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A Not-So-Fond Farewell to the 2025-26 Ski Season

2026-05-25T13:42:59-06:00

The 2025-26 ski season was a dud. It teased us with a promising start when Trish and Abbie spent Thanksgiving weekend in Winter Park.

We didn't get enough snow at our house for backyard cross-country skiing until early December. When I skied the Fraser River Trail on December 15, there was plenty of frozen dirt mixed in. It was cold enough that it didn't stick to my skis, but it was still an ominous preview of the winter ahead.

My stats for the year: 5 cross-country outings and 14 downhill days. Trish may have logged even more downhill days, which is a great sign that her ankle has recovered nicely!

We celebrated Mary Jane's 50th birthday on January 10. Honestly, it felt like the mountain opened that day because it had to show up for its own party.

By January 11, I had logged six downhill days. There still hadn't been a powder day, but it was early enough to stay optimistic. We squeezed in a few more turns at the end of January, then rented our Ski Chalet to friends for all of February.

Trish and I kicked off a month of travel by golfing in Cabo San Lucas with Cletus and Sarah.

After that, we spent a week with Trish's parents in Florida, and I joined my family in Arizona for MLB Spring Training.

We returned to Winter Park in early March and again in early April.

Conditions were so thin this year that we never even skied Trestle, one of our favorite runs at Mary Jane.

One bright spot: we joined the Rendezvous Mountain Club for the first time. Membership lets us keep our skis and poles on the mountain for a reasonable price, and Matt and Andy, the brothers who run the place, make the whole thing even better.

Just like last year, we wrapped up the season with a moose sighting near our condo.

Jack didn't make it onto the slopes this year because of an injury, but we did get plenty of ski time with Abbie. DU Hockey also won its 11th national championship!

The reduced snowpack means rafting season will be underwhelming too. We're trying not to dwell on that, so we've been distracting ourselves with other adventures: New Orleans Jazz Fest, Mother's Day in Montana, and a road trip to Moab for Syncro Solstice.

Now summer is right around the corner, the Nuggets are out, the Avs are on the ropes, and the golf courses are calling.

For more ski season photos, see my 2025-26 Ski Season album on Flickr.

2025 - A Year in Review

2025-12-31T16:15:01-07:00

What a year 2025 has been! From Trish's continuing recovery to Abbie's graduation and Jack's 21st birthday, from epic summer travels to family gatherings across the country, this year has been filled with gratitude, growth, and gorgeous moments.

From last year's review:

I have only one goal for 2025: be grateful.

This goal felt crucial given Trish's injuries at the end of 2024. Her wrist and ankle healed gradually, and by spring she was back to skiing and living life to the fullest. Watching her resilience and determination reminded me to be grateful for our health.

I'm gonna review 2025 using the following perspectives:

Personal

We kicked off 2025 with an incredible family trip to Puerto Rico in early January. Trish went to high school there and had been wanting to take me for years. Abbie, Jack, and my parents all joined us for the adventure. We celebrated my mom's 75th birthday before we left. She's a queen!

The island was everything Trish promised and more. We explored Old San Juan and El Morro, hiked through the El Yunque rainforest (the only tropical rainforest in the U.S. National Forest System!), and kayaked through bioluminescent waters in Fajardo. The trip was paradise, and Trish reconnected with her roots. You can read more in my Paradise in Puerto Rico blog post.

The 2024-2025 Ski Season

The ski season started slowly due to Trish's injuries and a lack of snow. I didn't get out for cross-country until mid-January after we returned from Puerto Rico. My stats for the year: 10 days of cross-country and only 7 days downhill. Not my best season, but every day on the snow contributes to my happiness.

My first day on the slopes wasn't until February 8th, when I skied with my good friend, Matt Good (aka the Professor), at Winter Park. In March, our nephew James visited for spring break, and we hit the slopes together.

You can read more in my Farewell to the 2024-2025 Ski Season post.

21 Years with Hefe the Bus

April marked a special milestone. Twenty-one years ago, I bought a 21-window VW Bus minutes after DU Hockey won a national title. Hefe has been part of countless adventures since then.

Today, 21 years ago, I bought a 21-window VW Bus minutes after @DU_Hockey won a national title. I'm pumped they're trying for another one this weekend! https://t.co/X2emVbkoN8 #GoDU #VWBus #HefeTheBus pic.twitter.com/9OPwjZeGPw
— Matt Raible (@mraible) April 10, 2025

Jack's Internship Search

In April, I shared Jack's search for a summer internship on LinkedIn. The response was overwhelming and heartwarming. Jack is a junior at CU majoring in information science. He just got a job scouting college basketball teams and gathering stats. He's really excited for the opportunity!

Nuggets Playoff Game

In early May, we had a blast at a Nuggets playoff game with the family. Game night was so much fun!

Game night with the family was soooo much fun!! 🤩 #GoNuggets pic.twitter.com/U4jmLad6Tu
— Matt Raible (@mraible) May 4, 2025

Abbie Graduates!

In May, Abbie graduated from the University of Colorado with her degree! We couldn't be prouder of her accomplishments. She had already secured a job as a Product Analyst at Spectrum after an amazing summer internship in 2024. The future is bright for our girl!

Abbie moved back in with us after graduation, bringing her adorable pup Gracie along. Having both of them home has been wonderful, even if Gracie does wake me up every morning for walks!

The Summer of Travel

This summer was absolutely epic. We were only home three weekends between Father's Day and the last day of summer! I wrote a whole blog post about it called The Summer of Travel (2025 Edition), so I'll hit the highlights here.

I moved up to Fraser for the entire month of June with the zoo (two dogs and a cat), enjoying the Fraser River Trail daily. Those Fraser sunsets never get old.

Father's Day brought the fam together for gorgeous golf at Pole Creek. The kids got me a "Best Dad Ever" t-shirt that made me a little emotional.

We rafted Ruby Horsethief Canyon (it took us 8 hours to go 8 miles on day two - next time I'm bringing a motor!), enjoyed Blues From The Top in Winter Park, and loaded up our Suburban for the entire month of July in Montana. My parents' place hosted 15 people for the 4th of July celebration!

We moved to The Last Best Place for the month of July! ??#Montana pic.twitter.com/KQri4NSuT9
— Matt Raible (@mraible) July 1, 2025

The annual Pirates at the Pumphouse rafting trip on the Colorado River never disappoints. Captain Trish commanded Pepples through the rapids like a pro.

Stout the Syncro made it to Del Norte for Rhythms on the Rio and BusCamp. Ed, Karen, Bridget, and the Professor joined us for the weekend of VWs and music.

Next, we headed to Cape Cod, where Trish was in her happy place with family. We celebrated Joe's birthday at New Seabury and enjoyed happy hours on the Spit. Then we moved on to Little Sebago Lake in Maine to visit with Kidder and Norm, my pledge class brothers from 1992!

The highlight of the summer was a five-day raft trip through Desolation Canyon on the Green River in Utah. Dawn, Erik, Chris, Brice, and the whole gang made it unforgettable. We had a wet start but the weather turned gorgeous. This is the kind of trip that reminds you what really matters: time with loved ones, connection with nature, and nights spent under the eternal stars.

We returned from rafting and went straight to Red Rocks the next night for Billy Idol. Trish and Jen are huge fans!

Jack Turns 21!

We headed to Vegas in late August to celebrate Jack's 21st birthday in style. We gifted him five laps in a Lamborghini at Dream Racing on the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Watching Jack drive that Lambo around the track was pure joy.

The Professor and Dr. Laura joined us for Smalltown for the Cause in Salida afterward. We enjoyed excellent bluegrass music. As summer wound down, we made it back to Fraser to catch the fall colors.

Jack even got a job working Broncos games for ESPN, and we spotted him on TV!

Abbie's 23rd Birthday

In November, we celebrated Abbie turning 23. She's adjusting to life as a young urban professional and bringing joy into our lives every day. Her company has been treating her well, from yoga on Tuesday mornings to golf lessons on Wednesday afternoons. She even got to play in a tournament at Arrowhead Golf Club!

Thanksgiving in Montana

For Thanksgiving, we flew to Montana for quality time with my family. My parents hosted, and we spent the week visiting with great friends, cooking, enjoying the sauna, playing pool at Mike and Mai's, relaxing, visiting local shops, and soaking up mountain time together. My Dad had heart surgery the week before Thanksgiving to put in a cow valve in his heart. He sometimes moos now. 🐮

December Skiing and Winter Fun

December brought snow to Colorado and family time on the slopes at Winter Park. We like to embrace fun, and Abbie joined us by buying a onesie too!

Christmas in Naples with Trish's Family

We wrapped up the year by heading to Naples, Florida to spend Christmas with Trish's family. After all the mountain time, the beach was a welcome change of scenery. The weather was perfect. Sunny and 75 degrees. Our kids got golf clubs for Christmas, so we played golf a lot. We also visited the Revs Institute (an incredible automotive museum), enjoyed many spectacular sunsets, and had quality time with the whole McGinity Clan. All 15 of us, plus three dogs!

You can see more photos from our Thanksgiving in Montana, December skiing at Winter Park, and Christmas in Naples in the Winter Begins 2025 album on Flickr.

Hefe the Bus and Stout the Syncro

Our beloved VWs continued to bring adventure and joy this year. In April, Stout the Syncro saved my life on the way up to Winter Park. I was cruising along in 2WD when the rear wheels started slipping on black ice. We started drifting at 70 mph, first to the left, then to the right, and eventually sideways. As we headed toward the guardrail, I thought, "Oh my, this is going to hurt!" That's when we hit ice again and the back end flipped around. We went down into the ditch backwards and landed with no harm done. The dogs barely noticed.

Stout also loved camping on the Colorado River for Pirates and posing for photos under the spectacular starry night.

Stout made the trip to Del Norte for Rhythms on the Rio and BusCamp, looking magnificent against the Colorado backdrop. The VW community came out in force, and it reminded us why we love these vehicles so much.

Hefe the Bus had a quieter year after his clutch went out at the end of 2024. I wasn't able to get him into the shop until just before we left for Montana in June, and didn't get him back until late September. By then, we'd missed most of the summer shows. But he's back on the road now and ready for adventures in 2026!

The year ended on a high note when Hefe was featured in the Readers' Showcase of the February 2026 issue of Hot VWs magazine! It's an honor to have him recognized by the VW community in one of the most respected magazines in the scene.

Professional

Professionally, 2025 was my first full year at CrowdStrike. I continued to work on developer.crowdstrike.com, creating blog posts, sample apps, and improving documentation about Falcon Foundry, Fusion SOAR, and Next-Gen SIEM. I got the opportunity to speak at Fal.Con 2025 in Las Vegas, which was nicely timed with Jack's birthday celebration.

The work has been rewarding, helping developers understand how to leverage CrowdStrike's APIs and SDKs. I've learned a tremendous amount about cybersecurity, Python, and the Falcon platform. I appreciate the opportunity to work with such talented people at one of the top cybersecurity companies in the world.

Community

I continued my role as co-lead of JHipster, helping shepherd the project through several releases throughout the year. We shipped JHipster v8.10.0 in March, v8.11.0 in May, and ended the year with the v9.0.0-beta.0 release in December. The community remains strong with consistent downloads and active contributions.

On GitHub, I had 2,935 contributions in 2025, with 44% dedicated to code review, 42% to commits, 13% to pull requests, and 1% to issues. I contributed to CrowdStrike's Foundry sample repositories and 73 other open source projects. It's gratifying to see JHipster continue to thrive after all these years. 🤓

The Denver JUG meetings continued regularly, providing a space for Java developers in the Denver area to connect and learn. Even though I wasn't traveling to conferences as much, staying connected to the local community remained important.

2026

Looking ahead to 2026, I'm excited about what's to come. Professionally, I want to push deeper into the Falcon platform's capabilities and help developers solve harder problems. Getting back on stage at Fal.Con and a few other conferences would be the icing on the cake.

Personally, we're looking forward to more adventures. We hope to visit the Ski Chalet frequently throughout the winter and spend the summer riding, rafting, and visiting friends and family in our favorite places. We're heading to the second weekend of Jazz Fest in New Orleans in the spring!

I have only one goal for 2026: live fully.

Living fully means showing up for every moment, whether it's a powder day at Winter Park, a raft trip on the Colorado, seeing live music, or a fun evening at home cheering for the Nuggets with Trish. It means saying yes to adventures, absolutely to friends, and investing in community relationships by showing up. At this stage of life, with the kids building their own paths and our freedom to explore, I want to squeeze every bit of joy and meaning out of each day. Yes, Trish, it’s time for your RV dreams to come true.

I'm grateful Trish is back in the game. Proud of Abbie for launching her career and Jack for chasing his passion. Thankful for family time in Montana and Florida, for gorgeous Colorado and our mountain retreat, and for friends who join us on the slopes, rivers, and at concerts.

