Raible Designs

Goodbye, DU House. Thanks for all the memories!

Matt Raible — Wed, 22 Nov 2023 13:08:26 -0700

On the weekend before I joined Stormpath as a full-time employee in 2016, we bought a house in the countryside and moved out of the city. We'd been looking for a while and finally found a place we loved. Trish liked that it was rigged for horses, with two pastures, a barn, and an outdoor riding arena nearby. I was happy because it had six garages, and I wanted a place to store Hefe the Bus now that he was finished. It's a beautiful place, and we're delighted to be here. The sunset dog walks in the backyard are spectacular.

The only downside of moving to the Raible Ranch was we had to sell our mountain views in Fraser to afford it. We tried to sell our house near the University of Denver (DU) for a few months, but it didn't work. We decided to keep it as a rental instead. There was part of me that hoped one of the kids would go to DU (my alma mater) and they could stay there. When Jack started at CU Boulder this fall, we decided it was time to try and sell it again. My favorite feature of the DU house was the sauna my parents and I built in the basement.

We recruited our friend, Michelle Addison, to help us sell it in early September. Not only was she instrumental in making the house look warm and wonderful, she created a bidding war, and we were under contract within days of listing it. We were thrilled! Thanks, Michelle!!

We closed on the DU house last week and are already under contract for a new place in Fraser. We're doing a 1031 exchange, which requires the new home to operate as a rental most of the time. We're excited to have a place in the mountains again! It has mountain and river views and is a short walk to the Fraser River Trail. We're due to close on it in mid-December. I'll make sure and write another post after we move in. 🥳

Upcoming Events: Devoxx4Kids Denver, Testing Angular 2, DevoxxUS CFP and VJUG24

Matt Raible — Fri, 12 Aug 2016 15:29:01 -0600

It's been awhile since I've posted anything on this here blog. That usually means one thing - I've been off having fun! That couldn't be more true this summer. The day after my last post, I began traveling and haven't stopped since. In fact, this weekend will be the first weekend I've been home since writing that post. Hawaii, Montana, Denver, Montana, Colorado Springs and Utah - it's been a fabulous summer. I'll write more about those adventures soon.

In the meantime, I wanted to mention some upcoming events you might be interested in:

September 10: Devoxx4Kids Denver has an upcoming workshop on Exploring JavaScript with the world famous Dr. Venkat Subramaniam. If you know Venkat, you know this is a session you shouldn't miss. Your kids will love it, you'll get a lot of good laughs and everyone is sure to have a good time. Make sure and RSVP soon so you get in before this baby fills up!
August 22: HTML5 Denver has a sessions on ES6 vs. Typescript and Testing Angular 2 Applications. The first session will be delivered by my good friend Geoffrey Filippi and I'll be performing the second act with the help of angular-cli.
September 1: One of my favorite conferences, Devoxx, is coming to the US! DevoxxUS recently announced that registration is open. Even more interesting is that the CFP begins September 1st. I'm biased because I'm on the program committee, but I'd love to see your ideas for great talks!
September 27: Our good friends from vJUG are hosting the first 24 hour Virtual Java Conference in the world! I'll be speaking about the Art of Angular in 2016 at 10pm EDT.
September: I'm looking for new clients. My current contracts end on August 31 and I'm searching for the next cool team to work with. My expertise: Java, JavaScript and I'm really good at CSS. This is a hard combination to find! LMK if you have a need.

I hope to see you at one of these events!

How to ReactJS and Tooling is Awesome at HTML5 Denver

Matt Raible — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 10:16:08 -0700

Last night, I had the pleasure of attending the HTML5 Denver Meetup with two talks by Will Klein. I was motivated to attend because React has been on my radar for a while and Will's first talk was titled How to ReactJS. Will's presentation doesn't show the real meat of this talk, which contained lots of live coding. Will started with a static webapp, then converted it to use React bit-by-bit. His live coding was greatly helped by the fact that he had 3-4 co-workers in the room, so there was a sense of pair programming when things didn't work. During the presentation, he mentioned the JavaScript Jabber Podcast on React. I listened to it this morning, and I recommend it if you want to learn about the history of React.

Will's second talk was titled Tooling is Awesome. In this presentation, he showed us how to use npm and webpack. Again, the presentation doesn't capture the vast amount of knowledge demonstrated during the live-cli session. I hadn't heard of webpack before, so I was pumped to learn about it. If you need to complete/translate to JavaScript or CSS from another language, chances are that webpack will work well for you. During this demo, Will converted the previously developed React code to require/export modules, as well to do transpilation using webpack's jsx-loader. He also mentioned Keith Cirkel's How to Use npm as a Build Tool. If you're just getting started with JavaScript development and don't want to learn tools like Grunt or Gulp, this article will help you use npm as your only build tool.

Even though you can't experience the live-coding that happened last night, the code has been posted to GitHub. If you're looking to have talks about developing with React, I'd suggest contacting Will. He delivered great talks on subjects I've been keen to learn more about. Thanks Will!

In other Denver-related tech news, ThingMonk is coming March 3-4 and HTML5 Denver has lightning talks on March 23rd. ThingMonk is "a meeting of the tribes for people building the Internet of Things" and is sure to be a great conference. The Redmonk crew is always fun to hang out with and knows how to create a conference. Did I mention it's at a distillery?! The lightning talks in March are always a great time too. You can really learn a lot in a short period of time and it's a great way to share knowledge about cool technology you've recently used. Heck, you could attend ThingMonk, then create a lightning talk about what you learned for HTML5 Denver!

The Art of AngularJS in 2015

Matt Raible — Wed, 4 Feb 2015 09:14:57 -0700

I've been tracking statistics on jobs and skills for JavaScript MVC frameworks ever since I Compared JVM Web Frameworks at Devoxx France in 2013. At that time, Backbone was the dominant framework.

Last year, I updated those statistics for a presentation on AngularJS at Denver's Derailed. Angular had a similar amount of jobs as Backbone and a lot of people added it to their LinkedIn profiles. I found that Ember had grown around 300%, Backbone 200% and Angular 1000%!

Before presenting on AngularJS at last night's Denver Open Source Users Group, I updated these statistics once again. The charts below show how the number of jobs for Angular has doubled in the last year, while jobs for Ember and Backbone have fallen slightly. As far as skills, developers learning Ember and Backbone has increased 200%, while skilled Angular folks has risen 400%.

Yes, AngularJS has experienced huge growth in the last couple of years. You might even say it's the Struts of the JavaScript world. I like to say that Struts 1.x was the 'Killer App' for J2EE back in the day.

