City. I met him at a Google Boulder office and delighted in the VW decorations.

Our talk was titled Choose Your Own Adventure with JHipster and Kubernetes. We used JHipster to build and deploy whatever technologies the audience chose. We let them choose the database, the build tool, the JVM language, the web framework, and the architecture (monolith vs microservices). After we created the apps, I showed them running, and made them work with Okta. Ray took it from there and used JHipster's Kubernetes generator to add (or exclude) Istio and deploy everything to Google Cloud. When all worked on the first try at the Denver JUG, we were pretty pumped! 🙌

Interesting trends: we had a lot of enthusiasm for Grails in Colorado and all audiences chose microservices. You can skim through our presentation below.

On Friday, we hit the slopes for another developer ski day.

View this post on Instagram

?It's a #HappyFriday at @snowbird with @saturnism2 and @brettgpalmer! ?#DevSkiDay

A post shared by Matt Raible (@vwsforlife) on Feb 14, 2020 at 10:40am PST

Thanks to all the fine folks who joined our ski days and came to the JUG meetups! We loved the energy and community vibe from each location. ❤️😃

Ray and I had a Rocky Mountain adventure with JHipster, and you can too! From the comfort of your own home, you can install JHipster and choose your own adventure. Good luck, and please let us know if you have any questions.

January Jaunts to New Orleans and Jackson Hole

Matt Raible — Tue, 3 Mar 2020 22:47:39 -0700

Trish and I started 2020 with a fun trip to New Orleans to meet up with our family. My parents wanted to get out of the snowy cold of Montana, as did Kalin and Mya from Washington state. My Aunt Mary from New York joined us, and we brought the kids. Trish even executed a trip to the Saints vs. Vikings NFL playoff game!

We celebrated "the superiors" birthdays, listened to lots of good music, hung out with our friends Jill and Brian, and savored many excellent meals.

For more photos see The Superiors Birthdays in New Orleans.

We returned to Denver in mid-January and Trish flew down to visit her folks in Naples, Florida. They spent a joyous week together before she flew back to start a new job.

While Trish was golfing with her Dad, I prepared for another trip: a 5-day ski weekend in Jackson Hole. My awesome friends Chris and Ben arranged it all; my friend Joe and I just had to show up and have a good time. We met Jersey Dave and Patriot Tom once we arrived. There were six skiers in total, and we enjoyed some of the best powder days of the year.

I made a video of our adventures with an AC/DC soundtrack. The reason for the music is because we saw Hell's Belles play at the Mangy Moose (footage included) and they were AWESOME! I smile every time I watch it. 😊

Yes, January was awesome. We got some good family time in warmer weather and I experienced Jackson Hole with lots of powder for the first time. Yeehaw! 🤠

2019 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Sun, 9 Feb 2020 20:56:56 -0700

It's time for my year-in-review post! This post sets the record for being the most delayed, ever. Usually, I'm able to get it published by the end of January. Oh well, I hope you enjoy it!

In 2019, I did my best to work hard, play often, and travel to interesting places. I took my Dad to Hawaii, drove through the worst blizzard of my life, traveled to India for the first time, did a UK + Ireland JUG Tour, and indulged in several fun vacations with my family.

We bought some additional rafts for whitewater, rafted in Montana and Colorado, and celebrated a family reunion in Cape Cod. Our classic VWs continued to perform well, and Hefe won his class once again at the 2019 VWs on the Green show. We did have to replace a clutch in Stout the Syncro, but I'm OK with that since he safely transported me through the most treacherous driving conditions of my life.

I'm going to look back on 2019 using the following categories.

Professional

For those stumbling upon this post with no context, I'm an open source developer that works at Okta. My title is officially "Developer Advocate", but all the code and words I write are distributed as open source.

This year I started trying to produce more YouTube videos in addition to blog posts. My team discovered our YouTube subscriber count increases a lot faster than our Twitter followers, so that provided our motivation. I published 13 videos on the OktaDev YouTube Channel. My most popular one was Java Microservices in 20 Minutes with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud.

