Raible Designs

2023 - A Year in Review

2023 started with a celebration of love in the Philippines. Trish and I traveled with friends to El Nido and Manila to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. It was a two-week trip that filled our souls with lasting memories.

2023 was a milestone year for our family. It's the year Jack graduated from high school!

Then, the Denver Nuggets won the NBA Championship, Jack started college at CU, and we became empty nesters. It was quite the year!

From last year's review:

I only have one goal for 2023: be present.

I live where I work, so this was easy enough on a physical level. However, I was forced to be even more present in Q4 of the year. My manager asked me to step up and be more present on my team in October. Then, sickness struck me down in mid-November after seven weeks of travel, allowing for some quality one-on-one time with Trish.

I will look back on 2023 using the following categories.

• Personal
  • Hefe the Bus and Stout the Syncro
• Professional
  • Speaking
  • Community
  • Projects
• 2024

Personal

The ski season was excellent with trips to Winter Park, Devil's Thumb Ranch, Crested Butte, and Steamboat.

We celebrated my sister's St. Paddy's Day birthday with a week in New Orleans. We visited my parents in Montana for Mother's Day.

We jumped for joy during Jack's High School Graduation at the end of May!

The Nuggets playoff run was magical, and our half-season tickets came in quite handy. The Denver Nuggets won the NBA Championship on June 12th. Crying from joy is a wonderful feeling. 🥹

I took a long summer vacation for the fourth year in a row. Thanks, Okta's unlimited vacation policy!

I wrote about my summer vacation adventures in Summer 2023: Colorado, Montana, and Cape Cod.

Jack started college at the University of Colorado on his birthday. We loved the Coach Prime and CU football experience in September, while the Broncos were terrible. When CU started sucking at halftime during the Stanford game, the teams seemed to swap fates. We relished in the Broncos winning streak in October and November as our CU football fandom waned.

Abbie turned 21 in early November. We celebrated at the CU vs. Oregon State game and again in Las Vegas the following weekend.

The last months of the year were dominated by real estate transactions. We sold our rental house near the University of Denver in early November.

And we bought a new ski chalet near Winter Park in December. It has mountain views with a river nearby and close proximity to many miles of mountain bike trails. We plan to rent it most of the time. We've experienced many misty-eyed moments of joy in it already.

We spent Christmas in Florida with Abbie, Jack, and Trish's whole family. The sunsets were gorgeous.

Hefe the Bus and Stout the Syncro

We gave Stout the Syncro a lot of rest this year. We bought a relatively new Chevy Suburban as a new tow vehicle for our whitewater rafts. We celebrated our 10-year anniversary by rafting on the Upper Colorado River with both vehicles.

Hefe the Bus purred along with no issues. He won runner-up in his class this year at the Colorado Bug-In!

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 Architect" and all the code I write is open source.

This year, my main focus was leading the Java Community team as part of Auth0 by Okta Developer Relations. I worked with Deepu K Sasidharan and Jimena Garbarino to come up with ideas, write blog posts, and author tutorials for the Auth0 Developer Center.

My Americas Developer Relations team has one main function: cultivating relationships with developers via events. Personally, I like creating content more than events, yet I've also found they go hand-in-hand. The content I create often gets turned into conference talks, so I find it important to create new content if I want new talks. I mention this because it's not my main job to produce content. There's another team that does content, but they currently have no Java specialists.

I published two blog posts on the Auth0 blog:

• Build a Beautiful CRUD App with Spring Boot and Angular
• Java Microservices with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud

We used the microservices post as the basis for Deepu and my Securing Spring Boot Microservices with OAuth and OpenID Connect workshop at Devoxx Belgium.

On the OktaDev YouTube Channel, I created four screencasts (down from 12 in 2022).

• Micro Frontends for Java Microservices
• Build a Simple CRUD App with Spring Boot and Vue.js
• Getting Started with Spring Boot and SAML
• Build a Beautiful CRUD App using Spring Boot and Angular

My most popular video was Spring Boot + Vue, with 8.6K views.

My Use React and Spring Boot to Build a Simple CRUD App screencast has 22K views, but it was published on December 29, 2022, so it doesn't count for 2023.

While at Devoxx Belgium, Deepu and I interviewed a bunch of Java community legends.

• Interview: James Gosling
• Interview: Stephan Janssen
• What is your biggest gripe about Java?
• How many times have you been to Devoxx?
• What excites you about the future of programming?
• Do you know the most common password?

I did a couple more interviews with the OpenFGA team at KubeCon.

• Interview: Jonathan Whitaker on OpenFGA (Fine Grained Authorization)
• Interview: Andres Aguiar What is OpenFGA?

I updated and released new versions of the JHipster and Angular Mini-Books with the help of InfoQ and awesome tech editors.

• The JHipster Mini-Book v7.0 Released!
• The Angular Mini-Book 3.0 is now available!

InfoQ allows publishing them on other sites after six months, so they're both available online at jhipster-book.org and angular-book.org.

Speaking

According to TripIt, I took 21 trips to 37 cities in eight countries. Nine trips were work-related; the rest involved traveling to see family or attending Celebration of Life events. That's three fewer trips than in 2022, and I had 109 days on the road (-14 from 2022). United 1K was enjoyed; I did not qualify for it in 2024.

My Speaker Deck profile shows 18 presentations at 17 events. Thirteen of those were in person. I also attended KubeCon to help the OpenFGA project. My most-viewed presentation was Comparing Native Java REST API Frameworks from the Chicago JUG in August. It had 1.2K views.

While the Midwest and Northeast JUG tours were a lot of fun, the highlight of the year was interviewing James Gosling at Devoxx Belgium.

Community

We stopped live-streaming Denver JUG meetups because we wanted to encourage folks to join us in person and grow our community. We're grateful to the folks at Thrive Workplace for donating their space. We hope to start meeting at their new downtown location near Union Station sometime this year.

Projects

I continued to maintain OktaDev Schematics in 2023. The project had four releases. According to npm-stat.com, it had ~42K downloads in 2023 (-20K from 2022).

I updated my Bare Bones Angular tutorial for Angular 17.

I also helped with the JHipster project. It turned 10 in October.

JHipster had eight releases and ~1.3 million downloads in 2023 (down 200K from 2022). Our biggest release was JHipster 8.0.0 on November 2nd. We released 8.1.0 in early December, and I updated my Get Started with JHipster 8 tutorial to use it.

I also published a screencast of the tutorial just before Christmas.

2024

Professionally, I'm starting the year with two of my favorite conferences, Jfokus and Devnexus. Then, I'm doing a JUG tour in April to Salt Lake City, Dallas, Tampa, Nashville, and Detroit. I'm trying to make Spring I/O and JNation happen too. September's dev2next is sure to be a fun conference in Denver. You can see where my whole team will be on our events page.

Personally, Trish and I hope to visit the Ski Chalet frequently. The mountains are calling, and we must go. I'll be a half-century old in July. That's sure to be a good party, especially if it's during another month-long summer vacation.

I have only one goal for 2024: breathe.

I often pause, breathe, and smile when I'm skiing, mountain biking, rafting, and frolicking in the great outdoors. Sometimes it's nature's beauty that causes this, but often it's my own satisfaction with the situation.

If you want to watch me connect with developers and opt outside, please follow me on Twitter. I also post pictures of my favorite moments on Instagram and whole albums on Flickr.