Raible Designs

Celebrating Love in the Philippines

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.

Questions about JHipster, JHipster Lite, and Spring Boot 3

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.

Happy Birthday, Abbie!

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!

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!

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

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

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.

Farewell to the 2021-2022 Ski Season

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. 🎊

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

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.

Mexico was fabulous.

The Angular Mini-Book 2.0 is now available!

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

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. What about deploying your Angular app to the cloud? Yep, it covers that too!

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 [email protected], email me at [email protected], or hit me up on Twitter @mraible.

2021 - A Year in Review

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.

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.