If you'd like to stay in touch, please connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on Flickr where I share photos from our adventures.

Here's to 2026! 🥂

2020 - A Year in Review

2021-01-19T16:34:30-07:00

2020 was an interesting year. It started out pretty awesome, then came a global pandemic, a renewed interest in social justice, and lots of political news to keep your blood pressure up. Doomscrolling became a word, and I found myself doing it often.

As a person that travels frequently and speaks at a lot of conferences, there were a lot of changes. The interesting thing is I planned for many of these changes beforehand. From last year's year in review:

I'm going to stop traveling in August for a year. Abbie will be a high school senior and I want to be around for her last year at home.

It seems I timed this quite well! However, I didn't expect most conferences to go virtual. I didn't expect I could still speak at them without traveling. I expected to speak less and have more time for writing. I didn't expect to stay home all the time and have everything delivered. I didn't expect to have to stop hanging out with friends.

I'm going to look back on 2020 using the following categories.

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 as much as blog posts. Our YouTube Channel continues to grow much faster than our Twitter followers, so we continue to invest in it. I published 20 videos on the @oktadev channel in 2020. In addition to doing videos about my own posts, I started doing them for posts written by other Java developers. My most popular video was based on a blog post written by Daniel Pereira. In case you're interested, you can watch Java REST API Comparison: Micronaut, Quarkus, and Spring Boot below.

In the first quarter, I continued to record meetups for the Denver JUG and Denver Open Source Users group. This changed quickly with COVID, and we pivoted to using StreamYard and YouTube for our meetups. This made it easier to record sessions because there's no editing involved. Even though it requires less time, I really miss the in-person meetups and after-hours discussions with the community. We published nine videos to the DJUG channel and three to the DOSUG channel.

Denver JUG is now up to 3,608 members. Our most popular video in 2020 was from Venkat Subramaniam on the Qualities of a Highly Effective Architect.

I wrote 15 blog posts throughout the year on the Okta developer blog. We publish two types of blog posts: thought leadership and conversion. Thought leadership posts tend to be about a hot topic, while conversion posts are usually tutorials.

I focused on Angular, Spring Boot, JHipster, Ionic, and the Okta CLI. We added author pages to our blog this year, so you can see all my posts here.

I especially enjoyed writing a four-part series on Angular and Spring Boot:

In particular, I learned a lot from writing the last post. It required collaborating with a lot of folks to make it happen. Kudos to Benoit Sautel for his help with Gradle + Kotlin, Ray Tsang for help with Jib, James Ward for help with Knative, Josh Long for his assistance with Docker + Cloud Foundry, and Joe Kutner for his buildpacks support.

Rather than rewriting this series for new versions every year, I've decided to use it as a foundation for an InfoQ Mini-Book on Angular.

My post popular thought leadership post was Security Patterns for Microservice Architectures. This was a runaway hit shortly after I posted it, and it remains #1 on Google for "microservice security."

Speaking

According to TripIt, I took 10 trips, to 16 cities, in 4 countries. That's 12 fewer trips than 2019, and I had 85 days on the road (-44 from 2019).

My Speaker Deck profile shows 23 presentations at 19 events. Eight of those were in-person, the rest virtual.

Denver Developer Identity Workshop (Okta event)
Jfokus
Jforum Stockholm
Boulder JUG
Denver JUG
Utah JUG
Switzerland JUG
Oktane 20
Frontend Tech Meetup (Sydney, Australia)
All The Talks

Dev Around the Sun
London Java Community
South West Java & JVM User Group (Bristol, United Kingdom)
ATDmag Microservices & APIs Seminar
SpringOne
JHipster Code
JConf.dev
Vaadin Webinar
JHipster Virtual Meetup

I had a lot of fun in February traveling to Sweden for Jfokus and doing a Rocky Mountain JUG Tour with Ray Tsang.

Community

As part of the Rocky Mountain JUG Tour, Ray Tsang and I started a Developer Ski Days meetup. We only had two meetups before COVID shut us down. We were really looking forward to taking the Winter Park Express train after dev.next. I'll make sure to try again when dev.next happens.

We did not host any Devoxx4Kids Meetups in 2020. Since most kids were on screens for school, I didn't feel we should subject them to more screen time. As of this writing, we have 341 members. I sent everyone a survey about doing online meetups in November and only received nine responses. Eight of them were in favor of it, so we might try to do one soon. I'm still looking for someone to help recruit speakers and schedule events.

Projects

I continued to maintain OktaDev Schematics in 2020. The project had 19 releases, added support for Express.js, and made Capacitor the default for Ionic apps. Working on it helps me keep up with changes in Angular, React, Vue, Ionic, and React Native and makes sure I know how to use the latest Okta SDKs. According to npm-stat.com, it had ~36K downloads in 2020.

My other projects are related to JHipster. I helped add OAuth 2.0 support for reactive JHipster apps. I also integrated Spring Cloud Gateway for microservice architectures. We had 12 releases in 2020. I'm blown away that we had almost 2 million downloads. 🤯

I'm proud to see JHipster's ecosystem thriving with blueprints. I try to test them every so often to ensure they have the same quality as the main generator.

I'm proud to say that JHipster 7 is really close to being finished. We had two beta releases in the last month!

I did not work on the JHipster Mini-Book in 2020, but I hope to update it for JHipster 7 this year.

Ionic for JHipster had eight releases in 2020 and around ~7K downloads.

Personal

I got some good ski days in before the pandemic hit with trips to Whitefish Mountain in Montana, Jackson Hole in Wyoming, and Trysil Ski Area in Norway.

I was super excited to travel to JavaLand in Germany in mid-March and hit the slopes in the Swiss Alps with my family after. That was canceled due to COVID, and we took our kids to Florida for Spring Break instead.

In addition to Florida in March, we had several other trips during the pandemic. We road tripped to see my parents in Montana in May. We flew to Boston for our nieces' graduation in June.

I wrote about these trips in 2019-2020 Ski Season, Quarantining for COVID, and a Graduation.

In July, I enjoyed a dream come true and took the whole month off. We enjoyed a family raft trip through Desolation Canyon to begin.

Then, I headed for Montana with my new eBike in tow. I had all kinds of fun biking on my childhood trails, rafting the Blackfoot and the Middle Fork of the Flathead, and golfing with my folks.

My sister and Mya visited, along with Trish and the kids.

Trish and I celebrated our 7th anniversary at a spa in Evergreen. I highly recommend their "Just for Two Escape" package.

I didn't publish many pictures from the rest of 2020, but a lot still happened. Jack turned 16, got his driver's license, and his mom gifted him a car.

Abbie turned 18 and is enjoying her senior year as much as possible.

how it started how it's going pic.twitter.com/iqjpeowFd6
— Matt Raible (@mraible) November 5, 2020

I'll take this opportunity to discuss our COVID close calls. We flew a few times during the pandemic, always wear masks outside our home, and believe in social distancing. We haven't had many close calls until recently.

The first close call was at Abbie's birthday party—a Saturday—in early November. She asked a small group of friends to get COVID tests before the party. They did, but all the results didn't come in. We let her have the party anyway. A positive result came back from one of her friends on Sunday. We thought for sure we'd come down with it since we were exposed. Their school went fully remote on Monday because of the fall surge. All the kids had to quarantine at home. No one caught it except the friend's sister.

Another scare happened a couple of weeks ago when we were up in the mountains. Jack and I ran into some friends on the slopes and joined them for a little après ski after. I hugged a family member that wasn't skiing that day, and they joked, "you don't have COVID, do you?" That was a Tuesday. They tested positive that Friday. Our whole family got tested Saturday, and the results were negative. Phew!

Stout the Syncro and Hefe the Bus

Stout and Hefe didn't get to make the rounds at any car shows this year. However, we did get to do a fun VW cruise with Hefe in early October.

Stout has been a trusty companion when making trips up to Winter Park to go skiing.

2021

Professionally, I don't think there will be any travel this year. Even if there were, I'm not interested until August. I made a pledge to stop traveling last year, and it's easier than ever now. I'm going to try and limit my speaking commitments to one per month and spend more time on mini-books, at least in the first half of the year. I'm still enjoying my 38" monitor and recommend you get one too.

I plan to contribute frequently to JHipster. Now that reactive support is released, I'll be trying to integrate microfrontends support. Why? Because no one wants a monolithic UI fronting their fancy microservice architecture! I also hope to integrate GraphQL, probably as a module to begin.

I'll be on vacation the whole month of July, again. I had so much fun last year; I can't think of a good reason not to do it again. 😃

Last year, I said I'd be skiing, biking, and rafting a lot more. The ski season was cut short, but I've been making up for it lately. I've been cross-country skiing 17 times since Thanksgiving and downhill 14 times. My goal is 42 days for both, but that might be tough if we don't get more snow soon.

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A post shared by Matt Raible (@vwsforlife)

When it's warmer, I'll take my ebike out on some trails and giggle to myself as the wind whisks through my hair while riding uphill. I'll take my Yeti out every-now-and-then to remember how hard mountain biking really is.

Rafting should come easy with our enthusiastic rafting family and vacation in July. We're thinking of renting a place near Salida in June so we can raft the Arkansas River after work. If Trish has to go back to an office, those plans could change quickly.

Last year, I wrote that I wanted to get more headspace, spend more time with friends, and enjoy being home. I did a lot of meditating in May (with the Headspace app). I gave it up with the busy summer and haven't resumed since. I'm mostly going with a "just get through this COVID thing" attitude. I really miss hanging out with friends. I look forward to that being a regular thing again.

I ❤️ being a homebody, and we're making some investments to make it even more fun. We have a 3-point basketball court being installed right now and a bunch of planted gardens that we hope will bloom with beautiful flowers this spring.

I only have one goal for 2021: dance more. 🕺

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.

2019 - A Year in Review

2020-02-09T20:56:56-07:00

It's time for my year-in-review post! This post sets the record for being the most delayed, ever. Usually, I'm able to get it published by the end of January. Oh well, I hope you enjoy it!

In 2019, I did my best to work hard, play often, and travel to interesting places. I took my Dad to Hawaii, drove through the worst blizzard of my life, traveled to India for the first time, did a UK + Ireland JUG Tour, and indulged in several fun vacations with my family.

We bought some additional rafts for whitewater, rafted in Montana and Colorado, and celebrated a family reunion in Cape Cod. Our classic VWs continued to perform well, and Hefe won his class once again at the 2019 VWs on the Green show. We did have to replace a clutch in Stout the Syncro, but I'm OK with that since he safely transported me through the most treacherous driving conditions of my life.

I'm going to look back on 2019 using the following categories.

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 started trying to produce more YouTube videos in addition to blog posts. My team discovered our YouTube subscriber count increases a lot faster than our Twitter followers, so that provided our motivation. I published 13 videos on the OktaDev YouTube Channel. My most popular one was Java Microservices in 20 Minutes with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud.

I upped my videographer skills by learning how to record meetups. I copied Aaron Parecki's portable wireless video setup and started recording Denver JUG and Denver Open Source User Group meetups. We posted the first couple to the OktaDev channel, then decided it'd be better to have the meetups start their own channels. We published 6 to the DJUG channel and 3 to the DOSUG channel. I recommend subscribing if you're into Java or Open Source.

I taught Abbie and Jack how to work the video kit and they've been recording these meetups when I'm out of town. Thanks kids!

I wrote 22 blog posts throughout the year on the Okta developer blog. We publish two types of blog posts: thought leadership and conversion. Thought leadership posts tend to be about a hot topic while conversion posts are usually tutorials. My main topics for the year included Angular, Schematics, JHipster, microservices, and mobile development with Ionic 4 and React Native. Here are some that seemed to be popular.

I wrote a few thought leadership posts too:

Speaking

According to TripIt, I took 22 trips, to 41 cities, in 12 countries. That's four fewer trips than 2018, and I had 129 days on the road (+10 from 2018). I visited twice as many countries in 2019 as I did in 2018.

My Speaker Deck profile shows 39 presentations at 24 events.

Denver JUG
Devnexus
SnowFROC
Great International Developer Summit: GIDS
Denver Microservices
JBCNConf
The Secure Developer (now MyDevSecOps)
Angular SF
JHipsterConf
KCDC
ACGNJ Java Users Group
JavaSIG (New York, NY)

That Conference
Develop Denver
London Java Community
South West Java & JVM User Group (Bristol, UK)
West Midlands Java User Group (Birmingham, UK)
Belfast JUG
JHipster Dublin
Dublin JUG
Cork JUG
Devoxx Belgium
Devoxx Morocco
The Progressive Web Experience

I also attended LavaOne (now UnVoxxed Hawaii) with my Dad. It was during his birthday week, so we played some golf and toured Pearl Harbor after the conference.

