Raible Designs

2022 - A Year in Review

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.

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
  • Speaking
  • Community
  • Projects
• Personal
  • Hefe the Bus and Stout the Syncro
• 2023

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:

1. Build REST APIs and Native Java Apps with Helidon
2. Introducing Spring Native for JHipster: Serverless Full-Stack Made Easy
3. Use GitHub Actions to Build GraalVM Native Images
4. Build Secure Ionic Apps with Angular and JHipster
5. Kickstart a Java REST API with Quarkus
6. Start a Java REST API with Spring Boot
7. Launch a Java REST API with Micronaut
8. Create a Java REST API with Helidon
9. OAuth for Java Developers
10. Use React and Spring Boot to Build a Simple CRUD App
11. Get Started with Spring Boot and SAML

I published four blog posts to the Auth0 blog.

1. Add OpenID Connect to Angular Apps Quickly
2. Integrate React Native and Spring Boot Securely
3. Micro Frontends for Java Microservices
4. Quick JavaScript Authentication with OktaDev Schematics

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!

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. 😅

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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:

• Build Secure Ionic Apps with Angular and JHipster
• Integrate React Native and Spring Boot Securely

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.

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.

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!

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!! 😆

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.