For the presentation I delivered last night, I made a number of improvements over last year's. I added a live coding demo based on my Getting Started with AngularJS tutorial. I used IntelliJ's live templates to make it look easy. However, since the audience was quiet, and some were falling asleep, I skipped over the testing demo.

I added a few slides on Foundation for Apps (FA). We've selected AngularJS and Foundation on my current project, and I've been researching how to integrate the two lately. FA is one solution I've found, Angular Foundation is another. If you know of others, please let me know.

For Java developers getting started with Angular, I recommended JHipster. I talked about its foundational frameworks and project options when creating your project. I included screenshots of its slick metrics UI and code generation features.

I also added a slide for Dave Syer's excellent five-part series on Spring and AngularJS:

Finally, I added a number of slides on Angular 2.0. I encouraged folks to checkout The Twelve-Factor App and James Ward's Java Doesn’t Suck – You’re Just Using it Wrong.

The discussion with the audience was great, particularly around HTTP/2 and minification/concatenation of assets. Thanks to all who attended, I really enjoyed having the opportunity to share what I've learned.

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

If you live in Denver, there's a number of interesting meetups happening in the next couple months.

Monday, February 16: Introduction to ReactJS at HTML5 Denver
Tuesday & Wednesday, March 3rd and 4th: ThingMonk at a distillery!
Wednesday, April 8: I'll be speaking about JHipster at Denver Java User Group

I'm also looking for speakers to teach programming to kids at Devoxx4Kids Denver. Let me know if you have a fun topic you'd like to present.

Devoxx4Kids Denver: Having fun with littleBits

Matt Raible — Tue, 2 Dec 2014 12:10:49 -0700

A little more than a week ago, on a beautiful Saturday morning, a number of Denver kids converged at Assembly to learn about hardware concepts with littleBits. This meetup was a bit different than our last meeting in that the kids built stuff with their hands rather than on computers.

The workshop was taught by Juan Sanchez of Tack Mobile. Juan did an excellent job of keeping his presentation short and sweet and got the kids building things within the first hour. The event space provided by Assembly was excellent and we look forward to December's Greenfoot Workshop at the same location.

Dan Allen was a big help in planning this meetup. Dan put me in touch with Corey Davis from Denver's Turing School. Corey introduced me to Rachel Warbelow, the pedagogy lead at Turing. Rachel not only volunteered at the event, but she brought a number of students with her to help out. There were a couple other volunteers as well, including my daughter's video game programming teacher from Campus Middle School. Everything went quite smooth with so much help. Thanks all!

Devoxx4Kids USA now owns a littleBits workshop set thanks to a generous donation from Raible Designs. If you're running a Devoxx4Kids meetup with littleBits, please let me know. I'd be happy to ship the set for you to use.

Juan's presentation on hardware concepts can be found on SlideShare or viewed below.

Thanks to McGinity Photo for all the pictures above. You find many more on Flickr.

Our next meetup will be a Greenfoot workshop with Steve Pousty on December 13th. Please RSVP if you'd like to attend!

Devoxx4Kids - Denver: Introduction to Hardware Concepts with littleBits

Matt Raible — Thu, 30 Oct 2014 08:17:21 -0600

I'm pleased to announce the second meeting of the Denver Chapter of Devoxx4Kids is now open for registration. It's a two hour class titled Introduction to Hardware Concepts with littleBits and will be taught by Denver's own Tack Mobile. To learn more about littleBits, see http://littlebits.cc. If you or your company would like help by donating a Workshop Set, please contact me.

The class will be held on Saturday, November 22nd, from 10am - 12pm at Assembly Workspace. Cost is $10, but you'll get that back in the form of a t-shirt. Age requirement is 9-18 and kids should have basic computer skills (copy/paste, opening applications, etc.).

I'd like to thank Juan Sanchez for reaching out to me about this class and inspiring his company (and workspace) to make it all happen. It's been great working with you and your team Juan!

When I started Devoxx4Kids Denver, I was hoping to host a class or two per year. Our first meetup in May was a wild success. After taking the summer off to relax, I started looking for more speakers in early October. The response has been great and we'll have another class about GreenFoot on December 13th. We're even in the planning stages for another session on NAO Humanoid Robot programming in Q1 2015.

If you'd like to get involved with Denver's Devoxx4Kids, please join our meetup group.

First Devoxx4Kids in Denver a Wild Success!

Matt Raible — Mon, 5 May 2014 23:42:30 -0600

The first Devoxx4Kids Denver was a wild success! This last Saturday, 20 enthusiastic Minecraft hackers gathered at Thrive in Cherry Creek to learn from one of the best. With masterful skill, Scott Davis, founder of ThirstyHead.com, taught everyone how to get a development environment setup, run a local Minecraft server and install plugins into it. You can see the materials we used for this class on Scott's site, at Introduction to Server-side Minecraft Programming.

McGinity Photo was kind enough to snap a bunch of pictures, which you can find on Flickr. A sampling is below:

I can't thank Thrive enough for their awesome venue. They had coffee ready and the front door wide-open when we arrived at 9am. The class started at 10am, and students started streaming in around 9:30. It was a mad scramble at first to copy all the setup files to student computers. Heck, it was a mad scramble for me most of the class: configuring environments, showing kids how to use the command line, troubleshooting errors -- all while the A/C was off. By the end of the class, the students were humming, connecting to each other's laptops and customizing their own worlds.

The only thing I regret is not setting up the students' laptops ahead of time. It would've been nice if Java and Gradle were installed and students could just run commands. However, I think it's neat they learned how to install and configure their own Java development environment. In the future, I'll send out instructions for parents a week before. For those needing help, we'll offer an "early setup" session the morning of the class. It'd also be nice to have a couple extra laptops for those that are too slow.

For the next meeting, it'd be cool to use Java since everyone has it all setup. Maybe we could control some robots with code or dive even deeper into hacking Minecraft. Whatever it is, it's sure to be fun!

Update: One other issue I forgot to mention. My kids have been sharing a Minecraft account for the last year. During the class, we found the duplicate username didn't work when they both wanted to join a server. It took 18 hours to get an additional account from Minecraft.net (6 hours for activation email, 12 for the unique username chooser to work). Make sure all kids have their own username before you teach a class like this.

The Modern Java Web Developer and Java Web Security at Denver JUG

Matt Raible — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 10:23:18 -0700

Last night, I had the pleasure of delivering two talks at the Denver Java User Group. The first talk, The Modern Java Web Developer, was inspired by the book titled The Well-Grounded Java Developer. Ben Evans and Martijn Verburg mention in the beginning of the book that they wrote it as a training guide to get new Java developers up to speed. For my talk, I wanted to do something similar, but for Java Web Developers.