GIDS 2019 was incredibly fun with my sister. We hung out with many usual suspects and had a fabulous experience.

I learned how to present without an internet connection and found much joy in serious selfies.

Monday closing crew at #gids19! ???? pic.twitter.com/Axp5uRYqql
— Matt Raible (@mraible) April 22, 2019

I published pictures from Devnexus,

my UK + Ireland JUG Tour,

SpringOne,

and Devoxx Belgium/Morocco.

At SpringOne, I did a talk with Josh Long and James Ward. I've never had so much fun on stage. 😆

I got to do a talk with two of my best friends and favorite technologists, @okta ‘s @mraible and @google ‘s @_JamesWard.

Thanks for making this happen @s1p ! pic.twitter.com/VCB7X7G8v4
— Josh Long (???, ???, ???? ????, ??? ????) (@starbuxman) October 10, 2019

A recording of our talk was published to YouTube.

Community

I was involved in many community activities in 2019. I'm proud to say that Denver JUG won a Duke's Choice Award this year! I flew out to CodeOne for a night to accept the award and celebrate with Java friends.

Wahoo! @denverjug wins a Duke's Choice Award at #CodeOne!! ???? https://t.co/4f7wo9FTPF
— Matt Raible (@mraible) September 17, 2019

We only had two Devoxx4Kids Denver workshops in 2019:

The first one was taught by Abbie and Jack. I taught the second one. It seems I need to do a better job recruiting speakers. In reality, I think it's time to offer the leadership of the group to someone who has more time.

Projects

I developed and released a new open source project in 2019: OktaDev Schematics. It provides a way to add Okta for authentication to Angular, React, Vue, Ionic, and React Native projects. I developed it mostly to make my demos easier. It had 12 releases throughout the year.

My other projects are mostly around JHipster. I support its OAuth 2.0 and OIDC support as best I can, and released seven versions of its Ionic module. Upgrading to Ionic 4 was a big task and I wrote about how to use Ionic 4 with JHipster 6. I recorded a screencast showing how to get started with JHipster 6 and traveled to JHipster Conf.

I did not work on the JHipster Mini-Book in 2019, but I hope to update it for JHipster 7 this year.

Personal

Trish and I journeyed to Jazz Fest in New Orleans. It was my first time and it might become a yearly tradition. So fun!

I was fortunate enough to bring family along with me a few times when traveling for work. Highlights include:

Taking my whole family to JBCNConf in Barcelona. They all speak Spanish, so I knew it'd be a fun adventure.

That Conference with Jack and my nephew, Michael. It was at a water park so the boys had a blast.

Trish and my parents meeting me during my Ireland JUG Tour.

I regret leaving in the middle of a family reunion for KCDC. The location in Cape Cod was fantastic.

Jack got his learners permit to drive in August. He was a little rusty at first, but he's come a long way since. He drives several times a week for practice when he's at our house.

Abbie is now 17 and Jack is 15. They grow a lot when they become teenagers. Jack is the tallest one in our house!

We had a ball with Trish's brother's family and parents in Turks and Caicos. It was part of a double-header Spring Break that started with skiing in Steamboat.

The 2018-19 ski season was fabulous and Stout was quite the hero during our first Bomb Cyclone!

We added two duckies to our rafting fleet so we can take more friends on the river in June. Father's Day on the Upper Colorado was fun with friends, but Chris Morse and the Fesser did have to float through a cold and dangerous class IV rapid. You could say they're were not fans of our duckies.

My Dad made me proud with his cameo in the "What is Okta?" Father's Day video.

We took Abbie's boyfriend, Joseph, with us to Montana for the 4th of July. My Dad and I road-tripped up in our Westfalia Vanagon. We decorated a float for the parade, enjoyed a couple days on the river, and spent some quality time with Owen and Dana.

Trish and I celebrated our 6th anniversary in Estes Park.

Happy Anniversary to us!! #6years ❤️🎉🥰💃🕺 pic.twitter.com/JnzhenOIzI
— Matt Raible (@mraible) July 27, 2019

We stayed at the Stanley Hotel in the "Kissing Cowboy" room. 😱

Trish went big in September and added her own cataraft to our fleet!

We visited Trish's family on the east coast for Thanksgiving.

Christmas at my parent's house in Montana was warm and cozy.

Stout the Syncro and Hefe the Bus

Our classic VWs are surviving and thriving. Hefe won best in class at VWs on the Green for the fourth time. Stout ran well on several road trips and now has a new clutch.

I hope to write a "Story of Hefe" book in 2020 from the pictures and posts on this blog.

View this post on Instagram

All shined up and ready for a cruise down Colfax tomorrow! #vw #vwbus #vwcolorado #hefethebus #vwec #21windows

A post shared by Matt Raible (@vwsforlife) on Sep 28, 2019 at 3:26pm PDT

2020

Professionally, I'll be hitting some new exotic locations. Voxxed Days Zürich and JavaLand in Germany are on my list. JavaLand happens during Spring Break, so we'll be spending a few days skiing in the Swiss Alps afterward.

I plan to speak at Devoxx UK (London), Spring I/O (Barcelona), and Voxxed Days Singapore. I hope to visit with the Java community in Japan as well. If you're interested in seeing where the @oktadev team will be in 2020, check out oktadev.events.

I'll be on vacation the whole month of July. I've always wanted to live like a European and Okta's unlimited vacation policy makes this possible.

I'm going to stop traveling in August for a year. Abbie will be a high school senior and I want to be around for her last year at home.

In 2020, I'll be skiing, biking, and rafting a lot more. I started Developer Ski Days to help with the first. I'm excited that Thrive Workplace has a new DTC location (at Innovation Pavilions). I'll be renting a desk from them and start bike-commuting soon. Our rafting family just applied for several week-long rafting permits. Spending a week on the river is one of our favorite activities!

Last year, I had a bunch of goals with numbers. This year I'm going to try and get more headspace, spend more time with friends, and enjoy being home.

I believe less travel in 2020 will be very rewarding. I might even get Nuggets season tickets. They're pretty good these days.

If you want to follow along on my adventures, please follow me on Twitter. I also post pictures of my favorite moments to Instagram and whole albums on Flickr.

2018 - A Year in Review

2019-01-29T13:25:24-07:00

In 2018, I spoke at several fantastic meetups, traveled a bit overseas, and enjoyed some fun family vacations. We had the time of our lives driving Hefe in the Denver St. Paddy's Day Parade!

We traveled to Crete for JCrete and had a blast with the Java community. We journeyed to Ireland with my folks, and I thoroughly enjoyed a speaking tour of Ireland JUGs and the Dublin JHipster Meetup. Our classic VWs had a great year with only minor repairs needed.

I'm going to look back on 2018 using the following categories.

Professional

For those stumbling upon this post with no context, I'm a veteran open source developer that works at Okta as a developer advocate.

This year I focused on blogging more than speaking. I still spoke a fair bit, but I tried to focus on meetups more than conferences. The DevEx Team at Okta released a slew of SDKs at the end of 2017, so I had plenty to write about. Over the year, I found more and more developers had heard of Okta during my talks. I even found users in most audiences! This was quite a change from 2017, so it seems my team's advocacy efforts might be working.

I wrote 29 blog posts throughout the year on the Okta developer blog. We publish two types of blog posts: thought leadership and conversion. Thought leadership posts tend to be about a hot topic while conversion posts are generally tutorials. I wrote a series of posts on PWAs with Ionic + Angular and Spring Boot. The series started in January and ended in July.

I also wrote a number of posts on JHipster, starting with Ionic for JHipster. Then I transitioned to microservices and showed how to build a Spring microservices architecture with Spring Security and OAuth 2.0. I felt this was important, as it's the same basic architecture that JHipster uses.

I published Develop a Microservices Architecture with OAuth 2.0 and JHipster, and had two more JHipster posts about its React and React Native support.

I learned about React and React Native from research I did while writing previous posts.

I stayed current on the latest releases of Angular and Spring Boot because I ❤ them both!

I heard from several developers that they wanted to use Okta with their Java apps, but they weren't using Spring. Or they were using Spring MVC, but not Spring Boot. I wrote Build a Java REST API with Java EE and OIDC to show a few authn/authz techniques: JWT validation, using Spring Security, and using Pac4j.

I had a blast in August and September collaborating with Josh Long about going Full Stack Reactive with Spring WebFlux and React. Josh authored his parts with AsciiDoc and forced me to integrate Asciidoctor support in our blog. It took awhile, but I was thrilled with the result. Now I get to author all my blog posts with AsciiDoc! 🎉

I played with other new technologies in 2018, namely GraphQL and TypeORM, Electron, and Vue with TypeScript.

The Super Epic Advocacy Battle!

I was super motivated to write a bunch of blog posts in June and July because I was having a "most views" contest with Randall Degges. The contest started after I mouthed off that I thought I could outperform him in the waning hours of our Oktane 2018 conference. He accepted my challenge and we competed for two months. He wrote mostly thought leadership posts, I wrote mostly tutorials. Long story short: he won. I had to wear gold pants the week of CodeOne for my lack of winning.

Hanging out at Oracle Code One conf with my buddy @mraible and his amazing MC Hammer pants.

I wonder why he's wearing them? :D

He's about to get onstage to talk about micro services <33333 pic.twitter.com/syoiIeSDMc
— Randall Degges (@rdegges) October 22, 2018

If only I'd published 10 Excellent Ways to Secure Your Spring Boot Application earlier in our contest. I collaborated on it with Simon Maple, and it seemed to be popular.

I wrote a few other thought leadership posts throughout 2018:

Speaking

According to TripIt, I took 26 trips, to 37 cities, in 6 countries. That's three fewer trips than 2017, and I only had 119 days on the road (versus 141). By my count, I spoke at 20 events.

JHipsterConf was especially fun because I took my son, Jack, with me.

I had a wonderful time this week in Paris and at @jhipsterconf. Many thanks to the @java_hipster developers, community, @juliendubois, @deepu105, and @ippontech for making it all possible! #JHipsterConf pic.twitter.com/61ZfRZxg8G
— Matt Raible (@mraible) June 23, 2018

I also attended a few conferences that I did not speak at: Iterate, JCrete, and Monktoberfest. All of these were special in their own ways. JCrete was an unconference in an exotic location (Crete, Greece) and was a fantastic experience. I learned that 1) it's important to rent a car if you bring your family and 2) an unconference is what you make of it. Put a lot into it, and you'll get a lot out of it. As a speaker, I think it's a fantastic conference format because it's an excellent networking atmosphere. You can also learn a lot if there are peers with expertise in the topic you're interested in. Monktoberfest also provided next-level networking.

Community

I was involved in many community activities in 2018: Devoxx4Kids Denver, Denver JUG, Denver Microservices Meetup, and I attended a few DOSUG meetups too.

We had three Devoxx4Kids Denver workshops in 2018:

Thanks to Kaitlyn Hornbuckle, James Sablatura, and Cassandra Chin for teaching these classes.

Finished training Denver Pokémon Trainers at #Devoxx4Kids. Gotta catch them all! @mraible @melissajmckay pic.twitter.com/zQSbIdH7Zb
— Cassandra Chin (@tingsterchin) December 9, 2018

We announced the 2018 Denver JUG Rock Stars at our December meetup. Venkat, David, and Jeff were voted as the group's favorite speakers. Y'all were excellent! Thanks for adding DJUG to your schedules.

At this week's @denverjug, we announced the Denver JUG Rock Stars of 2018. If you want to be entertained, intrigued, & educated: @venkat_s, @dblevins, and @jeffscottbrown are three of our favorite speakers. #denverjug #rockstars #java

Thanks to @oktadev for sponsoring trophies! pic.twitter.com/uTNcDZVCFi
— Matt Raible (@mraible) December 14, 2018

Projects

My projects these days are mostly around JHipster. I supported its OAuth 2.0 and OIDC support as best I could, and released five versions of its Ionic module. I wrote about how to use Ionic with JHipster in late January. I recorded a screencast showing how to get started with JHipster 5 in June.

We released the JHipster Mini-Book version 4.5 in April and version 5.0 in November. I published a Pluralsight course on developing microservices and mobile apps with JHipster in April and released 21-Points Health 5.0 in October.

Personal

This year was a mix of work your ass off and try to have fun at the same time. There were many times when we wished we were home, but the times on the road were grand. I suspect this will be a constant battle for Trish and I. We love to be home, but we love to explore new places. If old friends gather with us at home or in new places, it's bound to be a fantastic evening!

The biggest change was Abbie became a driver. For those parents with kids that have to chaperone endlessly throughout the weeks and weekends, you know this is a BFD! As of December 27, 2018, Abbie's now the captain of the ranch-to-school ship. She even drove in the blowing snow yesterday!

There were many highlights in 2019. My early favorite (that makes me tear up as I write this) is Hefe 3.5.