I upped my videographer skills by learning how to record meetups. I copied Aaron Parecki's portable wireless video setup and started recording Denver JUG and Denver Open Source User Group meetups. We posted the first couple to the OktaDev channel, then decided it'd be better to have the meetups start their own channels. We published 6 to the DJUG channel and 3 to the DOSUG channel. I recommend subscribing if you're into Java or Open Source.

I taught Abbie and Jack how to work the video kit and they've been recording these meetups when I'm out of town. Thanks kids!

I wrote 22 blog posts throughout the year on the Okta developer blog. We publish two types of blog posts: thought leadership and conversion. Thought leadership posts tend to be about a hot topic while conversion posts are usually tutorials. My main topics for the year included Angular, Schematics, JHipster, microservices, and mobile development with Ionic 4 and React Native. Here are some that seemed to be popular.

I wrote a few thought leadership posts too:

Speaking

According to TripIt, I took 22 trips, to 41 cities, in 12 countries. That's four fewer trips than 2018, and I had 129 days on the road (+10 from 2018). I visited twice as many countries in 2019 as I did in 2018.

My Speaker Deck profile shows 39 presentations at 24 events.

Denver JUG
Devnexus
SnowFROC
Great International Developer Summit: GIDS
Denver Microservices
JBCNConf
The Secure Developer (now MyDevSecOps)
Angular SF
JHipsterConf
KCDC
ACGNJ Java Users Group
JavaSIG (New York, NY)

That Conference
Develop Denver
London Java Community
South West Java & JVM User Group (Bristol, UK)
West Midlands Java User Group (Birmingham, UK)
Belfast JUG
JHipster Dublin
Dublin JUG
Cork JUG
Devoxx Belgium
Devoxx Morocco
The Progressive Web Experience

I also attended LavaOne (now UnVoxxed Hawaii) with my Dad. It was during his birthday week, so we played some golf and toured Pearl Harbor after the conference.

GIDS 2019 was incredibly fun with my sister. We hung out with many usual suspects and had a fabulous experience.

I learned how to present without an internet connection and found much joy in serious selfies.

Monday closing crew at #gids19! ???? pic.twitter.com/Axp5uRYqql
— Matt Raible (@mraible) April 22, 2019

I published pictures from Devnexus,

my UK + Ireland JUG Tour,

SpringOne,

and Devoxx Belgium/Morocco.

At SpringOne, I did a talk with Josh Long and James Ward. I've never had so much fun on stage. 😆

I got to do a talk with two of my best friends and favorite technologists, @okta ‘s @mraible and @google ‘s @_JamesWard.

Thanks for making this happen @s1p ! pic.twitter.com/VCB7X7G8v4
— Josh Long (???, ???, ???? ????, ??? ????) (@starbuxman) October 10, 2019

A recording of our talk was published to YouTube.

Community

I was involved in many community activities in 2019. I'm proud to say that Denver JUG won a Duke's Choice Award this year! I flew out to CodeOne for a night to accept the award and celebrate with Java friends.

Wahoo! @denverjug wins a Duke's Choice Award at #CodeOne!! ???? https://t.co/4f7wo9FTPF
— Matt Raible (@mraible) September 17, 2019

We only had two Devoxx4Kids Denver workshops in 2019:

The first one was taught by Abbie and Jack. I taught the second one. It seems I need to do a better job recruiting speakers. In reality, I think it's time to offer the leadership of the group to someone who has more time.

Projects

I developed and released a new open source project in 2019: OktaDev Schematics. It provides a way to add Okta for authentication to Angular, React, Vue, Ionic, and React Native projects. I developed it mostly to make my demos easier. It had 12 releases throughout the year.

My other projects are mostly around JHipster. I support its OAuth 2.0 and OIDC support as best I can, and released seven versions of its Ionic module. Upgrading to Ionic 4 was a big task and I wrote about how to use Ionic 4 with JHipster 6. I recorded a screencast showing how to get started with JHipster 6 and traveled to JHipster Conf.

I did not work on the JHipster Mini-Book in 2019, but I hope to update it for JHipster 7 this year.