I mentioned that the first thing you have to do to become modern is to change your title from a Java Web Developer to a JVM Web Developer. After doing that, you have a whole slew of new and wonderful technologies at your disposal. From there, I believe the Modern JVM Web Developer:

Starts with Fast Hardware
Uses IntelliJ IDEA
Leverages jQuery, HTML5, and CSS3
Creates High Performance Web Sites
For Mobile Devices
In the Cloud
And cares about Security

You can also view this presentation on Slideshare or download it from my presentations page.

The second talk was on Java Web Application Security and was largely an updated version of the talk I gave a couple years ago, starting with an appearance at the Utah JUG. It was mostly a live demo session using my Ajax Login application. To prepare the project for this talk, I created branches for each step. This means you can checkout the "baseline" branch and use Git to compare it with the "javaee" branch. You can also compare the "spring-security" branch vs. the "apache-shiro" branch. Finally, you could see what I needed to do to fix many of the vulnerabilities found by Zed Attack Proxy.

You can also view this presentation on Slideshare or download it from my presentations page.

Thanks to the DJUG and Thrive folks for providing good beer (especially the Guinness!) and FullContact for hosting. Also, I'd like to thank Manning for the copies of The Well-Grounded Java Developer they sent and No Starch Press for copies of Michal Zalewsky's The Tangled Web: A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications. Last, but certainly not least, thanks to all the good people who attended and listened to me ramble on about all this cool technology.

Future speaking engagements include Devoxx France in March and Denver's HTML5 User Group in April.

Denver Yard Harvest Kick Off Party

Matt Raible — Wed, 25 May 2011 09:37:53 -0600

When I first moved into my house, I was pumped to have fruit trees in my backyard. However, I quickly realized the downside:

I have the biggest apple tree I've ever seen and it drops apples like they're going out of style. I counted them in a 24-hour period last weekend and there was 100 new apples! I thought it was cool when I first moved in, but now it seems like a lot of work. However, it's such a good shade tree, it'd be a shame to do anything to it.

I've since grown to love my apple tree, plumb tree and grapes. They produce a lot of fruit, but I rarely pick and eat it.

Because I have so much fruit, I was pumped when my good friend Jason Barton moved back to Denver and started Yard Harvest. Their homepage explains their mission:

What We Do: Each fall, homeowners who register their trees with us call when those trees are dropping apples, cherries, peaches, and other food in their yards. Our volunteers harvest the fruit, leave as much as the homeowners would like, and deliver the rest to daycare centers, homes for the elderly, community kitchens, and other places that serve people around Denver who are at risk of going without fresh, healthy food.

Jason started a similar initiative in Vancouver, BC a few years ago and had great success. I'm writing this post to create awareness of Yard Harvest in Denver and invite you to the Kick Off Party. Below is a picture of the flyer that's being passed around and you can download the PDF if you want to print it out and help spread the word.

Hope to see you there!

Two Opening Days with a Stopover in Kraków

Matt Raible — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 09:40:47 -0600

Opening Day is a special event in Denver. The night before, it feels like the whole city is alive in anticipation of the big event. On Opening Day, it's typically a gorgeous spring day and serves as a great kickoff to baseball season. This year, we decided to take things up a notch and hit two opening days instead of one. The dates just happened to line up so we could go to the Rockies Home Opener on April 1st, fly to Kraków for the 33rd Degree Conference and make it back to Boston for the Red Sox Home Opener. Since Trish's brother lives near Boston, and I have good friends there, it sounded like the perfect vacation. To make a crazy vacation schedule even crazier, Trish and I moved in together the day before it all started. With moving and trying to finish my basement sauna before we left, we've definitely had a hectic few weeks.

After attending the Rockies Home Opener and having a great time with friends, we got to bed early and woke up on Saturday for our flight to Kraków. It was a 2 o'clock flight, so we got lots of sleep and then proceeded to thoroughly enjoy our flight when we upgraded to Business Class from Chicago to Munich. Business Class is the way to travel internationally. We arrived just after noon on Sunday and spent the afternoon exploring Kraków's Old Town and trying to stay awake. The weather was beautiful and it seemed like it might've been the warmest day of the year.

On Monday, we spent more time in the center of Kraków, wandering through the Main Market Square, Wawel Castle and the very cool Dragon's Den. We had lunch outside, again enjoying the great weather and some local beers. We were surprised to find that kamikaze shots are served in groups of four, rather than just one like it's done in the US. That evening, we enjoyed an excellent Italian dinner at Aqua e Wino.

On Tuesday, we headed to Aushwitz. This was a very sobering experience, but I'm glad we did it. It made me wonder if this type of thing could happen again, only to realize that it has. That evening, we sipped on martinis at the Metropolitan.

On Wednesday, I delivered my talk on Comparing JVM Web Frameworks. You can download the PDF or view the presentation on Slideshare if you're interested. The conference itself had a spectacular schedule and speaker lineup, so I was a little disappointed I didn't attend any sessions. We did make it to the ZeroTurnaround Party that night and had a lot of fun talking to Grzegorz, Martijn and Anton.

We woke up Thursday and headed to the airport for our flight back to the US. We landed in Boston at 6:30 pm and headed to my friend Chris's house in Concord. You might remember Chris from my first game at Fenway Park. Friday, we joined other friends, hopped on the train and headed to Yawkey Way for a beer before the game. Our seats were in the bleachers, but we had a fantastic time watching the Red Sox win their first game of the year.

We went to another game on Saturday with Trish's brother and a friend of his. We then proceeded to spend a relaxing Lazy Sunday with his family before flying back Monday morning.

Thanks to all our friends who participated in the opening day festivities as well as to Grzegorz Duda for inviting me to speak at 33rd Degree. We had a blast!

If you'd like to see more pictures from this adventure, please see Two Opening Days with a Stopover in Kraków on Flickr.

WebSockets with Johnny Wey at Denver JUG

Matt Raible — Wed, 9 Mar 2011 19:10:12 -0700

This evening, I attended Denver JUG to hear Johnny Wey talk about WebSockets. This month, the location moved and even though I had a nice bike ride to the meeting, I showed up about 20 minutes late. Johnny's talk lasted about 40 minutes, so I missed the first half.

When I arrived, he was talking about workarounds for implementing push applications in browsers. He had a slide that talked about Comet and iframes as the common implementation, and the other major option being ActionScript's XMLSocket. The biggest issues with XMLSocket (according to Johnny) are:

Not available on many modern mobile platforms.
Flash and managing / detecting plugin versions can add unwanted complexity.
Many would consider Flash solutions deprecated.