My daughter observed the other day that most people are frowning when they’re driving. I’m not one of this people. In fact, I have to wear sunglasses to hide my tears of joy! 🤣 #HefeTheBus #21windows pic.twitter.com/0LWaQkjZlx
— Matt Raible (@mraible) March 14, 2018

We had a blast with Trish's parents during Spring Break in Florida and squeezed in a day trip to Disney World.

The 2017-18 ski season didn't bring a lot of snow, but our ski trip to Utah was wonderful!

Trish and I celebrated our 5th anniversary at JCrete. I hope the next five years are as adventurous as the last five!

Happy Friday! We’re having a blast celebrating our 5th anniversary in Greece. 😃 #JCrete pic.twitter.com/yMzphpNhnj
— Matt Raible (@mraible) July 27, 2018

Jack turned 14, and Abbie turned 16. I'm proud to say they're both fabulous humans. 😊

If you want a glimpse of my backwoods childhood (without electricity) in Montana, see my Life Update: Thanksgiving in Montana, RWX2018, Devoxx4Kids, DJUG, and Trish's Birthday post.

2019

Professionally, I'm planning to travel a bit more to exotic locations. Atlanta, San Francisco, Paris, Bangalore, Barcelona, and Kansas City are on my list (before August). The Developer Relations team at Okta is a fantastic place to be. As many of y'all know, the best thing about a job is often your boss. Mine is Randall Degges. He's a legitimate badass hacker. Don't try to win a popularity contest with him. There's a good chance I'll be at Okta as long as he's my boss.

On the developer relations team, we set our own schedules, plan our own interests, schedule our own conference appearances, and sponsor our favorite local events. Being a developer advocate is a gratifying job. You can write about your favorite open source frameworks, attend/sponsor local meetups, and learn new things every day! If you happen to be #devrel folk (or a like-minded awesomeperson), you might like my Pro Tips for Developer Relations.

Personally, I'd like to ski, raft, bike, and have a good time in 2019 a lot more! Y'all know I won't have any problem with the last one, but its predecessors are the ones that really make me smile. Skiing down a chute, rafting through a class IV, and biking in Moab are some of the most exhilarating activities I've ever experienced. I'm getting a bit older (44) these days, but I still love playing in the outdoors. Luckily, I married a magical woman that loves the outdoors as much as I do. Even better, she photographs its excellence!

Abbie is the school-commute driver, but Jack will be 15 in August, and he's determined to get his learners permit as soon as he can. That means he'll need a family member in the car that's 21+. If he wants to drive, the 20-minute-each-way commute is back on in the fall. For those of you with children of similar ages, you know that this is a precious time in our lives. I don't have a work commute. Driving my kids to school takes an hour round-trip. If it were a commute to work, I'd hate it. However, it's precious time with my kids, and it's really quite fabulous. Even if they're staring at their phones, you have their full attention. Ask questions and enjoy their responses.

Last year, I said one of my goals was to simply be content. This year, I'm taking it up a notch. If you don't have goals, how can you measure how you improved your life? I'm a big believer in self-improvement, so here goes (in order of priority):

Personal

Good Blood Pressure
More 2 and 3 point days
Ride/ski/hoops 4x week
Walk daily (preferably at home with Sagan and Daisy)
More salads, less red meat
Love is a verb, embrace 1:1 time with everyone (Trish, kids, parents, friends)
20 days camping
25 days skiing
15 days rafting

I'm a big fan of the last three. Those activities typically involve a break from technology, the great outdoors, and exquisite views. Follow me on Instagram if you want a highlight reel.

I have some work-related goals too, because metrics seem to motivate me.

Work

Author/publish two blog posts per month
Review/mentor four blog posts per month
Record/publish two videos per month
One performance/speaking gig per month
Three "no travel" months
Stand more while working

I believe 2019 will be fabulous, and I hope to reflect my favorite moments on this blog. If you're a long-time follower, you'll notice I'm mostly active @mraible. Y'all use Twitter, right? That's my modern day notification channel. When I'm super giddy, I'll post pictures of my favorite moments on Instagram. When I want to save them forever, I publish them to Flickr.

I hope to see you at a conference or meetup in 2019!

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Fun family photo in Crested Butte. #lastbestskitown

A post shared by Matt Raible (@vwsforlife) on Jan 6, 2018 at 4:27pm PST

Life Update: Thanksgiving in Montana, RWX2018, Devoxx4Kids, DJUG, and Trish's Birthday

2018-12-20T09:20:02-07:00

For the first time in many years, we flew to Montana for the holidays. We typically drive, and it takes around 14 hours. It was quite nice to take off and land in just a couple of hours.

I thought it'd be fun to take some pictures of the cabin I grew up in. It's just a guest cabin now, but it still seems very cozy.

My parents have been remodeling the sauna lately, which was built in 1916. My Finnish ancestors built the sauna before the cabin back in the day!

We had a wonderful time with friends and family at Thanksgiving dinner...

...and while burning slash piles on Black Friday. #OptOutside

Our friends, Mike and Mai, have a real working phone booth, so Abbie had fun checking it out. The light from a kerosene lamp reminded me of growing up without electricity.

The Rich Web Experience 2019

After traveling to Montana, I had a week at home before the Rich Web Experience. I gave a new talk on Bootiful Development with Spring Boot and Vue. It was conference-driven development at its best. Because I was giving the talk, I had to base if off a blog post. I even thought it'd be cool if the blog post was published the same day as my talk. It all worked out in the end, but I had an in-anger encounter with Vue and TypeScript for a couple days there. Then it all magically worked and I became very happy. I published blog posts about Spring Boot 2.1, Bootiful Vue, and Angular 7:

I gave other talks at #RWX2019 on Bootiful Angular and JHipster + Microservices. The venue was marvelous.

As usual, I really enjoyed talking to developers about the open source frameworks I love. I published all of my presentations from RWX 2019 on Speaker Deck.

Devoxx4Kids Denver

While attending CodeOne this year, I had a chat with Stephen Chin about Devoxx4Kids Denver. I mentioned we'd love to have a hands-on Raspberry Pi class like the one I attended at a remote ski resort in Sweden. His response was music to my ears: "If you want, I can come out and teach the workshop. Or better yet, my daughter can." I was flabbergasted and jumped at the opportunity. "Yes!", I said.

Cassandra and Steve showed up in Denver a couple months later and taught a Devoxx4Kids Denver Workshop.

The kids loved it and they left us some equipment we can use to teach a future class. I'm currently discussing possibilities with the principals of my kids' schools. I hope that both Abbie and Jack can teach classes at their respective schools in 2019.

Denver JUG (DJUG)

The week after RWX, I was back in Denver and celebrated a great year with the Denver Java Community at the Denver JUG Holiday Party. Combining lightning talks with a holiday party turned out to be fun and we'll likely do it again next year.

Happy Birthday, Trish!

My lovely wife's birthday was just a few days ago. We both believe you shouldn't work on your birthday, so we took the day off and headed for the hills. We experienced a gorgeous Colorado day, smooth/fast runs, and smiles from ear-to-ear.

We had a fabulous day, and Trish got a birthday nap on the way home in Stout the Syncro. There's nothing like having a comfy bed in the back of your van.

What's Next?

Vacation! I'm on vacation at the end of this week and plan to relax a lot during the following two weeks. The first week, we'll be in Pennsylvania with Trish's fabulous family. Then we're back in town for a couple days. It'll be a turning point in our lives if Abbie passes her driving test (for her real license) on December 27. After that, we're heading back to the hills for a week of skiing, smiling, and good times.

I hope y'all have a fun holiday break. I'll see ya next year!

For more photos, see my Flickr album Life Update, December 2018.

The Syncro Rescue Road Trip

2013-12-10T23:47:46-07:00

Last Thursday, Trish and I met in Boise, Idaho to begin our Syncro Rescue Road Trip. You might remember we bought a ski bus a couple months ago. After Devoxx and Thanksgiving, we finally had time to pick up our new rig. We rented a car from Boise and drove to Bruce's (the owner) house near Sun Valley. We arrived at Bruce's house, met his family and were introduced to our new Volkswagen. We spent the next hour learning about its engine, suspension, beds, captains (swivel) seats, propane system, RV hookups, fridge, stove and roof tent. It was impressive and I couldn't wait to drive it!

Looking back, after reading all the receipts, it's obvious that Bruce did great things for this vehicle. When he bought it in 2004, he worked with Small Car to convert the engine to a 3.3L Subaru SVX. He also installed a 2" lift kit, disc brakes, and better gearing. It was a cool car before Bruce bought it; he turned it into a mean machine. I thought it'd be small like my '66, but it's more like a tank, that you have to crawl into. We like it more every time we drive it.

After spending the night in their cozy guest bed, we enjoyed some good coffee and got on the road.

I was immediately impressed with the Syncro's acceleration. The Subaru engine has some great pickup in lower gears. In third gear, you can easily get up to 75 mph (120 kph) before shifting into fourth. The fourth gear is a lot like overdrive, bad for power but great for gas mileage. Within the first ten minutes, I was pleased to find the cruise control still worked. It took another hour for us to figure out to work the heater. Once we did, we had all kinds of heat, which was handy considering it never got above 5°F on the whole trip.

Trish's first shift at the wheel was met with some resistance: the e-brake was on. After a couple miles, pulled over for something else, but realized the mistake as soon as we parked. It smelled a lot and hasn't worked since.

Our Friday destination was Jackson Hole, where we figured we could find a nice place to stay and possibly ski the next morning. We briefly considered sleeping in our new camper, but with no auxiliary heater (possessed, but not installed) it seemed like a bad idea. We got our first taste of bad roads over Teton Pass. We figured it wouldn't be a problem since the Syncro is a 4WD, but we used the wrong lever (the differential lock instead of the 4WD) and slid all over the roads. We drifted sideways a few times, but soon after figured out how to engage 4WD, resulting in great traction. We celebrated our safe arrival with tasty beers at Wyoming's oldest brewery.

That evening, we moseyed into Jackson and found some great live music. While driving around, we noticed the stereo and cigarette lighter / phone charger quit working. The next morning, I woke up early to get some new windshield wipers and fix the blown dash fuse. After some inspection, I found it wasn't a fuse problem (there was a wire into where the fuse should be). I texted the previous owner, who pointed me to the auxiliary battery. Wiggling some of the battery's wires got everything working again.

After breakfast, Trish and I decided to do the responsible thing and drive back to Denver rather than go skiing. The conditions were still frigid and there was only 1" of fresh snow. We left Jackson around 9:30am and arrived in Denver just before 7pm. We only stopped for gas and our vanagon drove like a dream.

We've got some work to do before our next road trip (to Montana in two weeks). It seems the previous owner did most of his improvements when he bought it in 2004. The engine, drive train, suspension and wheels/tires are all in great shape. The Subaru conversion is "beautiful" according to a vanagon mechanic I talked to today. The upholstery could use a refresh and the stereo is showing its age. It failed an emissions test today, but there's a shop a few blocks away that specializes in Subarus.

Our Syncro is a real joy to drive. It cruises on the freeway and works great in the city with its quick acceleration and impressive turning radius. Let the VW adventures begin!

P.S. I love getting the '66's daily progress updates. Checkout yesterday's and today's.

Devoxx 2013 + a Nordic Countries Speaking Tour

2013-11-28T12:07:26-07:00

Two weeks ago, Trish and I boarded a flight for one of our favorite conferences: Devoxx. After a brief layover in Frankfurt, we arrived in Amsterdam and took a train to Antwerp. Within hours, we'd settled into our hotel near the center of Antwerp and strolled over to the dungeonous, yet cozy, Pelgrom restaurant. We were hoping for a delicious dinner, but found much more. We ran into James Ward, Dick Wall and a number of other enthusiastic speakers from the conference. Since I had to speak the next day, we didn't stay long, but we did share a number of laughs with some great people.

Tuesday (November 12), was a University Day at Devoxx, and I had my talk that afternoon. I spent a couple hours finishing up my talk that morning, then grabbed a taxi to head to the conference. I was honored with the opportunity to speak in Room 8, which is a huge theater that holds several hundred people.

I presented a lengthened version of The Modern Java Web Developer presentation I did early this year (at Denver's JUG and JavaOne). Based on your feedback, I chose to do deep dives on AngularJS, Bootstrap and Page Speed. I've always enjoyed speaking at Devoxx because attendees are so enthusiastic and passionate about the conference. I received an immense amount of feedback, both in praises and criticisms. The critics indicated there were too many buzzwords and not enough substance. Others complained that the AngularJS Lipsync that I did was too deep.

