Raible Designs

Devoxx Poland: A Huge Conference in a Beautiful City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Farewell to the 2016-17 Ski Season

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

Angular and Cloud Native PWAs at Devoxx France

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

I had two speaking events at the conference:

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

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

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

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

Let the Okta and Devoxx Journeys Begin!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Jolly Good Time at Jfokus 2017

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

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

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

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

2016 - A Year in Review

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

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

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

Professional

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

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

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

Happy Birthday Abbie!

Abbie turns 14 today and she's celebrating in style. Her brave parents allowed her to have a slumber with all her friends. There's 11 teenage girls in our basement right now, screaming, giggling and making lots of loud noises.

I'm really proud of the young woman Abbie has become. She's a straight-A student and loves horseback riding and sleeping.

Trish and she bought a new horse a few weeks ago. His name is Tucker and they traveled to New Mexico to find him. He's a thoroughbred paint, with hunter jumper skills. We'd love to keep at the Raible Ranch, but we want to see what the winters are like first. For now, he's at Friends of Horses, which has an indoor arena. Next year, the girls plan to compete and hopefully bring home lots of trophies!

Happy 14th Birthday Abbie!

Life as an Open Source Developer

It's been a little over a month since I started my new gig at Stormpath. I gotta say, life is great as an open source developer! Yes, I did start working for them as a consultant in April, so it's not a huge change for me. However, I only recently realized I haven't written a single line of proprietary code the entire time. My GitHub contributions look pretty good this year. They're nothing like @mojavelinux, or @dsyer, but I'll get there.

It's also been a bit more stress than I'm used to. I think this comes from a couple things: 1) turning my hobby into my job and 2) I've set a lot of high expectations for myself. As a developer evangelist, I get to create my own job. That means I can speak at the conferences I want to, write the code I want to, create the blog posts I want to, and everything else in between.

At the end of September, I finished updating the JHipster Mini-Book for JHipster 3.x. It's gone through tech editing and it's being copy-edited right now. I hope to release it within a week.

In early October, I said I'd commit to writing one blog post per week, develop a JHipster module for Stormpath, and help get their Angular 2 support good enough for an alpha release. I'm happy to report I've been able to accomplish most of these and I hope to show off our Angular 2 support soon.

I then channeled my efforts into integrating Stormpath's Java SDK with their AngularJS directives. You can read about how I did that in Get Started with AngularJS, Spring Boot, and Stormpath. Unlike my previous AngularJS tutorial, this one connects to a backend and shows how to communicate with Spring Boot cross-domain.

If you like to read code more than words, you can look at the example project's commits on GitHub.

1. Create an AngularJS UI: search and edit features
2. Create a Spring Boot app with Stormpath: app from start.stormpath.io
3. Develop an API to CRUD people with Spring Data REST: /api/people
4. Integrate AngularJS and Spring Boot apps: cross-domain
5. Integrate Stormpath into AngularJS for login, registration and forgot password: Stormpath Angular SDK

Last week, I released a JHipster module that integrates Stormpath. This exercise was good because I was able to identify some gaps in Stormpath's SDKs and fix them. Getting something to work made me feel good; having the ability to improve the developer experience was even better! Of course, I blogged about what I learned.

This week, I edited and code reviewed some posts from Karl Penzhorn on React with Spring Boot and using webpack with React. I also got to bang my head against the wall writing Angular 2 tests. If you're writing a module for Angular 2, generator-angular2-module provides a nice starting point.

Last, but certainly not least, I'll be speaking at a few events about Microservices, JHipster, Angular 2 and Stormpath in the near feature.

• Rocky Mountain Software Symposium, November 19
• The Rich Web Experience, December 9
• A joint talk at Denver JUG with the infamous Josh Long, December 14

If you have any questions about developer evangelism, the technologies I mentioned in this post, or Stormpath, please let me know. Otherwise, I hope to see you on the road soon!

Life Update: A Summer to Remember, a New House, and a Sweet New Gig

TL;DR: I had a super fun summer traveling with my family, recently moved to a new house in the country, and I've joined Stormpath as a Developer Evangelist. Wahoo!

I've written several "life update" posts in the past, but there's been few as epic as this one. When I wrote my 2016 Goals, I listed "July in Montana" as one of them. And y'all know that "finish the bus" was #1. Since the bus is done, I wanted to show it off in my hometown 4th of July parade in Condon, Montana.

A path to these goals became clear in mid-June, shortly after visiting London and Tallinn with my Mom. It involved a lot of driving, but I was determined to make it happen. I was so excited about my plan that I sent an email to my best friend, Owen, on June 15.