The biggest issue with implementing push on a client is managing it all, especially if you need to support older browsers. Socket.IO is one possible solution. It rides on the coattails of node.js. Features of Socket.IO include:

Abstracts socket methods into a unified API.
Open source (MIT) with active community.
Multiple server implementations (including Java) with the "reference" implementation developed in node.js.

The client API looks as follows:

var socket = new io.Socket(); 
socket.on('connect', function(){ 
  socket.send('hi!'); 
}) 
socket.on('message', function(data){ 
  alert(data);
})
socket.on('disconnect', function(){})

jWebSocket is another solution and it's where a lot of the Java WebSocket development is ending up right now. Highlights about the project include:

Open source (LGPL) with relatively active community.
Servlet-like API.
More "enterprisey" than Socket.IO.

Other options include CometD, which is a Dojo-driven Comet implementation that uses a specification called Bayeux. Jetty and GlassFish both support WebSockets in various forms of functionality and stability. Finally, there's Pusher (a SaaS implementation of push with a RESTful API) and Atmosphere (a container-agnostic framework).

How do you scale web sockets? The same way you make a webapp scale:

Go stateless
Use short request / response cycle
Use the smallest payload possible
Cache as much as possible

Scaling challenges with web sockets:

Connections have intrinsic state (they never close!)
Communications pipeline to your app server
Some sort of introspection on LB side (JMX)

There's also some existing controversy in the WebSockets Community, mostly around using Upgrade vs. CONNECT with HTTP. An (IETF) experiment found Upgrade portion of HTTP protocol was often improperly implemented by proxy servers and other network hardware. This seems to have caused Google Chrome to deprecate using Upgrade in favor of CONNECT. CONNECT used in this manner is seen by many as an abuse of the web.

Other useful links that Johnny provided were What can I use… to find out native support across browsers. For example, you can see which browsers support websockets. He also pointed out that websocket.org provides a good intro to WebSockets.

I'm glad I attended Johnny's talk. I've been a little leery of using WebSockets in my applications because of older browsers. Now that I'm aware of frameworks (like Socket.IO) that solve this problem, I'm eager to try it when the need arises.

An Epic Weekend in Estes Park

Matt Raible — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 00:13:38 -0600

A couple years ago, a good friend and I headed up to Estes Park for a day at the Longs Peak Scottish-Irish Festival. I was so impressed with the venue, views and music that I vowed to return. Last weekend, I invited my super-fun friend Trish for a party in the hills. I'm happy to report it was once again an awesome festival, with perfect weather.

Highlights of the weekend included: dining at The Rock Inn, the parade, riding bikes around town, lunch at The Stanley Hotel, fly fishing along the river, Ed's Cantina and many hours of excellent Celtic music. For more pictures, checkout the full set on Flickr.

After leaving Estes Park on Sunday, we drove back to Denver, hoping to watch the Broncos game in LoDo. At one point, I thought I'd have to listen to the whole game on the radio. Luckily, we got hooked up and got to watch the 4th quarter. My sadness over the Broncos loss was erased within a couple hours as we celebrated Jason Giambi's walk-off home run at the Rockies game. You gotta love that it's already been documented on WikiPedia.

In other news, Jack's turned 6 a couple weeks ago. He's in 1st grade now and currently into Super Mario on Wii, Bakugans, and Transformers. He also seems to have an intense addiction to Angry Birds on my iPhone. We had a blast celebrating his birthday at Chuck-E-Cheese and the Broncos game.

As summer fades and fall starts to kick in, I'll be attending the Great American Beer Festival, the Denver Broncos home opener with my sister, training for ski season and (hopefully) enjoying Rocktober. I love fall in Denver.

What's New in Maven 3.0 with Matthew McCullough

Matt Raible — Thu, 13 May 2010 15:54:21 -0600

Last night, I attended the Denver JUG meeting to hear some excellent talks by Matthew McCullough and Tim Berglund. I took notes during Matthew's talk, but my battery ran out before Tim's talk started. Below are my notes.

Matthew started out by described the differences between Maven 2 and Maven 3. As he began, he emphasized it wasn't a beginner talk, but mostly for existing Maven users that understand how to read a pom.xml and such.

The Roadmap
Commits to Maven 3 have been happening for the last 3 years. Matthew is not an employee of Sonatype, but he mentioned their name quite a bit in his talk. Sonatype has hired several committers (7 that Matthew knows of by name) that now work on Maven 3 full-time. For compatibility with Maven 2, the project has 450 integration tests and they test it against 100s of Maven 2 projects. Maven 3 has plugin classloader partitioning and a legacy simulation layer for old plugins.

The main improvement in Maven 3 is speed. It's been performance tuned to be 50% to 400% faster. Benchmarks (guaranteed by integration tests) include better: Disk I/O, Network I/O, CPU and Memory. Another new feature is extensibility so Maven is a better library rather than just a command-line tool. Now there's a library and APIs that you can use to do the things that Maven does. Plexus has been replaced with Guice and it's now much easier to embed Maven (Polyglot Maven and Maven Shell are examples of this).

Below are a number of other changes between Maven 2 and Maven 3.

Syntax: pom.xml still uses <modelVersion>4.0.0</modelVersion> so it can be a drop-in replacement for Maven 2 projects.
Validations: poms are heavily validated against common mistakes, warns when plugin versions are not specified (use mvn validate to see issues), blocks duplicate dependencies (examined in same POM only, conflict resolution used otherwise).
Help URLs: wiki page URLs now shown for all error messages. One of the first Apache projects to do this.
Removals: profiles.xml external file support removed, Maven 1.0 repository support removed <layout>legacy</layout> (it's been 5 years since any commits to Maven 1).
Behavior: SNAPSHOTs always deployed with date-stamps, artifact resolution caching has been improved to do less checking (override with mvn <phase> -U).
Plugins: version auto-selection favors RELEASEs over SNAPSHOTs (opposite for Maven 2), versions cannot be specified as RELEASE or LATEST, plugins only resolved from <pluginRepository> locations.
See the Plugin Compatibility Matrix to see if your favorite plugins are compatible.

Maven 3 hopes to be a drop-in replacement for Maven 2, but non backwards-compatible changes will be happening in Maven 3.1. It's anticipated release is Q1 of 2011 and will likely contain the following features.

"Mixins" for direct dependencies
Site plugin takes over <reporting>
Backwards compatibility by <modelVersion
There's a good chance 3.1 breaks compatibility with legacy POMs

Another new thing in Maven 3 is Toolchain. Toolchain a common way to configure your JDK for multiple plugins. There are only a handful of plugins that are toolchain-enabled. User tool chain definitions are defined in ~/.m2/toolchains.xml. To use different toolchains (JDKs), you specify a vendor and version as part of your plugin configuration.

