Raible Designs

JavaOne 2013: My Presentations

I flew into San Francisco this past Monday to speak at JavaOne 2013, and to meet with my new client. I made sure to wear a Broncos shirt since I was riding the train through Oakland and had some co-workers that were Raiders fans. My trip started off nicely as the Broncos dismantled the Raiders on Monday Night Football. My new team and I watched it during a team dinner at Havana in Walnut Creek. Historically, the Broncos and Raiders have had a heated rivalry historically, so the win was the perfect start to the week.

On Tuesday, I worked from my hotel in the morning, then met James Ward to do some last minute prep for our smackdown. The prior week, we both upgraded our respective apps to use the latest versions of Grails and Play Framework. I ran into a few issues when upgrading, while Play required some API changes.

We both added Memcachier to our apps (to share caching between dynos) and ran some Apache Bench tests. The results showed quite a bit of slowdown compared to last time, which we attributed to caching needing to make network hops. Other than that, we both had to make changes to our framework's buildpacks to get the latest versions running on Heroku, and when we headed for our talk, my instance of Grails wasn't running (60 second boot timeout on startup). The good news is it somehow solved its issues during our talk and was up and running when I checked it after, as it is now. Below is an embedded version of the presentation we delivered. You can also click here to see it in a new window, or view it on SlideShare.

On Wednesday morning, I tried to attend Venkat's Programming with Lambda Expressions in Java, but quickly discovered it was sold out. My talk on The Modern Java Web Developer started shortly after and I had a fantastic time talking to a packed room and preaching the virtues of learning and staying up-to-date with web technologies. I made sure to include a slide on Avatar, an Oracle-sponsored JavaScript-based framework that requires "very minor JavaScript knowledge". You can view my presentation below or on SlideShare.

According to @JavaOneConf, all JavaOne 2013 presentations will be published on Parleys.com.

After completing my talks, I journeyed to my client and practiced what I preached, successfully finishing a spike that reduced page load time from 8 seconds to 2 seconds. That evening, I attended the Oracle Appreciation Event at Treasure Island, had some cold beer and listened to some loud music.

I had a great time speaking at JavaOne this year, and look forward to my next speaking engagement. In November, I'll be traveling to Devoxx where I'll be giving a 3-hour University session on The Modern Java Web Developer. Hope to see you there!

JavaOne 2013: My First Time Speaking

I've been to JavaOne many times in my life, starting in 2004 and continuing in 2005, 2006 and 2008. I have fond memories of the first couple years, meeting all the Java open source guys and having a lot of fun.

You might notice that the aforementioned blog posts no longer show pictures. That's because they were originally hosted on Apple's HomePage, which they shut down years ago. I haven't bothered to republish the photos and fix the links, but I do still have them. For those looking for a blast from the past, checkout Mike, Howard and James or Bruce and Marc. I also have a set of photos from our Geronimo Live party in 2006.

As many of you know, JavaOne used to be a huge conference, attracting 15,000 attendees back in the day. Numbers have dwindled a lot since Oracle bought Sun and I've heard recent years are more around 1500. Since I've spoken at a lot of conferences, but never JavaOne, I figured I'd try this year. The good news is I got accepted and I'll be there next week!

On Tuesday afternoon, I'll be presenting the Play Framework vs Grails Smackdown with James Ward. On Wednesday morning, I'll be talking about The Modern Java Web Developer. I also look forward to The Black Keys on Wednesday night.

I have a feeling it's gonna be a great week!

Developing with AngularJS - Part IV: Making it Pop

Welcome to the final article in a series on my experience developing with AngularJS. I learned its concepts, beat my head against-the-wall with and finally tamed it enough to create a "My Dashboard" feature for a client. For previous articles, please see the following:

• Part I: The Basics
• Part II: Dialogs and Data
• Part III: Services

The last mile of development for the My Dashboard feature was to spice things up a bit and make it look better. We hired a design company to come up a new look and feel and they went to work. Within a week, we had a meeting with them and they presented a few different options. We picked the one we liked the best and went to work. Below are screenshots that I used to implement the new design.

Matrimony in Montana

On July 27, 2013, in the late afternoon, Trish McGinity and I were married at the Holland Lake Lodge, in the town I grew up in. The Lodge was a favorite childhood place and getting married there, to the awesomest woman ever, was a glorious experience. There were several planned activities (e.g. horseback riding, rafting, golfing) the week before our wedding day, and many of our friends and family joined the fun. While we couldn't capture every smile, giggle, or loving moment, this is an endeavor to document our matrimony month, our wedding week, and the day we sealed the deal.

We started our month in Montana on Sunday, June 30th. We're officially calling it Raible Road Trip #18. We packed up our pets, raft and golf clubs and left Denver around happy hour.

To read more about our rafting adventures, our wedding week festivities and our delightful wedding day, please click the link below. You can also skip directly to the wedding week or wedding day.