Raible Designs

2017 - A Year in Review

2017 was a year with many changes. We changed presidents, Stormpath joined forces with Okta, our daughter started high school, and we lost two of our precious pets. On the upside, I traveled to many beautiful places, talked to developers around the world, and became a Devoxx Champion. Not only that, but our two classic VWs ran like champs the whole year. We put upwards of 10K adventure miles on our Syncro, and another couple thousand on Hefe the Bus.

I'm going to look back on 2017 using the following categories.

• Professional
  • Speaking
  • Devoxx4Kids
  • Projects
• Personal
  • Stout and Hefe
• 2018

Professional

2017 was the first year I started with a full-time job in January since the turn of the century. I'd been an independent consultant for most of my career. Stormpath enticed me enough with their people and vision that I became a full-time employee with them in September 2016.

January started slow, but I started to hit my stride in February when I traveled to Sweden for Jfokus and skiing. Coincidentally, it was shortly after the conference that I found myself negotiating with Eric Berg about joining forces with Okta. I remember it well: I was sitting in the hotel lobby, with James Ward and Ray Tsang, when it all happened. Shortly after, we were sitting in the back of the bus on our way to a skiing adventure.

SpringOne, The Rich Web Experience, and Being Home for the Holidays

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of hitting two excellent conferences in one week: SpringOne and The Rich Web Experience. The primary reason I like both conferences so much is that there are so many familiar faces.

I had a gas hanging out with folks from Pivotal after I arrived on Monday night. On Tuesday, I thoroughly enjoyed the opening keynote. Seeing the unveiling of Spring Boot 2.0's most impressive feature was spectacular too!

I walked to the Okta office for some swag that afternoon, then proceeded to the Atomist happy hour. I talked with Rod Johnson about how Atomist might be able to help update our example apps and the Okta Developer blog. Since keeping our posts and examples up-to-date is a maintenance burden, I think Atomist could be a huge help.

After happy hour, a bunch of us joined Heroku for a delicious dinner and fun conversations.

On Wednesday, I delivered my talk on Bootiful Development with Spring Boot and React. You can find my slides on Speaker Deck.

It was recorded and published to YouTube as well.

After my talk ended, I only had 70 minutes before my flight took off for Florida and the Rich Web Experience. Luckily, there was hardly any traffic and I found myself boarding with 23 minutes to spare.

A Stressful, but Rewarding, Trip to Devoxx Belgium and Morocco

One of my favorite conferences in the world is Devoxx Belgium. First of all, it tends to have one of the most enthusiastic audiences I've ever seen. Secondly, its organizers are super awesome and challenge you to give great talks. Third, it was the first conference I ever took my Trish to. In 2011, I took her a second time and proposed to her in Paris afterward.

This year, I traveled to Devoxx Belgium for the first time without Trish. It was stressful because I didn't prepare well beforehand. However, it was also gratifying because I was able to make everything work, even it all happened at the last minute. Furthermore, I did the majority of my talks with good friends, which is always a pleasant experience.

The purpose of this blog post is to document my experience this year, so I can look back and say WTF was I thinking?!

I left Denver on Monday (November 6) afternoon and flew to Brussels, Belgium. My flight landed in Brussels at 9 am and Josh and my (three hour) talk was at 1:30 pm. I made it in time, but it was one of the first times we didn’t have a lot of time to prepare face-to-face beforehand. I learned that getting t-shirts printed in the US to save $500 is a good idea, but having to take two suitcases to carry them all is a bad idea.

We did our usual talk and I used Okta's new Angular SDK instead of the Sign-In Widget to showcase authentication. Even though the crucial step I needed was contained in my notes, I failed. One simple line to add an HttpInterceptor and I missed it!

I think I followed up well with a tweet that showed how to fix it. But who knows how many people use Twitter. One things for sure, people tweet more at Devoxx Belgium than any other conference I’ve ever been too! In fact, the #Devoxx hashtag got hijacked by some porn sites and their tweets started showing up on the Twitter wall. 

I tweeted about what I forgot to do after our talk.

Josh and my talk was published on YouTube the very next day, which is awesome.

Life as an Open Source Developer, One Year Later

It's been a little over a year since I wrote about life as an open source developer. I'm happy to say I still haven't written a single line of proprietary code. Of course, things have changed a lot in the last year. I thought going full-time would bring stability to my career. Instead, six months into it we joined forces with Okta.

The transition was rough at first. At Stormpath, we had full-featured SDKs and a great relationship with developers that used our service. We were able to port many of our SDKs to work with Okta, but we discovered that Okta didn't have a great relationship with developers. In fact, their developer blog hadn't been updated in over a year when we arrived.

On the upside, Okta's API supported standards like SAML, OAuth, and OpenID Connect. Open standards made it possible to use other frameworks and not have to rely on our own. I was pumped to find that Spring Security made it easy to integrate with SAML and OAuth. In fact, I was able to leverage these standards to add OIDC support to JHipster.

Okta's new developer console and open pricing are just a couple examples of improved happenings since we arrived. The Okta Spring Boot Starter and JavaScript libraries for Node.js, Angular, and React are also pretty awesome.

I'm happy to say my contributions on GitHub almost doubled in the last year!