Maven Shell is a high performance console that's a Maven 3 add-on. It's hosted at GitHub to make community contributions easier. It goes on your command line and it offers syntax highlighting and context-sensitive help (by typing ? at the command prompt).

Another major improvement in Maven 3 is Polyglot Maven. Tools like Gant and Buildr have made Maven look ancient, but they've also given it a good challenge. Maven 3 is likely to leapfrog these tools because of its ability to use different languages for your build configuration. Currently, 6 languages are supported. Polyglot Maven is a super-set distribution of Maven 3. It's not shipped with Maven 3 core because it contains all the other language implementations and is quite large. Polyglot Maven also contains a translate tool that allows you to convert any-to-any language. It has a DSL framework with Macros and Lifecycle Hooks. Macros allows for more concise syntax.

After talking about Polyglot Maven a bit, Matthew shows us a demo translating pom.xml to pom.yaml and then running the build. After that, he showed us examples of what a pom looks like when defined in Clojure, Scala and Groovy. Someone asked about file parsing performance and Matthew said different languages would cause a single-digit performance difference as part of your build process. Personally, I can't help but think any non-XML parser would be faster than the XML parser.

In regards to m2eclipse, a new drop (0.10) occurred a few weeks ago and it's one of the highest quality releases to date. It has major refactoring and many performance improvements.

For sample Maven projects see Matthew's Maven Samples.

I very much enjoyed Matthew's talk, both because of his presentation techniques and because he had a lot of good information. While I've tried Maven 3 and Shell in the past, I've been newly inspired to start using them again on a daily basis.

Tim's talk on Decision Making was also excellent. The biggest things I learned were that conflict is good (idea-wise, not personal) and things to look out for between teams (fault lines). Hopefully both Tim and Matthew post their slides so I can link to them here.

My Guest Room Remodel is finished!

Matt Raible — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 07:49:37 -0700

On December 5th, I flew home from Orlando (after The Rich Web Experience) and arrived home to the sound of waterfalls in my house. As soon as I opened the door, I knew something was wrong. Sure enough, the pipes had burst in my back guest room and water was pouring out of my ceiling. My guess is that it'd been happening for days.

The following week was quite interesting as I juggled a cleanup with lots of fans and a house without water. My water got turned on by Wednesday and I gained a whole new appreciation for indoor plumbing. Initially, I thought I could get everything fixed before my family arrived for Christmas. As their arrival approached, I became less and less hopeful and quickly scrambled to setup a couple ad hoc guest rooms.

After the Christmas holiday, I met with a local contractor (the same guy who fixed my plumbing initially) and discussed my options. The cheapest option (a.k.a. the one my homeowner's insurance would cover) was to put everything back like it was. However, it was readily apparent that if we did this, there's a good chance busted pipes would happen again. Therefore, I made the leap and decided to remodel the whole thing. Major changes made were 1) moving the bathroom to an opposite corner, 2) adding an interior window for light from the skylights and 3) adding a door to the bathroom from Jack's room.

The results are something I'm very happy with. I'd like to thank Nu Image for their great work and my parents for flying in to help finish it all up. If you're a friend of mine and looking for some powder runs this winter, I have a nice guest room for you to stay in.

For more pictures, see my Guest Room Remodeling set on Flickr.

17" MacBook Pro Stolen from Living Room

Matt Raible — Wed, 3 Feb 2010 09:45:52 -0700

Almost 3 years ago, I bought a 17" MacBook Pro. This laptop served me well for several years, mostly as a home computer. A few months after I bought it, I started working at LinkedIn and got a brand new laptop as part of my first day on the job. After working with LinkedIn's 15" for almost 2 years, I grew to love the form factor and purchased another one almost a year ago. I found the 17" was too big for planes and the 15" fits me perfectly.

Fast forward to last night.

I attended the first half of the Ignite talks at DOSUG and left around 7. When I arrived home, I suspected something might be out of whack when my front door was unlocked. Julie had come over to pick up Abbie's dance shoes around 6, so I figured she must've forgot to lock the door on her way out. When I got inside and saw my coat closet open, I justified it by thinking she grabbed one of the kids coats out of the closet and forgot to close the door. When I walked into my living room and saw my space heater's remote in the middle of the floor, busted open with batteries out, it clicked that a stranger was in my house. The first thing that jumped into my head was "Where's my laptop?" As I looked at the bare mini-desk in my living room, I realized it had been stolen.

I called Julie and asked her if she left the front door open. She said no, but when she arrived at my house (and came through the back), the garage's light was on and my back door was wide open. I asked her if she saw the busted remote on the floor or if the closet door was open. She said no. Putting all the pieces together, it appears that the burglar was actually hiding in my closet when Julie came into my house. Naturally, she's a little a freaked out by this, but she also saved the day by scaring off perpetrator before they took anything else.

This isn't a new trend for me and this incident is mostly my fault. I left my backdoor unlocked. Two years ago, my truck's stereo was stolen and there's a good chance I left the doors unlocked (and didn't turn on the alarm). Last year, my bike was stolen and the lock was still there, indicating I missed the frame when locking it up. So getting robbed in the first part of every year seems somewhat par for the course.

With my truck's stereo, it worked out well because the rig needed a new stereo. My bike last year? There wasn't any silver lining to that incident, so I made myself earn a new one. With this laptop incident, there is a silver lining in that I've been thinking about getting a 27" iMac for a home computer. Other options include a Mac Pro for my office (and use my laptop for traveling/home use) or a Mac Mini for home and hook it up to my TV with a wireless keyboard and mouse.

The home iMac seems like the best option, but I'd also be interested to hear what others recommend. Of course, I'll be keeping my doors locked from now on.

Consulting, SOFEA, Grails and GWT at next week's Denver JUG

Matt Raible — Thu, 5 Nov 2009 22:52:37 -0700

Next Wednesday, I'll be at Denver's JUG meeting to talk about Independent Consulting and Building SOFEA Applications with Grails and GWT. The first talk will be a a panel discussion among local independent consultants, including James Goodwill, Matthew McCullough, Tim Berglund and myself.

This session explores the trials and tribulations of an independent consultant. How do you find contracts? Should you setup an LLC, an S-Corp or just be a sole proprietorship? What about health insurance and benefits? Are recruiters helpful or hurtful? Learn lots of tips and tricks to get your dream job and your ideal lifestyle.

The Grails and GWT talk is a preview of a talk I'll be doing at the Rich Web Experience in December. Below is a rewrite of the abstract in first-person.