I made sure to review and process everyone's comments, and then used them to improve the presentation throughout the following week. I learned to elaborate on the fact that many of the technologies were important to know about, but not important to know through-and-through. I made sure to mention that the use of CoffeeScript and LESS is often limited (or embraced) by team members and their willingness to try new things. If you're not writing thousands of lines of JavaScript or CSS, it probably doesn't make sense to use these languages. Furthermore, if your team members are struggling to write JavaScript or CSS, introducing a new language is probably not the best thing. I also reminded people to be skeptical of new technology, but also to be open-minded and give everything a chance. The 10-minute, download-and-try test, is a great way to do that.

You can find my presentation below, download it from my presentations page, or view it on SlideShare.

Within this presentation, there are links to each of the deep dives. The last two are screencasts that I added audio to a few days ago.

Bootstrap 3 | AngularJS Deep Dive | Page Speed Demo

We stayed in Antwerp until Friday, attending the conference, taking pictures, networking over beers and having a fabulous time with everyone attending Devoxx.

Thursday night, we dined at Matty, one of the best restaurants in Antwerp. The food was excellent and provided a nice start for a night that included the Devoxx Party at Noxx and a journey to Bier Central.

On Friday, we traveled to Brussels for a weekend in one of the best beer cities in the world. Trish booked us a room at the Hotel Saint Michel, which was right on the most beautiful square in Europe. Their pre-Christmas light show was spectacular. The beer was delicious, the location was magnificent and we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves, especially the mussels in Brussels. Thanks in particular to Stéphane and Philip for your recommendations.

Nordic Countries Speaking Tour
On Sunday (November 17), we flew to Stockholm to being the second half our trip. Nordea hired me to deliver my Devoxx presentation as part their Java Competence Network. Nordea's Jonny Berggren first contacted me in March 2010 about this opportunity, so it was fun to see it finally happen. We agreed that I'd speak at their four main locations: Stockholm, Helsinki, Oslo and Copenhagen.

Mattias Karlsson (of Jfokus fame) also presented me with an opportunity to speak at his company while I was in Sweden.

I started the week delivering my talk on Monday afternoon at Nordea. Then we met up with Mattias, walked to his company and I delivered it again 45 minutes later. It was exhausting to talk for six hours in one day, but it all seemed to go well. I especially enjoyed the enthusiasm of Mattias's Avega Group.

That evening, we took the train to the airport, boarded a flight to Helsinki and arrived just after midnight. While on the train, we sat next to a Finlander, Karol, that gave us all kinds of great advice on what to do. Tuesday in Helsinki was cold and dreary; perfect sauna weather. We walked around a bit in the rain that morning and visited Senate Square on Karol's recommendation. I mentioned to the developers there that my Mom's grandparents were from Finland (Oulu and Hamina), and that I'd grown up in a rustic cabin built by my Finish grandfather, Matti Hill.

We flew to Oslo Tuesday evening, rode the super-fast train from the airport and got to bed just before midnight. Wednesday morning, we walked around the Vigelandsparken Sculpture Park, and then I headed to the Nordea office while Trish did a walkabout and rode a Viking ship around the bay. We met up afterwards at the wonderful Beer Palace for some pizza and delicious German/Belgian beer.

Copenhagen was our last stop, a city which neither of us have ever traveled to. After arriving, we quickly got a hint that Copenhagen was a special place. We did a bit of research on Wikipedia and learned it was The City of Bikes and their craft brewing industry has blossomed in the last decade, now sporting over 100 microbreweries. My last talk on Thursday morning went very well, especially since my presentation and advice was well polished by that point.

That afternoon, we rented bikes from our hotel, slowly ate sushi on the top of the Tivoli Hotel, and then rode to Tivoli Gardens. Tivoli Gardens was decorated as a Christmas wonderland and their amusement park made us smile and giggle with glee. We stayed there for hours before riding home. Biking around town with hundreds of other cyclists was really cool and fun. I hope Denver gets Copenhagenized someday, the abundance of bike-only roads is simply awesome.

Our Nordic countries tour was especially pleasant because Christmas decorations were everywhere. In the US, many folks look down upon Christmas decorations before Thanksgiving, but since Europeans don't celebrate Thanksgiving - there's no reason not to ease into the Christmas spirit. We figured Abbie and Jack would have a blast at Tivoli in a future November or December. Yes, it was a bit chilly (20-30°F) in most of the countries, but we were well dressed for it. Unfortunately, we didn't get to see any snow.

Many thanks to Devoxx, Nordea, Mattias's Avega Group and the hundreds of developers who listened to me talk about being a modern web developer. We had a wonderful time speaking, laughing, photographing, drinking your delicious beer and seeing all your smiling faces.

For more photos of this whirlwind trip, see Trish's EU and Scandanavian Speaking Tour 2013, while mine are in Devoxx 2013 and Nordic Speaking Tour.

We Bought a Ski Bus!

2013-10-22T11:47:18-06:00

This summer while vacationing in Montana, I gave my Cadillac Escalade to my parents. My reason was simple - it'd been molested too many times in the big city. We did enjoy catching the criminals (busted two would-be-thieves in the act in 2010), but we were ready for a new car.

We started looking for one shortly after arriving home from our honeymoon - from the Nissan Armada to the Tesla. But none of them really appealed to me. Then I found a rig that made my heart leap, the VW Syncro Westfalia, aka The Greatest Car Ever Built.

Everyone from pro snowboarder Jussi Oksanen to Maverick’s surfing legend Grant Washburn to actor Tom Hanks, who calls his Syncro addiction "a rare dementia," has succumbed to the Vanagon. The only drawback: production ceased in 1992, and there are only so many of these babies left (maybe as few as 5,000), so the vehicles are appreciating in value.

The first one I found stood out because it fixed the problem that many VW Busses have - crappy engines. Rather than a powerless ol' VW engine, it had a Subaru SVX H6 3.3L (240HP). I found a maroon syncro that was similar to the aforementioned one, but ended up buying the blue one after I asked the owner why his was better. He replied with a 12-item list and a closing paragraph that sealed the deal for me.

Any van you end up with will have its own eccentricities, personality traits, faults and virtues. Owning one, especially a Syncro is a labor of love, not necessarily a good investment purely in terms of money but man, I've racked-up more memories in that Syncro over the past 10 years than with anything else in my life. I've owned Syncros for years and will continue to do so, it gets in your blood and there's no cure.

Trish has always wanted an RV for photography, and I've longed for a VW Bus that runs. With our plan of skiing all over Colorado this year (Abbie gets free days at every resort), it should be a heckuva ski season!

I can't wait to go and rescue it in December with my Dad. We figured it'd be fun since we did our first bus rescue in 2004. For more pictures, see my 1990 Syncro Westy SVX Full Camper set on Flickr or the original listing.

As for my '66 Porsche Bus, that's progressing nicely. It should be starting and drivable (though not street legal) in the next couple weeks.

Update: Dad is out, Trish is in for the Syncro Rescue Road Trip. She wasn't about to let us have all the fun.

2012 - A Year in Review

2013-01-08T13:15:24-07:00

I wrote my first year in review blog entry way back in 2005. That means this year's is number 8. Since they keep getting longer every year, I figured I'd try something different this year and use sections similar to Remy Sharp.

Professional

I spent the entirety of the year with one client: Taleo. Oracle bought them in February. In June, the transition to Oracle happened. My tasks and projects haven't changed much since the transition, but it has been a real pain to get paid on time. My contract with them is through the end of May. I hope to take July off (to get married) and August off (to honeymoon) and start a new gig in September.

I did minimal Java work throughout the year and spent most of my time doing CSS and JavaScript. I love doing front-end work much more than back-end, so day-to-day, it was very satisfying.

Business

Raible Designs had a great year, our best ever financially. I hired Trish as an assistant in January, doubling the size of the company. We had our Annual Shareholders Meeting on a Disney Cruise in April. I have no plans to do increase the size of the company in 2013, mostly because I enjoy not having the responsibility of employees. I've employed sub-contractors in the past and it always seems to create more of a headache than it's worth.

We moved our offices from downtown Littleton to Thrive (in LoDo) last April and I plan on staying there. It's an easy 6-mile bicycle commute and the guys there have been great to work with. I highly recommend it if you're looking for co-working space.

Speaking

I spoke at 5 events in 2012:

Silicon Valley Spring User Group on What's New in Spring 3.1.
JFokus on Comparing Web Frameworks and HTML5 with Play Scala.
Spring I/O on Comparing JVM Web Frameworks.
JavaPosse Roundup on How to build a Shot-Ski.
ÜberConf on Play vs. Grails.

Traveling to Stockholm and Madrid for JFokus and Spring I/O was spectacular.

I took the 2nd half of the year off from speaking, celebrating my temporary retirement at a Def Leppard concert in June. When I decided to do this, I was planning on my VW Bus being finished. I was planning on switching from Java Conferences to VW Shows as a hobby. Unfortunately, now it's January and The Bus still isn't done. I have high hopes for it being finished in 2013.

I paid for 2 conferences in 2012, the JavaPosse Roundup in March and Monktoberfest in October. While I enjoyed both, Monktoberfest will likely become a tradition.

Projects

AppFuse: I started the year by refreshing AppFuse's UI with Twitter Bootstrap and blogged about the Twitter's Summit on Bootstrap shortly after. At the same time, I was overhauling Taleo's UI with HTML5, Bootstrap and CSS3, but waited until August to blog about it.

In the fall, the AppFuse Team migrated to GitHub and integrated Hibernate Search. AppFuse 2.2.1 was released in December.

Happy Trails: In May and June, I worked on Happy Trails with James Ward as part of our Play vs. Grails Smackdown. This was a very enjoyable experience and I learned a lot about GitHub, Cloudbees and Heroku.

Play More: In June, I wrote about Upgrading to Play 2: Anorm and Testing. A couple weeks later, I wrote about integrating Validation and Secure Social into Play More. In the aforementioned post, I also posted my ÜberConf presentation, the source code and my thoughts on Play 2.

I found Anorm and Scalate to be huge time sinks and don't know if I'd recommend using either one in a Play 2 project. I'm sure Scalate will be easier to use as its Play 2 integration gets more refined, but I don't know if there's any hope for a JDBC abstraction that doesn't produce error messages when things go south.

Roller: Although I didn't contribute much to Apache Roller in 2012, I do continue to use it frequently. This site celebrated its 10-year anniversary in August. It got a new look and feel shortly after.

Personal

Last year was a fantastic year for family time. Our cruise around the Western Caribbean was money well spent.

My goal was to spend a month with my parents this year and we satisfied that by July. In total, we enjoyed their company for 8 weeks in 2012.

The worst ski season on record ended in April and Trish and I headed for wine country in May.

Abbie and Jack's school year ended on June 5th and we celebrated Father's Day on the Oregon coast.

Raible Road Trip #17 began in late June and we spent two weeks parading, rafting and golfing in Montana. From there, we flew to Maui for two weeks. I wrote about it all in Summer Vacation 2012 in Montana and Maui.

After returning from Hawaii, we dropped the kids off at their Mom's and headed to my cousin's wedding in Beacon, NY for the weekend. From there, my parents, Trish and I rode the train to Boston, spent a few days in Cape Cod and returned home in time for the beginning of school.

The kids started the school year in mid-August and we celebrated Jack's 8th birthday a couple weeks later.

My lack of speaking engagements and work-related travel gave us more time to frolic in the Colorado mountains, so we bought a boat for Labor Day weekend. That Saturday, we took it on its Maiden Voyage on the Colorado River, floating from Radium to Rancho del Rio. I guided and rowed the boat most of the time while our 7 passengers (and 2 dogs) enjoyed cold beverages, great scenery and relaxing in the sun.

The next day, Abbie played her first game of golf.

In October, I finished our deck project and work continued on our kitchen remodel (started in July by Ted Pepper). Our kitchen was far enough along for us to host our 1st Annual Halloween Party.

Abbie turned 10 the first week in November. That Friday, we headed to Kauai to celebrate my parents' 40th Anniversary. We spent Thanksgiving in Wenatchee, Christmas in Boston/Vermont and New Years with good friends in Fraser.

2013

My goals for 2013 are to be happy and to slow down. I don't plan on traveling any less, or spending less time with my family. I'd just like to walk slower, smell the good ol' Rocky Mountain air more and enjoy life. I believe our raft will help us facilitate this and we're already planning trips to the Green River in Utah and Schafer Meadows in the Bob.

The big event for the year will be Trish and my wedding this summer. We'll be doing it in my hometown in Montana and we expect it to be quite the shindig. Afterward, we plan on traveling the world for our honeymoon.

Of course, if the bus gets finished, that's a huge bonus too.

Professionally, I'm starting an exciting project at Taleo that will involve heavy JavaScript, CSS3 and maybe even Canvas. I have speaking engagements lined up at Denver JUG in February and HTML5 Denver in April. Also, I just submitted a couple talks to Devoxx France.