Personal

Trish and I journeyed to Jazz Fest in New Orleans. It was my first time and it might become a yearly tradition. So fun!

I was fortunate enough to bring family along with me a few times when traveling for work. Highlights include:

Taking my whole family to JBCNConf in Barcelona. They all speak Spanish, so I knew it'd be a fun adventure.

That Conference with Jack and my nephew, Michael. It was at a water park so the boys had a blast.

Trish and my parents meeting me during my Ireland JUG Tour.

I regret leaving in the middle of a family reunion for KCDC. The location in Cape Cod was fantastic.

Jack got his learners permit to drive in August. He was a little rusty at first, but he's come a long way since. He drives several times a week for practice when he's at our house.

Abbie is now 17 and Jack is 15. They grow a lot when they become teenagers. Jack is the tallest one in our house!

We had a ball with Trish's brother's family and parents in Turks and Caicos. It was part of a double-header Spring Break that started with skiing in Steamboat.

The 2018-19 ski season was fabulous and Stout was quite the hero during our first Bomb Cyclone!

We added two duckies to our rafting fleet so we can take more friends on the river in June. Father's Day on the Upper Colorado was fun with friends, but Chris Morse and the Fesser did have to float through a cold and dangerous class IV rapid. You could say they're were not fans of our duckies.

My Dad made me proud with his cameo in the "What is Okta?" Father's Day video.

We took Abbie's boyfriend, Joseph, with us to Montana for the 4th of July. My Dad and I road-tripped up in our Westfalia Vanagon. We decorated a float for the parade, enjoyed a couple days on the river, and spent some quality time with Owen and Dana.

Trish and I celebrated our 6th anniversary in Estes Park.

Happy Anniversary to us!! #6years ❤️🎉🥰💃🕺 pic.twitter.com/JnzhenOIzI
— Matt Raible (@mraible) July 27, 2019

We stayed at the Stanley Hotel in the "Kissing Cowboy" room. 😱

Trish went big in September and added her own cataraft to our fleet!

We visited Trish's family on the east coast for Thanksgiving.

Christmas at my parent's house in Montana was warm and cozy.

Stout the Syncro and Hefe the Bus

Our classic VWs are surviving and thriving. Hefe won best in class at VWs on the Green for the fourth time. Stout ran well on several road trips and now has a new clutch.

I hope to write a "Story of Hefe" book in 2020 from the pictures and posts on this blog.

View this post on Instagram

All shined up and ready for a cruise down Colfax tomorrow! #vw #vwbus #vwcolorado #hefethebus #vwec #21windows

A post shared by Matt Raible (@vwsforlife) on Sep 28, 2019 at 3:26pm PDT

2020

Professionally, I'll be hitting some new exotic locations. Voxxed Days Zürich and JavaLand in Germany are on my list. JavaLand happens during Spring Break, so we'll be spending a few days skiing in the Swiss Alps afterward.

I plan to speak at Devoxx UK (London), Spring I/O (Barcelona), and Voxxed Days Singapore. I hope to visit with the Java community in Japan as well. If you're interested in seeing where the @oktadev team will be in 2020, check out oktadev.events.

I'll be on vacation the whole month of July. I've always wanted to live like a European and Okta's unlimited vacation policy makes this possible.

I'm going to stop traveling in August for a year. Abbie will be a high school senior and I want to be around for her last year at home.

In 2020, I'll be skiing, biking, and rafting a lot more. I started Developer Ski Days to help with the first. I'm excited that Thrive Workplace has a new DTC location (at Innovation Pavilions). I'll be renting a desk from them and start bike-commuting soon. Our rafting family just applied for several week-long rafting permits. Spending a week on the river is one of our favorite activities!

Last year, I had a bunch of goals with numbers. This year I'm going to try and get more headspace, spend more time with friends, and enjoy being home.

I believe less travel in 2020 will be very rewarding. I might even get Nuggets season tickets. They're pretty good these days.

If you want to follow along on my adventures, please follow me on Twitter. I also post pictures of my favorite moments to Instagram and whole albums on Flickr.