Earlier this year, I participated in a major enhancement of a high-traffic well-known internet site. The company wanted us to quickly re-architect their site and use a modern Ajax framework to do it with. An Ajax Framework evaluation was done to help the team choose the best framework for their skillset. The application was built with a SOFEA architecture using GWT on the frontend and Grails/REST on the backend.

This talk will cover how Bryan Noll, Scott Nicholls, James Goodwill and I came to choose GWT and Grails, as well as stumbling blocks we encountered along the way. In addition, we'll explore many topics such as raw GWT vs. GXT/SmartGWT, the Maven GWT Plugin, modularizing your code, multiple EntryPoints, MVP, integration testing and JSON parsing with Overlay Types.

If you're in Denver next Wednesday night (November 11th), you should stop by the Denver JUG meeting. It'll be a fun night and there's sure to be a few beers afterward.

Lean Teams: Doing more with less

Matt Raible — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 21:20:28 -0600

This evening I attended the Denver Rails User Group (a.k.a. DeRailed) to hear a presentation by Marty Haught. It was titled "Lean Teams: Doing more with less" and the following are my notes from the event.

Today's talk is about "Rocking with Ramen" - a.k.a. working with less funds to make great things. Lean comes from the manufacturing world in that you should Add Nothing but Value. The most important thing you should do is add business value.

The Seven Wasteful Sins for manufacturing are:

Overproduction
Inventory
Extra Processing Steps
Motion
Defects
Waiting
Transportation

The key to fighting overproduction in software is to trim features to those that achieve the greatest value. You should do "the simplest thing that could possibly work" and delay commitment as long as you can because YAGNI.

A minimum viable product is a starting place for validated learning with the least amount of effort. It should be embarrassing. Early adopters see the potential. Rails Rumble and Startup Weekend are good examples of promoting this type of development.

Unused and useless features are best solved by feedback-driven development. This is a process for validating value and creating software that people use. The end result is that you create software that people use and you're able to pivot your plan as you learn. The benefit of this is you stay humble and you don't drink the Kool-Aid (e.g. VC's tell you you're going to be the next Twitter).

The first part of feedback is "Pirate Metrics" by Dave McClure. The main things to track are acquisition, activation, retention, referral and revenue (AARRRR!). The main things you should gather from metrics is they're actionable and should help you make decisions. Vanity metrics like hits-per-month and such should be ignored.

Other feedback options include net promoter score (popup question to ask if users would recommend to a friend), feedback form (make it easy for users to tell you what you think about your product), A/B testing, and usability testing.

The final point is that it's OK to remove features.

To reduce extra processing and waiting, you should implement "Kanban". It's a pull-based system for a continuous flow of work and can be used in software projects to manage/schedule work for cross functional teams. It's an expression of just-in-time and has an emphasis on flow. It's all about getting across the board as fast as possible. In agile development, this is often expressed as a card-based system on a wall in the same room as your development team. Things can only move from the left-to-right as there is space for them. Marty is showing a screenshot of a "Zen" tool he uses on his projects. It has 3 columns (Definition, Work and Verification) from left-to-right that allows you to easily move stuff.

The most important thing about Kanban is it helps to eliminate constraints. The Zen tool only allows a certain amount of items in the "Work" column and it visually communicates blocked items by moving them to the top and highlighting them with a red border. The Zen tool that Marty is showing looks similar to Rally, but is much more visually appealing.

The benefits of Kanban include:

simple, less process
less inventory of requirements/stories
limit work in progress, maximize throughput
less time in meetings
more naturally represents story lifecycle
more easily spot bottlenecks
estimate only if it adds value

Kanban promotes tracking how long it takes for a story get across the board and into production vs. tracking velocity of a team.

On my current project, we use Rally, a small team and have two week iterations. Because the things that Marty is talking about seem to be things we're already doing, I asked him how Kanban differs from Scrum with small teams. He explained that this biggest difference is Kanban is most useful when you're pushing things to production with each iteration.

The most controversial practice that Marty promotes is Continuous Deployment. This is the automated deployment of code to production. It includes automated testing and continuous integration, simple deployment/rollback scripts, a successful CI build triggers deployment, and there's real-time alerts in production. When shit goes wrong, you should use the "five whys" to perform root cause analysis. Marty admits that this is only a good idea when there's a high-level of trust in your development team and lots of tests to prove nothing is broken.

The benefits of continuous deployment is there's a lower story cycle time, you eliminate waste in deploying code, you deliver features/bugs fixes faster and you find integration issues quicker and in isolation. It's also a great way to promote not checking in shitty code.

The skeptics think this is a bad idea because 1) it's scary, 2) they believe it causes lower quality and 3) it causes more issues in production. The good news is you can still control production deployments with your source control system (e.g. branches and such). More than anything, it forces you to have a high quality continuous integration system that acts as the gatekeeper for what goes to production.

You can learn more about topics Marty covered in this talk at the following sites:

Eric Ries - http://www.startuplessonslearned.com
Steve Blank - The Four Steps to the Epiphany
Mary Poppendieck - Lean Software Development
Dave McClure - http://davemcclure.com
Kanban Applied to Software Development: from Agile to Lean

If you're lucky enough to be attending Aloha on Rails, Marty will be presenting there. I recommend you attend his talk if you're trying to get stuff done quickly and get it into production even quicker. His techniques seem to be invaluable for developers that are trying to maximize their efficiency and reduce the time it takes to get their code into production.

New Office and New Bike

Matt Raible — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 23:51:39 -0600

Back in January, I moved into a new office to work on my current project. The following week, my bike was stolen. The next day I ran to work and decided to do it for a couple months.

My current goal is to run until April 1st or until I lose 20 pounds, whichever comes first.

The next week, my co-worker's bike was stolen and I knew I had to stick with my goal. The significance of April 1st was that our office lease expires on April 1st and we were planning on moving to a new office. While our office is nice, it is a large one-room office with no windows. The previous office was quite a bit cooler, but also cost twice as much.

A couple of weeks ago, we found a nice office near downtown. I signed a 1-year lease and moved in over the weekend. For folks in Denver, you might recognize the nice location.

I did my final run to work last Thursday, in the midst the Blizzard of 2009. While running to work was a great experiment and I enjoyed telling people I was doing it, it wasn't fun. I've been riding my bike to work for many years (first year was 1999). The one thing I've always enjoyed was the thrill of the ride in the morning. On a beautiful spring day, it's really a fantastic experience. It's easily been the best part of any job I've ever had.

With the new office secured and the running mission completed, I walked over to my favorite bike shop and picked up a Trek FX 7.5 yesterday. To research and figure out which bike to buy, I asked my network on LinkedIn.