For AppFuse, I'd love to get 3-4 releases out this year, but 2 is probably more realistic. The AppFuse Roadmap shows our future releases + features. I'd also like to work a bit more on my Play 2 app; finishing the mobile client and possibly switching from Anorm to Slick or Spring Data.

While Oracle has been good to me, I look forward to finding and working for a new client in September.

Last year at this time, we watched the Broncos execute the Mile High Miracle over the Steelers. With tickets to both this week's game (vs. The Ravens) and next week's game (vs. The Patriots), I wouldn't be surprised if January turns out to be a great month. However, with the Powder Days, The Super Bowl, the raft trips, the Bus Shows and The Wedding, there's a good chance that all the months in 2013 are epic.

November Travels to Kauai and Wenatchee

2012-12-05T20:59:00-07:00

For the last two Novembers, we've celebrated Abbie's birthday, watched the Broncos beat the Chiefs and then headed to Antwerp, Belgium for Devoxx.

2010 was awesome. 2011 was even better.

This year, we chose to celebrate my parent's 40th wedding anniversary instead. It wasn't a hard choice, since they chose Hawaii as their destination of choice. After visiting last year and this summer, we're pretty much in when anyone suggests Hawaii. We got our flights for $10, rented an awesome beach-front house and had a great time with my parents and sisters.

Below was the view from our backyard.

The purpose of this post is to 1) show off some of Trish's spectacular photos and 2) tell you a bit about what we enjoyed.

First of all, the location was fantastic. If you get a chance to stay at Nani Nani Hale, I highly recommend it. We could walk to the beach in seconds and spent a few hours each day on the lanai, enjoying each other's company, playing games, napping and reading. The sunsets were spectacular.

We felt like we never had to leave and really enjoyed the relaxing atmosphere.

When we did leave, we played golf, went stand up padding or surfing.

We did a lot of surfing; almost every day.

It was awesome seeing my parents so happy after all these years.

And it was great spending so much time with my family and their long-time friends Mike and Mai from Montana.

Thanksgiving in Wenatchee
We flew back from Hawaii on Monday, November 19th. A red eye brought us to Denver, where we picked up Abbie and Jack and headed to Washington on Wednesday.

My sister and her wife recently moved from Chelan to Wenatchee and Thanksgiving at their house was the name of the game. My parents were already there, since they started their journey to Hawaii from Seattle. We rented another nice VRBO and enjoyed ourselves while cooking, watching football, playing games, hot-tubbing and watching movies.

I love Trish's panorama of Wenatchee in the early morn.

The kids had fun...

As for the adults? I'll let the photo speak for itself.

For more pictures, see Trish's Kauai 2012 and Wenatchee 2012 albums.

Our Engaging Trip to Paris and Antwerp

2011-12-04T16:02:34-07:00

If you're a technologist, you should attend the Devoxx conference at least once in your life. It's one of the finest conferences on the planet. If you're a fan of Belgian beer, you owe it to yourself to visit Belgium to savor a taste. If you're a romantic, Paris is a recommended destination. Since I'm a technologist, love Belgian beer and consider myself a romantic, I went for the trifecta a couple weeks ago on what's becoming an annual trek to Devoxx. When Trish and I traveled to Devoxx last year, we flew to Amsterdam and took the train to Antwerp. This year, we decided to fly to Paris and take the train.

Much like last year, we witnessed another Broncos over Chiefs victory the Sunday before we left. That night, I stayed up until the wee hours of the morning finishing my Devoxx presentation. We left Denver around noon and met up with James Ward at the Red Carpet Club in Chicago. While sipping cocktails and catching up, I wrote a blog post about how PhoneGap rescued me a couple days earlier.

We slept soundly on the flight over, thanks to little sleep the night before. After arriving in Paris, we took the train to the the Notre Dame de Paris and had some breakfast nearby.

We were planning on exploring throughout the day, but quickly realized that hauling our bags around was no fun and headed to Gare du Nord to catch a Thalys train to Brussels. We gasped at the cost of two first-class tickets, but soon forgot when we settled into our seats with free wi-fi, Belgian beers and power. After talking a local train to Antwerp, we finished our 21-hour journey by checking into the Hilton Antwerp in the city center. We were warmly welcomed with excellent Belgian beers on ice in our room and celebrated with a delicious meal at De Godevaart.

On Wednesday, I headed to Devoxx and attended a couple of great talks: Play 2.0, A web framework for a new era and PhoneGap for Hybrid App Development. As you can imagine, both talks were extremely interesting for me since I'd been using Play for several months and was recently saved by PhoneGap. Play 2.0 Beta was announced just before the Play talk and my blog post about the Play 2.0 session was picked up by Hacker News and the hits rolled in.

That afternoon, I headed back to my hotel with James Ward and met up with Trish for a couple beers. We spent a few hours in our hotel lobby updating presentations, editing videos, editing photos and getting ready for our talks on Thursday. That evening, we enjoyed a scrumptious dinner in the dungeon-like Pelgrom and conversations with Kevin Nilson, Sadek Drobi, Guillaume Bort and David Geary. I was pleased to find out from Sadek and Guillaume that Play 2.0 will include many fast website best practices, including concatenation, minification and gzipping of static assets. We retired early to get a good night's sleep before my talk on Thursday.

On Thursday, both Trish and I journeyed to Devoxx to watch James Ward talk about how to deploy Java, Play Framework, and Scala apps on Heroku. My talk was an hour later and I gulped as I stood up front and watched the (very large) auditorium fill up with Devoxxians. Since I'd never rehearsed my talk or timed it, I was a bit nervous. Luckily, it ended up being one of my best-timed performances and there was even time for Q and A at the end. You can imagine the smile on my face as AC/DC's Thunderstruck blasted through the speakers during my video demo. After my talk finished, it was great to see all the positive feedback on Twitter and enjoy an "Atlas Beer" while watching Java Posse Live.

That evening, we had dinner with the Java Posse crew and James Ward before heading to the Devoxx Party @ Noxx.

Yes, we had an awesome time at Devoxx. I was pleased with the positive response from my talk and learned a bunch from the few talks I attended. Thanks to Stephan for inviting me and organizing one of the best conferences I've ever attended. For our last night in Antwerp, we dined at Huis De Colvenier and especially enjoyed our aperitif in the 19th-century wine cellar.

Paris and Beyond
This brings us to my favorite part of this story. I was pretty stressed leading up to our departure to Devoxx because I had so many deadlines. I had a deadline with my current client to finish up some features before I left, I had to finish my Devoxx presentation (and app developed for the talk) and I had a secret deadline to finish my proposal to Trish. That's right, I was planning on proposing marriage to my dream girl. I mean, we were going to the diamond capital of the world (Antwerp) and one of Earth's most romantic cities (Paris). It seemed like the perfect opportunity to ask her to marry me. We did some ring shopping before we left Denver, but she didn't realize I had purchased one before we left.

We're both big music fans, so I decided months earlier that I would propose with lines from songs we both liked. Of course, I waited until the last minute to compose my prose, but I did finish it before we left for Europe. However, with all the Devoxx shenanigans, I didn't have time to memorize my proposal. Instead, I recorded it using the "Voice Memos" on my iPhone. I did this in the wee hours of the morning on Friday, while I was watching the Broncos game on the internet.

Saturday afternoon, we traveled to Paris via Thalys and checked into our hotel around sunset. When we stepped outside an hour later, I remember saying to Trish, "the Eiffel Tower looks pretty small, I thought it'd be bigger". After walking for a bit, it turned from small to big to huge. My plan that night was to propose on the tower. As Trish snapped pictures along our walk, I was taking out the piece of paper I had the proposal printed on and trying to memorize it. As you can imagine, I had to to this stealthily and by the time we reached the Eiffel Tower, I had enough memorized to propose. We arrived around midnight and were disappointed to find it was closed. This terminated my proposal plans for that night, but we still enjoyed the sparkling tower lights and took several pictures.

The next day, Sunday, we traveled to the Château de Versailles. This was a recommendation from my good friend Eric, who had recently traveled to Paris with his wife, Heather. In fact, I owe a lot to Eric. He recommended we extend our trip to Paris (he'd traveled there disgruntled about not doing a beach vacation, then fell in love with the city) and suggested a number of great locations to visit. He also recommended proposing in the Gardens of Versailles, a very romantic location according to him. I had this in the back of my mind as we did an audio tour through the Palace of Versailles. As we ventured out into the Orangerie, I started hatching a plan to get Trish down to the gardens and try to rent bikes. We both love biking and the outdoors, so I figured it'd be a nice way to spend our memorable moment. As we strolled closer and I didn't see bikes to rent, I spotted the Grand Canal and noticed they had row boats.

When we first arrived at the boat dock, there was a long line, but it magically disappeared moments later. We stepped into the boat, rowed to the center of the canal and paused for a bit to take in the beautiful day and the setting sun. Trish asked me to row to a better spot so she could photograph the sunset, but instead I said "here, listen to this" and handed her my headphones. I pressed play and watched her face light up as she heard my voice in her ears. 90 seconds later, I asked "Trish McGinity, will you marry me?" She responded with, "Of course!"

The rest of our trip in Paris was quite romantic and fun. We decided to wait until we got back to The States before telling anyone we were engaged. This meant we had three days of just us, Paris and some of the most beautiful art in the world. We explored the Louvre for 5-hours on Monday, marveling at the low-rider on display near the entrance and all the famous paintings.

We imbibed in $40 martinis at The Hemingway Bar and scarfed down some delicious pizza at Gambino's. We had breakfast at Angelina's, toured La Sainte-Chapelle, hiked up Arc de Triomphe and wandered through the shopping districts Champs-Élysées and Faubourg St-Honoré. Yes, we fell in love with Paris and can't wait to return for Devoxx France in April.

We departed Paris on the Wednesday morning before Thanksgiving and arrived in Boston that evening. We spent the next three days with Trish's family and our good friends, Chris, Julie, Lili and Wes. We did a 5K Turkey Trot on Thursday morning, followed by football watching and eating succulent turkey while basking in everyone's joy for us. We smiled, giggled, laughed, guffawed, smiled some more and had an all-around great time the rest of the weekend.

We returned home on Sunday evening, departing Boston's Logan airport only minutes after the Broncos kicked a field goal in overtime to beat the Chargers. Our flight was delayed just long enough (3 hours) that we got to watch almost the whole game. It was the perfect ending to a phenomenal trip.

To see more pictures from this adventure, see Trish's fantastic photos and mine on Flickr.

2010 - A Year in Review

2011-01-10T11:42:01-07:00

2010 was a heckuva year, possibly one of my all-time favorites. It started with lots of anticipated fun and ended with lots of travel, skiing and relaxing and I'm only just now finding time to write this post. I had a lot of goals when I started 2010; the top two being my favorite:

Happiness
Girl

The rest of my goals involved running, skiing, mountain biking and finishing The Bus. I also had some professional goals that involved open source, conferences, publishing articles and learning new technologies. I accomplished about 75% of my personal goals and 50% of my professional goals. I'm pretty happy with these percentages considering how much fun I had last year.

In December 2009, I started working with Time Warner Cable as their Chief Architect of Web Development. I was hired to help them build a team of hard-working developers that could quickly build their online video presence. In January, we started getting our ducks in a row with some Agile Training in Virginia, followed by hiring some Agile Coaches. The only technical post I had during this process was about development infrastructure stacks. Both at TWC and my current gig, I've found myself enjoying the following stack:

Source Control: SVN
Source Viewer: FishEye
Wiki: Confluence
Bug Tracker: JIRA
Continuous Integration: Hudson

We tried Git for a couple months at TWC, but ended up reverting to SVN after we had "code deleted" issues during one of our most intense development cycles. When the kids and I weren't skiing, we worked on documenting How to be a Super Hero and The Adventures of Upside Down Man.

In February, I refreshed my Grails knowledge, later learning that it was tough to teach Grails to developers that didn't know Java. First of all, a lot of Grails and Groovy books are targeted at Java Developers. Secondly, the developers I was trying to sell it to had more interest in learning Java. Since I failed to sell Grails, we ended up using Spring + jQuery to build our app. I don't think was a bad decision as most of our development ended up being UI: ActionScript/Flex, Objective-C and jQuery/HTML.

My laptop was stolen from my living room in early February. It worked out nicely in the end since I didn't lose any data (thanks to good backups) and my business insurance covered the loss. My parents came out and helped me finish remodeling my guest room. I posted about My Future of Web Frameworks Presentations and became a proud father when "Jack was flying past both Abbie and I and giggling while doing it".

By the beginning of March, we'd hired a team of 10 at TWC and I took a trip to Jackson Hole to celebrate.

The thing I enjoyed the most about this trip was how well the group jelled. Kudos to Chris for assembling such an awesome group and putting such a spectacular trip together. Can't wait for next year.