As far as stress is concerned, that hasn't changed much. I've learned that the stress I feel from work is still causing me to have high blood pressure. When I measure it in the mornings, or at night, it's fine. When I measure it during the day, it's elevated. I believe my high blood pressure is caused by doing too much. Sure, it's great to be productive and accomplish a lot for my company, but it's killing me.

Therein lies the rub. I get to create my job. All I'm asked to do is write a blog post per week and speak at a conference (or meetup) once a month. Yet I'm doing way more than that. Since this time last year, I've delivered 33 presentations, in 13 different cities. I keep a page on this blog updated with all my presentations.

Next year, I still plan to speak a lot, but I plan on toning things down a bit. I'll be concentrating on US cities, with large Java user groups, and I'll be limiting my travel overseas.

Outside of my health concerns, I'm still loving my job. The fact that I get paid to speak at great conferences, write example applications, and discover new ways to do things is awesome. It's also pretty sweet that I was able to update the JHipster Mini-Book and upgrade 21-Points Health during work hours. The fact that I got featured on the main Okta blog was pretty cool too.

The good news is my overseas travel isn't done this year. Today, I leave for Devoxx Belgium, one of my favorite conferences. It'll be my first time in Antwerp without Trish. However, I'm speaking with friends Josh Long and Deepu Sasidharan, so it's sure to be a good time. Traveling to Devoxx Morocco should be fun too. I've never been to Casablanca before.

In December, you can catch me at SpringOne and The Rich Web Experience. Next year, I'll be speaking at Denver Microservices meetup, Utah JUG, Seattle JUG, and JazzCon. I plan to do a JUG tour in the northeast US too.

You might've noticed I don't write a lot of technical content here anymore. That's because I'm doing most of my writing on developer.okta.com/blog. I'm still writing for InfoQ as well. I really enjoyed attending the JavaOne keynotes and writing up what I saw.

• Oracle Announced Plans to Open Source All Features of Their JDK and Address Shortcomings in Java EE
• JavaOne Keynote: Oracle Talks Blockchain, Bots and Serverless
• JavaOne Keynote: IBM on OpenJ9 and Open Liberty; Java Community in The Matrix

I'll leave you with this, a project I'm working on actively and plan to finish before Devoxx Morocco.

Viva la Open Source!

Happy Birthday Abbie!

Abbie turned 15 today. About a month ago, she said she didn't want a birthday party, so we decided we'd surprise her with one. Her mom did most of the work, inviting her friends, gather food and drinks, and hosting the event at her house.

We told her we were going out to a family dinner, and we needed to pick her mom up along the way. We found out later that she knew about it the whole time, but the same friend that showed her the Evite told her it was next weekend. So she kinda knew. However, when I put a tie on, Trish got fancy, and Jack dressed nice for dinner, she figured "Oh well, I guess it's not tonight."

Abbie still rides her horse, Tucker, a couple of times a week and she's won several ribbons at all the shows she's been in. She's a freshman in high school now. It's incredible to look back and see that I started this blog just a few months before she was born.

Happy 15th Birthday Abbie!

Goodbye, Sir Jake

Jake was a border collie that came into my life when I met Trish. In fact, I met him on our first date. After dinner, Trish and I wandered back to her place and took her dogs for a walk in Wash Park. She had two: Sagan (the crazy one) and Jake (stoner dog). Jake wasn't a purebred border collie, but he was one of those perfect dogs. He slept a lot, liked to lay in the sunshine, and was always happy to harass Sagan and giggle while doing it when we went on walks.

A few years ago, when I was only working 20 hours per week, I grew to appreciate our dogs more than ever. I'd take them on walks, hikes, and runs almost every afternoon. I learned that living my life like my dogs wanted me to live it was a great thing. Long walks, relaxing in the sun, smiling from ear to ear when a family member comes home.

A few weeks ago, I took both our dogs on a run and Jake was not feeling well. He certainly didn't want to run, and he could barely keep up even when we walked. Trish took him in for some tests, and we discovered his blood cells were under attack. Trish rushed him to CSU's Veterinary Hospital for a blood transfusion. That helped, but we discovered a few days later that his bones were no longer producing red blood cells. Another blood transfusion, a bunch of prescription drugs, and he was back in action. He seemed to be doing great. We drove to Montana last week to visit my parents and brought him with us.

Last Friday, Jake could only walk on three legs. Yesterday, he was down to two. Trish took him in, and his doctor said his liver was failing. Since he was an older dog and lived a great life, we chose not continue keeping him alive. He was put to sleep yesterday afternoon at Aurora Animal Hospital. They allowed him to lay in the grass, in the sunshine, while they carried out the procedure.

I'm happy to have known you, Jake. You were a great dog, and I learned a lot from you. Sleep well, buddy.

The JHipster Mini-Book v4.0 Now Available for Download!

The JHipster Mini-Book v4.0 is now available as a free download from InfoQ. Get it while it's hot! You'll also be able to buy a print version in a week or two. You can read all about what’s changed since v2.0 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, Dennis Sharpe for tech editing, and Lawrence Nyveen for copy editing. And most of all, thank you Asciidoctor for making the publishing process so easy!

Rafting the Salmon River in Idaho

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

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

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

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

Happy Birthday Jack!

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

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

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

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

Happy 13th Birthday Jack!

Driving, Rafting, Hiking, and Enjoying Life in Montana

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

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

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

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