As luck would have it, my first ride to the new office was today and we woke up to a morning snow storm. Even though the ride was cold and wet, I still had a blast. I've enjoyed riding since I traversed the hills on a BMX bike back in Montana. Getting back in the saddle today was simply awesome and I can't wait to ride again tomorrow, regardless of the weather. I know those nice spring days are just around the corner.

1st Hike of 2009

Matt Raible — Mon, 9 Mar 2009 22:28:20 -0600

This past Sunday, the kids and I loaded up our camelbaks and headed out for a hike to the top of Dakota Ridge Trail. We parked in the Green Mountain parking lot next to C-470 and trekked up the west-side of the mountain.

First of all, I was impressed with their enthusiasm. Granted, it was a beautiful Denver spring day, but still - you know how 4 and 6 year olds are. I'm not sure how far it was, but I'd guess somewhere between 1 and 2 miles. Abbie was gung-ho the entire way up, while Jack kept saying he was tired and wanted me to carry him. I never broke down, kept encouraging him and they both made it to the top without any issues.

While at the top, they did some exploring and Abbie gathered a whole backpack full of rocks for the trip down. By the time she was done filling it, it must've weighed around 20 pounds. Even though it was pretty darn heavy, she carried it all the way down - stopping every-so-often to empty a few rocks out. We weighed it when we got home and discovered it was 10 pounds. I was very impressed with her strength and perseverance.

Well done kids!

How old do kids have to be before you take them up a 14er?

Bike to Work Day

Matt Raible — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:51:19 -0600

Today is Denver's annual Bike to Work Day. While I try to bike to work everyday, it's fun to see others trying it. It's also fun to look back in this blog and see what past years were like.

In 2004, I'd just landed a gig with OpenLogic (when there was only 2 employees). The commute was great, but I only rode to work once that whole summer. I never returned to "the office" for the rest of that contract. In 2005, I'd just started working for Virtuas and didn't have a bike. Last year, I rode to The Hive.

This year, I'm riding to LinkedIn Denver (yes, we still need to decorate). I have to say, this seems like one of the best years yet. I've never enjoyed working in an office as much as I have this year. However, with 4 Mac Pros in one room, we might have to buy a window A/C unit. The room we all work in is a good 10-15 degrees warmer than the other rooms.

It's a beautiful night in Denver

Matt Raible — Sun, 18 May 2008 22:31:43 -0600

It's a pleasant 68°F in Denver tonight. Rather than working in the house, I thought I'd step out into the backyard. It's quite nice out here - I might have to do this more often.

Denver Weather

Matt Raible — Thu, 1 May 2008 10:38:27 -0600

Yesterday it was 82°F in Denver, today it's snowing. Here's the view from our office in downtown Denver. Drab and dreary - perfect for the Avs Playoff Game tonight.

An Irish Pub moves into the Neighborhood

Matt Raible — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 09:25:43 -0600

In August 2006, I described how happy I was to be living in the DU Neighborhood and how we had so many good restaurants around. Today, I discovered there's a new Irish Pub that opened this week. While I don't live in the same house that I did in August 2006, I still live close by, a mere 5 blocks from Julie's house. While the old location was excellent, with Sushi, Indian and Liquor on the same block - my new location is 6 blocks from the Light Rail and a 1/2 block from the Elementary School Abbie and Jack will attend next year. DU is 5 blocks away - which is great for hockey games and gym memberships.

Why am I rambling on like this? I don't know, I just wanted to write down how much I like this neighborhood. With Spring starting yesterday, a beautiful day today and DU beating North Dakota last night - life is very good.

Today's agenda: skiing with the kids at Copper. WCHA Championship tonight.

What's the Java Job Market like in Denver?

Matt Raible — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 21:59:22 -0700

I recently received an e-mail from someone asking me a number of questions about Denver's Java Job Market. He's moving from Seattle to Denver and asked me the questions below. Since Denver is one of the best places to live on Earth, I figured some other folks might like to hear my answers.

-------------------------------------

For senior architect types, is the market strong?
I believe it is. I haven't looked for a local gig in quite some time, but when I did back in June - there was lots of opportunities.

Any good employers you could recommend?
Not really, I've done contracting for the most part for the last 11 years. I've always enjoyed smaller companies. The best place to find Java jobs is by subscribing to the Denver JUG Jobs mailing list. There's jobs posted several times per week (both full time and contract).

Any companies to avoid?
Not that I know of.

For senior types, what type of salaries or hourly rates should I expect to find?
I think you'll be lucky to make over $100K as a full-time employee. You can certainly work your way to 110-120K after a couple years, but I think it's tough to hire into that. I'd expect 90+. As a contractor, you can expect $60-70/hour. There's definitely opportunities to get 90-100/hour, but they're hard to find because you have to eliminate the middle-man (recruiters).

Are Colorado Springs or Boulder good options for looking for jobs?
Boulder is definitely hopping. Colorado Springs - not so much.

Are contract positions good in Denver?
I've always liked contract positions.

Any recruiters that would be good talk to?
Lauren Ford is a good resource I've worked with in the past. You can tell her I sent you if you send her an e-mail.

Anything else you'd recommend?
If you can, get a gig downtown. Baseball Season starts in April and downtown has a buzz about it that's very enjoyable. Either that or Golden so you can be close to Mountain Biking.

-------------------------------------

One thing I forgot to mention in my reply is how valuable LinkedIn has become when searching for jobs. I've always believed being well connected is the key to career success and LinkedIn allows you to use the power of network very easily. You may think I'm biased because I work there - but how do you think I got the job there in the first place?

Nice Day in Denver

Matt Raible — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 18:25:35 -0700

One of the reasons I love Denver so much is we usually have extremely mild winters. One year, it was 75°F on Christmas Day (no kidding). Back in college, I have fond memories of playing hacky sack outside in January. The last two winters, we haven't been that lucky. Our high temperatures have been mostly in the 20s and 30s for the last two months. Today, we got up to a balmy 53°F and it felt like spring time. Believe it or not, it actually made the news.

To celebrate, the kids and I took a walk to a nearby park and spent the better part of two hours swinging, sliding, playing tag and enjoying the nice weather. Abbie and I wore shorts and never noticed it was winter until the walk home with the sun setting. Tomorrow's high is supposed to be 60°F. You can best most of Denver will be outside enjoying the sunshine - I know we will.

Denver Tech Meetup: January 24th at 6:30

Matt Raible — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 14:15:16 -0700

From the RedMonk Social Planner:

Why our holiday decorations are still up, I couldn’t tell you, but I do have the answer you’re all looking for: the date of the next Denver Tech Meetup. You remember, the Denver Tech Meetup? The User Group without the User Group? But with beers? Denver’s least ambitious monthly(ish) (ha!) gathering of technology workers?