The next week, I flew to Las Vegas for The ServerSide Java Symposium and enjoyed sessions on Cloud, Web Service APIs, Flex, Spring 3 and Cameron's Lessons Learned from the Internet Age. I posted my Future of Web Frameworks and GWT vs. Flex Smackdown presentations after the conference.

I ended March with The Trifecta.

For Easter, I purchased an iPad and reviewed it a few days later. Seven months later, I'm not enthralled with the iPad, but I do think it's a heckuva lot better than the Galaxy Tab. I don't use it much, except for movies when traveling. My kids are its primary users, mostly using it for games and Netflix.

We visited my parents in Oregon and celebrated my Mom's retirement.

The picture I took of my Mom and Abbie that weekend is one of my all-time favorites.

At the end of April, I said farewell to the ski season, getting in 25 days; a personal best. I'm happy to report I have 10 days in so far this year, so my goal of 30 days looks to be well on track. No helicopter attempts yet, but hopefully soon.

I ended the month with a work trip to Seattle and painting the town red with my sister and Mya.

I returned to Denver and turned off my TV for a month. I wrote about my experience in early June. For Memorial Day Weekend, I went mountain biking in Moab and had a blast at the Desert Rocks Music Festival. The Porcupine Rim ride took us 4.5 hours and we tracked 26.75 miles. The several points in the trail with "death on the right" were truly epic.

June started with our annual Ride to Red Rocks. I slept six hours and did the 25-mile off-road Elephant Rock ride the next morning. The next morning I hopped on a plane to Ireland for the Irish Software Show. My sister joined me and we had an incredible time with Jamie, Rob, John and Josh.

Upon returning to work, I got to have an awkward conversation with my client about all the vacation I was taking.

For Father's Day, my parents drove to Denver and we packed up the camping gear for a fun weekend at The Great Sand Dunes. After The Dunes, my parents and kids drove to The Cabin, camping out and touring Yellowstone along the way. That Thursday, June 24th, I attended my good friend Jason's birthday party in Lodo.

That's the night I met Trish.

I saw her switch from a Martini to a Guinness and I knew I had to talk to her. I introduced myself and quickly found myself conflicted with having a soon-to-expire iPhone 4 reservation at the Apple Store. I rushed out to grab the phone, returning because there was something special about Trish. We talked for a couple hours that night ... me mesmerized, her smiling a lot. I was dumbfounded to find such a cool person existed in the world. At the end of the night, I got her number and drove home with a feeling that my life was about to change.

The next day, I began a road trip to The Last Best Place for a Montana Summer Vacation.

During that trip, Trish and I exchanged occasional text messages and I told many friends about the kick-ass girl I met. It was another great Montana vacation.

My favorite part of this year's trip to The Cabin was seeing it as a home again. My Mom retired in April and my parents moved back to Montana shortly after. Seeing how happy they are there is truly magical. I especially enjoy the thought of visiting them and all the wonderful folks in the Swan Valley many, many times in the future.

The kids and I drove like bats out of hell and made it back to Denver (950 miles) in 14.25 hours. I quickly scheduled a first date with Trish that Wednesday, and went back to work at TWC with a renewed energy. After our first date, I formed a sort of perma-grin. That Friday was my birthday. I've been having a blast with Trish ever since.

July ended with a trip to the Lost Coast for Jess and Lili's Wedding.

The reception afterwards was a truly spectacular party that lasted well into the evening. Clint and I vowed to go to bed early, but we ended up having so much fun we closed the place down. Jess and Lili were an instrumental part in creating a spectacular night, especially with their wedding dance and infectious happiness.

In August, I celebrated this blog's 8th birthday and we started our "60-Day Push" at work. The goal of our 60-Day Push was to re-write our Video Portal, iPad and Sony Blu-ray apps from scratch, without politics dictating their features. We hired Method for design, chose our own features and went to work. I wrote about the success of this effort in October.

I neglected to write about the Denver Cruisers Saints and Sinners ride or how much fun we had listening to B.B. King at Red Rocks.

Abbie and Jack's first day of school was on August 16th.

At the end of August, we celebrated Jack's 6th Birthday and attended my Cousin Amy's Wedding in Missouri.

September rolled in, we finished the majority of the work in our 60-Day Push and Trish and I drove up to Estes Park for an epic weekend at the Scottish-Irish Festival. We rode our bikes in the parade (by accident), enjoyed a few pints and even did a bit of fly-fishing near our riverside accommodations.

We listened to the 1st 2010 Broncos game while driving back from Estes and slipped into a Rockies game shortly after losing. Our sadness over the Broncos loss was erased within a couple hours as we celebrated Jason Giambi's walk-off home run. Unfortunately, the Rockies didn't make it to the post-season, but the Broncos looked good at their home opener.

October came quickly and I wrote How's the ol' Team Doing and defended the Age of Frameworks. At the end of October, we moved into TWC's Lodo Office on Wynkoop. That weekend, we dressed up as superheros for Halloween.

November started off with Abbie's birthday and Trish got to meet the kids for the first time. From there, we went into traveling-like-madmen mode. We enjoyed suite seats at the Broncos vs. Kansas City game, then flew to Amsterdam for Devoxx the next morning (performing an AppFuse release along the way). I presented on Thursday and posted my Comparing JVM Web Frameworks presentation shortly after. I wrote about our trip while at The Cabin for Thanksgiving.

I flew back from Montana, stopped in at the Lodo office for a couple days, then hopped on a plane to the Rich Web Experience with Trish. My presentations went well, sparked some controversy, and we raced to Key West to celebrate the end of the conference season.

I returned to Denver for my last week at TWC, enjoyed a couple days of skiing, then headed to Utah for an interview with Overstock.com. While I enjoyed my time at TWC, my contract duration was up and being a full-time employee didn't give me the vacation time I tend to enjoy. My interview with Overstock.com was two days, with the 2nd day on the slopes at Snowbird. I was very impressed by the company, people and interview process and agreed to work there on the way to the airport.

I returned to Denver for Trish's Birthday Weekend at Breckenridge, then flew down to Naples on Wednesday to spend Christmas with her family. It was my first time meeting her parents, but that didn't stop us from having a great time talking, beach-going, golfing and relaxing.

We returned to Denver, I tried to get AppFuse 2.1 finished and then we celebrated New Years with friends in Steamboat.

As I reminisce about last year, I can't help but smile. While I've been a happy person for a while, having someone to share your life with is a special thing. I feel like I dreamed up Trish a couple years ago. I was looking for someone that liked to do my favorite activities: mountain biking, skiing, traveling the world and enjoying good beer. I found that and more in Trish and couldn't be happier.

I didn't write as many technical posts on this blog as I'd like to, but I attribute that mostly to the lack of learning new things at TWC. At Overstock.com, I expect that to change and hope to have more technical articles in the coming year.

At the end of last year's Year in Review, I wrote:

I hope to speak at (or attend) 3 conferences, finish up The Bus and do a whole bunch of skiing and mountain biking.

I accomplished all but one goal: finishing The Bus. In 2011, I plan on doing two main things: keep rockin' it with Trish and finishing The Bus. Everything else is gravy.

It's gonna be a spectacular year.

2009 - A Year in Review

2010-01-11T10:06:09-07:00

I wrote my first "year in review" post in 2005 and continued the tradition in 2006 and 2008. This year, my December was filled with unplanned circumstances, a new job and a houseful of family for the holidays, so I never had time to sit down and write this post. As things are returning to normal, I figured it's about time I kicked off 2010 with one of my favorite writing reflections.

2009 started off with a bang: I wrote about my Mom nailing a bear's nuts to a tree after she killed it. My new gig (at Evite) started out fun with choosing an Ajax framework and a Tech Meetup in LA. My bike got stolen, I started running to work and traveled to Tahoe without an ID.

February started off with an epic weekend at Silverton. I went to Web Directions North and attended many good talks:

I wrote my first GWT-related entry and a few posts related to independent consulting.

I ended February with a couple more GWT-related entries.

In March, I bought a new 15" MacBook Pro and shipped it back shortly after to get a 256 GB SSD. I still have nothing but good things to say about the machine. I discovered Nexus is awesome and the kids and I went on our first hike of the year.

My GWT Journey continued with GXT MVC, modularization and optimization. I got a new office and new bike and proudly witnessed my Dad's Retirement.

April came and I got Drunk on Software, had a blast at Holly and Jason's Wedding and published our Ajax Framework Analysis Results.

At the end of April, I started building the kids a treehouse and inspired smiles with two new kittens. On May 7th, I had PRK eye surgery and wrote about my experience in early June. I continue to be extremely happy with the results.

May ended with Ryan and Breanne's Wedding in Playa Del Carmen. Having so many great friends around and the Nuggets vs. Lakers playoffs the same week made this one of the best vacations of my life.

June brought the news that the Colorado Software Summit was over. There's been several times in the past few months that I've missed the annual experience. Can someone please start a conference at a Colorado mountain resort in the near future? Pretty please! I've always experienced this conference with Bruce and we continued another tradition (riding to Red Rocks) with 2nd Row seats at Big Head Todd.

My GWT posts continued with a Facebook-style Autocomplete, Implementing OAuth, JSON Parsing with JavaScript Overlays and a preview of GWT 2.0. I wrote about implementing SOFEA with GWT and Grails at Evite.com and had a blast at the Great Sand Dunes on Father's Day.

My job hunt began and I started a month-long vacation in Montana with Raible Road Trip #13. Vacationing for a summer month in Montana has been one of my goals for several years. Accomplishing it this year made me extremely happy and I hope to make it a summer tradition.

July was an awesome month in 2009. Granted, April and May were special with tropical weddings, but Montana in July is a particularly tasty treat. My Summer Vacation in Montana attempts to capture how much fun we had. It was particularly enjoyable because my parents, children and many life-long friends were involved.

As summer began to set, I decided to get back into speaking at conferences, starting with the Rich Web Experience. I wrote about initial GWT work at my new client, which included an interesting experience with Java REST Frameworks. The month ended with one of my favorite holidays: Jack's Birthday.

September was nice and uneventful. I learned about Concurrency on the JVM Using Scala, started using MVP with GWT and learned how to do more with less. I also ran in a 10K.

October started out with a family trip to Washington for my sister's fabulous wedding. People flew in from all over the US and we had a sweet condo on Lake Chelan for the week. Playing golf, wine tasting and celebrating with good people made for a great start to the fall season.

In November, I started writing more, mostly because I was gearing up for upcoming talks and thinking about / working on AppFuse. I celebrated Abbie's Birthday, did some website optimization and chuckled at the comments about my hunting season adventure.

Right before Thanksgiving, I got a call from my client letting me know that their budget had run out my contract would end soon. Luckily, I had an interview setup the next day and had great success in finding a new gig.

I ended November with a trip to Oregon for Thanksgiving and ran in the Oregon Mid-Valley Road Race. The followed week, I flew with my kids and parents to The Rich Web Experience and learned about Objective-J and Cappuccino. I had a near-perfect (high 70s, no lines) Disney World experience with my family, watched the Ducks with the Civil War and compared kick-ass web frameworks.

In December, I didn't do much blogging - mostly because I arrived home from Florida to discover a waterfall in my guest room. The water pipes were routed through the ceiling, had busted from the cold, and water was pouring everywhere. Dealing with that and starting a new job occupied most of my time and I never got a chance to write much down. I ran in the Jingle Bell 5K and watched the Broncos lose a lot. Shortly after, my family came for Christmas and a good time was had by all.

As I reflect back on last year, my biggest surprise is that I got into running. I ended up running in 5 races last year and even enjoyed doing it a few times. It's still not my favorite activity (skiing and mountain biking win that title), but I enjoy it enough to do it a couple times each week. The goals I wrote down for last year were: visit 3 foreign countries, take 3 months of vacation and spend 1 month in Montana. I only made it to 1 foreign country (Mexico), but I did take 2 months of vacation and got my month in Montana. I'll take that.

In 2010, I hope to speak at (or attend) 3 conferences, finish up The Bus and do a whole bunch of skiing and mountain biking. More than anything, I plan to continue having a lot of fun with my family and implementing a lot of cool technologies along the way.

It's gonna be a great year.

Costa Rica was Awesome!

2008-12-10T00:39:24-07:00

After entering The Golden Period almost two weeks ago, I boarded a flight bound for Costa Rica early on the morning of Thanksgiving. I knew Costa Rica was going to be a great time since good friends (the bride and groom, Autumn and Clint) and my parents were going.

On Thursday night, I had a room booked at Villa Pacande. As they suggested on their website, I took an Orange cab (for $4, not $22 like the driver tried to tell me) to my hotel. 30 minutes later I ended up at the Hotel Pacande and quickly negotiated for another cab to the Villa Pacande. 30 minutes later, I was swinging in a hammock on my room's balcony. As you can see from the picture on the right, it was a pretty nice room. I enjoyed the sunset, tipped back a few cold ones and waited for my friends to arrive at 11. After they arrived, we stayed up until the wee hours of the morning and had a fun time sharing old memories.