Yes, I’ve failed spectacularly in my ambition to hold these things every other month, as was the expectation back in 2005, but I’ve been a little busy. And as I’m fond of telling our clients, a percentage of something is better than an entirety of nothing, right?

So ignore the inset picture - I posted it merely for nostalgic reasons; two Thursdays from today we’ll convene at our probationary new venue (my bartending friend is now way uptown) and frequent Jabber hangout, the Celtic. 18th and Blake, for the Denver folks in the audience. Still very easy walking distance for yours truly, not to worry.

Let’s you and me cram as many Tech Meetups in as we can before I flee back east before the hell that is the Denver summer. If things break as I hope they will next week and the week after, it’s possible that I’ll have my own not-so-captive audience to drag along.

See you at the Celtic. No Smithwick’s, sadly, but there is Murphy’s.

It's shaping up to be a good month for meetups: Silicon Valley next week, Denver the following. I'm participating in a Consulting Panel at the local Ruby on Rails user group that same night. Hopefully they won't mind if I have a couple cold ones beforehand.

It's been c-c-c-cold in Denver

Matt Raible — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 08:57:32 -0700

Last weekend, it snowed about 6 inches on Saturday afternoon. Ever since then, it's been c-c-c-cold (as Jack says) in Denver. During the day it's not too bad (in the 30s), but at night it's been getting into the teens. Apparently, last night was one of the coldest nights of this winter.

With all the cold, my house has become considerably colder in spots - particularly the living room (with high ceilings) and my office. Both of these rooms have vents in them, but they don't work. I've known this for quite some time - ever since I had Central A/C installed in August. The reasons these vents didn't work -- I concluded -- was because someone has severed the duct work behind them. I was telling a friend this a few days ago and he mentioned I should check to make sure ducts existed before I had anyone come out to "reconnect" them.

Yesterday, I pulled 2 of the 4 vents and had a look. Sure enough - no ducts! WTF?! Whoever added the back addition onto this house (in the 70s) must've put the vents in both rooms to pass an inspection, and that's about it. I'm having a guy come out to install a blower on my rear fireplace today in hopes of getting more heat into both rooms. If that doesn't work, I'll be getting some space heaters. I'm tired of being c-c-c-cold in my own house!

On a related note, it snowed another 4 inches yesterday, so we now have plenty of snow in Denver and the ski resorts are doing awesome. In the last 2 weeks, I've received 4-5 9" reports from the ski resorts on the front range. Crested Butte has over 5 feet of snow in the past 7 days.

With all the snow, it's been nice having Snow White. I'm so glad I'm driving her around instead of my old Accord. It should be fun taking her into the hills for a little pow-pow this weekend!

Denver JUG End of Year Party

Matt Raible — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 12:24:46 -0700

Tomorrow's Denver JUG meeting should be a lot of fun.

Our DJUG meeting this Wednesday, December 12th will be our annual end of year get together. It will start at 5:30 PM and we'll be meeting at the Wynkoop Brewery and Restaurant located at 18th and Wynkoop in the upstairs area where the pool tables and dart boards are.

No presentations, free pool and beer. What's not to like? I'll be there with bells on.

Next Thursday, the Denver Open Source User Group is having a party as well. It's at 6:00 at Darcy's Irish Pub. Cheers!

First Snow!

Matt Raible — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 12:02:30 -0600

It usually snows in September in Denver. This year, it waited until today. It was awesome to wake up this morning and see the white stuff coming down. Bring on Ski Season - I'm ready!

Bill mentions that A-Basin is open. If you're going to this year's Colorado Software Summit (starts today), you may want to bring your skis. Then again, who wants to ski greens?

Wow!

Matt Raible — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 00:03:52 -0600

The Rockies are the National League Champions!! Congratulations guys - it's been incredible watching your post-season magic. The next couple weeks should be quite the adventure.

It's a great time to live in Denver

Matt Raible — Mon, 8 Oct 2007 14:25:49 -0600

The past week has been an incredible time to live in Denver. It all started last Monday when I went to the Rockies vs. Padres Wildcard Game. It was a beautiful night, we had club-level seats and the Rockies beat the Padres in a 13-inning, 5-hour marathon. It was the best baseball game I've ever seen in my life.

Fast forward to last weekend. The kids and I rented a condo in Winter Park with some friends. It was an awesome 5-bedroom place with a great view of the ski resort, a nice hot tub and an ideal location to watch Saturday night's sweep of the Phillies.

After a hike in the warm mountain air on Saturday, I received a phone call from a friend saying he couldn't make it to the Broncos game on Sunday and asked if I wanted his tickets. I leaped at the opportunity and sped down the mountain on Sunday to go to the game. While the Broncos game was pretty bad, it was still fun going to the stadium and watching them play.

The fun hasn't stopped yet either - I (somehow) got free VIP tickets to a Nuggets pre-season game tomorrow night and this weekend is the Great American Beer Festival. Unfortunately, I'm out of town for all the Arizona games, but I should be in town for the World Series.

From Vegas to Snow to Boston

Matt Raible — Sun, 8 Apr 2007 11:40:12 -0600

Our visit to Las Vegas was a lot of fun. Little did we know, some friends we were meeting there were getting engaged on Thursday night. Of course, the girl (Kim) didn't know, but the guy (Mike) had been planning it for quite some time. We had a great time celebrating with them - as well as at the craps and blackjack tables.

I was planning on staying until Saturday, but Julie made me leave with her on Friday night. Her reasoning was because she was up and I was hemorrhaging cash. I didn't like the idea at the time, but loved it once I slid into my own bed late Friday night.

Leaving Vegas's 90°F temperatures and arriving in Denver's 30°F was kind of a bummer, but the 1" of snow yesterday and today is kinda cool. I leave in a few hours for Boston, where it's supposed to be cold all week. I was hoping for a warm and sunny Red Sox game on Thursday, but with a forecasted high of 40°F it doesn't look like it's going to happen. Oh well, bad weather means I'll probably bill and work on AppFuse more, so it's not necessarily a bad thing.

Happy Easter Everyone!

Update: I just went online to check in for my flight tonight and found out that United cancelled my flight due to "crew legalities" - whatever that means. Orbitz booked me on the next available flight, which isn't until tomorrow morning at 7:00 a.m. Doh!

The good news is I get to spend another night with the wife and kids. Unfortunately, tomorrow is going to be a brutal work day since I won't get on site until 3 in the afternoon.