On Friday, we boarded a private bus that transported us from the Villa to Hotel Esperanza. It was pretty nerve-racking watching our driver navigate the narrow roads at high speed for 5 hours. We safely arrived in Playa Carrillo on Friday afternoon and soon after walked 10 minutes to the local beach. As we were walking there, my parents showed up in their rental car (they'd been in Panama for the week). Soon after, we saw some monkeys in trees then ran for the beach and splashed around in the waves of the Pacific. We entered darkness to a beautiful sunset that evening.

On Saturday, I woke up early (6:30), went on a run with my mom (very hot when the wind disappeared), had a dip in the pool and enjoyed a delicious breakfast from Dennis, the host of Hotel Esperanza. I should probably talk about the hotel a bit since that was one of the best parts. Hotel Esperanza is owned by an American (Dennis) from Florida and he and his right-hand man (Erwin) provided some of the best service I've ever seen at a hotel. The hotel had 7 rooms, and our wedding party took up 6 of them. The bride and groom occupied one, I had one, the maid of honor (Angie) had one and the other 3 were occupied by parents (mine + parents of the bride and groom). We had the place all to ourselves and it was simply magnificent.

After breakfast, we headed down to Jesse's Gym for some surfing lessons. We were told to come back at 2:30 when the tide was good. We walked down the beach to Samara and had some lunch while we waited. After lunch, 5 of us got surfing lessons and had a blast. I'm definitely hooked on surfing now and hope to get some more practice in when I make trips out to LA this winter.

Sunday was the wedding day and we started things off by taking a horseback ride in the pouring rain. It was a warm rain, so the ride itself wasn't bad. The lack of views at the top of the mountain wasn't too great though.

For the wedding ceremony, all the guys traveled down to the local beach and built an altar. The ceremony was a couple hours later and we had a ball toasting, eating and dancing the night away. At the end of the night, after everyone else had crashed, Angie and I walked down to the beach with a bottle of wine and enjoyed a spectacular site: 15-20 boats that were glowing in the distance off the shore. Sure, it could've been the booze, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't.

On Monday morning, people started to head their different directions. Clint's parents were staying another week, so they rented a car and headed north. Clint and Autumn jumped on a bus to enjoy their honeymoon in many different parts of Costa Rica. Autumn's parents hopped on a shuttle to San Jose to catch a flight back home. The rest of us (my parents, Angie and I) stayed at Hotel Esparanza for one more night. Angie and I got massages, napped by the pool and enjoyed one last walk on the beach. Tuesday was spent driving back to San Jose. We dropped Angie off at Hotel Pacande and boarded a plane for Panama City.

After arriving in Panama City, we rented a car and drove to Ivan's Bed and Breakfast (highly recommended) for the night. On Wednesday morning, we toured the Miraflores Locks (part of the Panama Canal) and drove to our friends' house in El Valle. In El Valle, we talked, read, relaxed and watched it rain. A lot. It was a nice way to wind down the trip before flying back last Friday.

My favorite part of this vacation was enjoying the beautiful beaches with really cool people. Good friends are always fun to party with, especially when they bring along other good friends. I love destination weddings and I'm pumped to enjoy two more in 2009: one in West Palm Beach and one in Cancun.

It's a strange feeling being back in the snow after surfing last week. Hopefully I'll get over it soon. Skiing last weekend was good therapy. 5 more days before the end of the year and I should be fully recovered.

For more pictures from this trip, see my Costa Rica 2008 set on Flickr.

What's Next

2008-11-26T15:19:18-07:00

It's been three weeks since I joined the realm of the unemployed. Fortunately, I didn't stay unemployed for long. In fact, after writing the aforementioned post, I received 5 offers the next day. Of the opportunities I received, the most interesting ones were those from companies interested in hiring the whole team. Not only that, but LinkedIn hired me back as a contractor through the end of the year. The goal of the LinkedIn contract: finish up projects that my team had started in the previous months.

At the end of the first week after the LinkedIn layoffs, we all had individual opportunities, but we also had two team opportunities. The following week (last week), I flew to NYC to meet with one potential client while the other potential client flew to Denver to meet with the rest of the team. After flying to NYC, I traveled to Mountain View to do some on-site work at LinkedIn. At the end of the week, it seemed like most of the remaining tasks at LinkedIn could be done by someone else. I told them I thought it was best that I move onto other things, while staying available for support questions. On the way to the airport, I spoke with both our team opportunities. Following those conversations, I was very pumped about both projects and confident about pending offers. You can imagine my disappointment when my flight was delayed for 5 hours.

After a fun weekend with Abbie, Jack and friends, I woke up Monday morning without a job and it felt great. However, things changed quickly. Monday morning many opportunities landed in my inbox: a 3-day gig this week (helping write open-source training), a 1-week gig in December (evaluating how well Tapestry 5, Wicket and Struts 2 integrate with Dojo/Comet for a client in Europe), a 1-week training gig in Europe next year and a 3-month gig for the whole team. I accepted all these opportunities and am very happy I'll get to work with Jimbo, Country and Scotty again next year. The 3-month gig should be a lot of fun. We're helping build a SOFEA-based architecture that leverages appropriate client technologies (to be determined) to build a kick-ass web application. I look forward to talking about the technologies we use and things we learn along the way.

So the good news is I've entered The Golden Period. The Golden Period is when you don't have a job, but you do have a start date. Unemployment is absolutely blissful during this time. The Golden Period exists a couple times for me over the next 6 weeks.

I'll be traveling to Costa Rica tomorrow for a best friend's wedding. I'm leaving both my laptop and my iPhone at home. Next week, I'll be loving life with my parents in Costa Rica and Panama. The following week, I'll be working on AppFuse all week and hope to make great progress on developing 2.1. Then I have the 1-week Web Framework Analysis gig, followed by 2 weeks of vacation in Oregon. My Golden Period begins this afternoon (for 3 weeks) and happens again over Christmas (for 2 weeks).

Yeah, life is good. Damn good.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2007-11-22T00:37:10-07:00

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Thanks for leaving such good comments on this blog and making the web such an enjoyable place to write stuff. Here's a Thanksgiving smile from Abbie in November 2003. Damn they grow up fast.

I'd also like to thank my parents for making the drive to Colorado from Oregon (via Montana). I've had a lot of fun with them in town this week. I'm looking forward to teaching my Dad how to play pool over the next couple days.

Related: Past Thanksgiving entries.

Raible Road Trip #11

2006-11-21T06:53:00-07:00

Sometime before midnight tonight, we'll be departing on Raible Road Trip #11. This time we're going to The Cabin for Thanksgiving. Of course, we'd prefer to fly, but neither ticket prices nor arrival times are cooperating, so we're doing the road trip.

It's a 15 hour drive, which is pretty brutal for the kids. In an attempt to alleviate their pain, and get there in one fell swoop, we're going to try something new. We're going to leave at night (as soon as Julie's done with her Barenaked Ladies concert) and drive straight through. I'm in the midst of conditioning myself for the drive. What does that mean? It means I slept in yesterday, took a nap in the afternoon, and then stayed up all night. The good news is I got quite a bit of work done. The bad news is I didn't get nearly as much done as I'd hoped.

As I write this, it's almost fully light out. I should probably hit the sack and get plenty of rest for tonight. The Cabin doesn't have internet access nor cell phone service, so I'll be completely out of touch for a week. Should be nice.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2005-11-24T22:22:17-07:00

I have to admit, Thanksgiving is one of the best American holidays there is. No gift giving, no marketing hype - just good food and hanging out with friends and family. This year, we took a break from the norm and canceled our trip to Florida - instead opting to stay home and relax a bit. We're certainly glad we did as things are much less stressed and we had a great dinner with friends this evening.

Like previous years, I have a lot to be thankful for. I owe you, the readers of this blog, a huge thanks. Your comments and feedback are always appreciated. I also owe a big thanks to Virtuas for hooking me up with a kick-ass job and fun folks to work with.

Last, but certainly not least - I'd like to thank Julie, Abbie and Jack. You guys are the best part of this whole world and make it tremendously fun to live in.

Happy Turkey Day Y'all!

The Busy Season Begins

2005-10-02T12:17:25-06:00

I never thought the 4th Quarter would be the busy season, but it is for me this year. Tomorrow marks the beginning and it won't end until after The Spring Experience is over. My current schedule is that I'll only be in Denver 2 weeks in the next 2 1/2 months! Of course, I'll be home on the weekends, but I'll be on the road the rest of that time. Most of the travel is for conferences, but a few weeks is for clients, as well as a couple weeks of remote work/vacation. I'll be traveling to Florida (twice), Keystone (Colorado), San Francisco and New Jersey.

In that same time span, I'll be speaking 15 times. 2 times at Java in Action next week, 6 times at the Colorado Software Summit (in two weeks), twice at Denver's No Fluff, at the Gator and Orlando JUGs in November/December, and 3 times at The Spring Experience. Phew! That's a lot of talking. Conferences are fun though, especially since you only have to really work for the hour or two while you're talking.

The last part of the whole roadtrip should be a really good time. We're heading down to West Palm Beach (Florida) for Thanksgiving and staying for 3 weeks. I'll be working remotely, swimming in Julie's Mom's pool, speaking at the JUGs and ending it all at the Spring conference.

If you're going to any of these shows, let me know. I'm always up for a beer.

Happy Thanksgiving!

2004-11-25T08:30:32-07:00

Happy Thanksgiving to all those celebrating today. It's been a great week at the Raible Household. I've managed to squeeze in a few hours for AppFuse/Tapestry/JSF, but mostly I've been building a garage workbench with my Dad. We also setup a "beer fridge" so the garage is now a nice place to hang out. Should be even better when I start disassembling the bus.

I have a lot to be thankful for this year - the new bus, new baby, new house and new book. Abbie is a ton of fun these days, so I owe her a big thanks for all the smiles and laughs. I owe Julie a huge thanks for being so supportive of my "burning the midnight oil" and allowing me to write another book. To my Mom, Dad, and Kalin - you guys rock for always reminding me who I am and where I came from.

I owe my readers a note of thanks for visiting this site and listening to me ramble on about Java and the kick-ass open source tools that make our lives easier. You guys are responsible for the popularity of this site. Finally, I thank Dave Johnson for Roller (which started this site) - which lead to meeting Lance, which led to my first authoring opportunity. A lot of good fortune these days come from this site - I'm still astounded that a simple blog can open so many doors.

Moving

2004-10-22T06:02:35-06:00

Today is move-in day to our remodeled house. The final trim installation and a the last few doors should be done sometime this afternoon. It's hard to believe it's almost done. It's been a long journey since construction started in March. There were a few interesting times along the way, like the garage demolition and basement wall falling off. It's tough to mention it, but it wouldn't be right to talk about this finished house without taking a moment to remember Bob the Builder. He would be smiling from ear to ear if he was here today.

It's been 7 months since we moved into our current house. After living in sub-1000 sq. ft. houses for the last 15 months, it'll be nice to get some space again. Total square footage on new house? Somewhere around 2500 square feet! Here's a comparison between old and new (click to zoom in):

Old House

New House

Happy Thanksgiving Y'all

2003-11-27T05:10:38-07:00

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone! This year I'm thankful for continued employment, a thriving Java community and an awesome family. Abbie and Julie are the most incredible women I've ever met. My parents, sister, and in-laws deserve a "Thank You" as well - you all rock. Here's a smile from Abbie to brighten your Turkey Day.

JAAS vs. Container-Managed Security

2002-12-04T10:19:06-07:00

I'm digging into JAAS this afternoon as I enjoy the vacancy of the Winter Break at DU's Penrose Library. Man, what a great school - I used to love it when we'd get off 6 weeks for Christmas Break - from Thanksgiving through January - how sweet is that!?

The reason I'm writing on this cold (32Â°F) afternon is to get some thoughts on JAAS in web applications. I'm giving it about a paragraph of coverage, explaining that it's mainly for declaring authentication and authorization in policy files. Furthermore, it's only invoked when running your application (or Tomcat) with a security manager. However, it's not really needed in web applications because 1) container-managed/web.xml is good enough, and 2) authentication mechanisms never really need to be that fine-grained. Whaddya think? Am I wrong, does it deserve more coverage? Don't most app servers use JAAS under the covers?

Happy Thanksgiving!

2002-11-27T18:53:27-07:00

I would like to thank my wonderful family and my great friends for making my life a blast to live! I'm also thankful for good health and the micro-breweries of Colorado, Montana and Oregon.

I'd also like to thank the blogging community (particlarly you java.blogs gents) for making the web fun again. Now go get some good eats and tell your family I said Hi!