Raible Designs

2025 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 16:15:01 -0700

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! 🥂

2024 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 08:44:59 -0700

Last year brought a few challenges and misfortunes. From changing companies to broken bones, Trish and I learned more about ourselves and our abilities than we ever anticipated. I had seven months off from the beginning of February through the end of July. Trish returned to her passion for horses and started competing near the end of my funemployment. A few months later, her saddle malfunctioned, and she found herself with a broken wrist and a broken ankle.

From last year's review:

I only have one goal for 2024: breathe.

I had plenty of time to breathe, so this turned out to be an excellent goal. Whether it was on the ski slopes or mountain biking, I had lots of heavy breathing in the first half of the year thanks to a nice severance package and a zest for adventure.

I'm gonna review 2024 using the following perspectives:

Personal

The year started with a trip to Cabo San Lucas. Trish and I have a friend with a condo down there, so we joined them for a weekend in mid-January. I stayed the following week, working remotely. Another friend flew in, and we golfed on some of the most beautiful courses I'd ever seen: Palmilla and Solmar. Both were all-inclusive, which I didn't even know existed. It basically means that all drinks and snacks are included. On Sunday, we went deep-sea fishing and caught a couple of Marlin. You haven't experienced forearm pain until you've spent 45 minutes trying to reel in a huge fish. The first one got away at the end, but we successfully landed the second one.

Shortly after, my funemployment began.

I started looking for a new gig in April. Since finding a job is often about who you know, not what you know, I flew to Atlanta for Devnexus and networking. There, I attended the JUG Leaders Summit and the Java Champions Summit before the conference. I spoke about micro frontends with JHipster and stayed for the speaker festivities after. You can read about this experience in A Delightful Trip to Devnexus.

The following week, I did a marvelous road trip to the Utah JUG in Stout the Syncro. I skied at Copper, mountain biked at Fruita and Moab, and skied at Snowbird and Alta before my talk. Then, I hit Steamboat and Winter Park on the way home.

We attended our niece's graduation from Michigan in May, watched the Nuggets lose to the Timberwolves in the playoffs, almost won a fowling (bowling with a football) tournament, and my job search started heating up. At one point, I had 15 interviews in one week and interviewing felt like a full-time job.

We did some fun rafting trips on the Colorado River in June. Our rafting family didn't win any permits in the lottery, so there were no week-long trips.

I wrote about our ski season in late June. My only trip outside the Rockies was to a friend's birthday celebration in Sugarbush, Vermont. The conditions were less optimal than I'm used to. When it snowed a foot on the last day, the power went out and the lifts didn't work. 😅

July brought a trip to Montana, my 50th birthday celebration, and Trish started competing with horses again. I started a new job with CrowdStrike at the very end of the month. You can read about these happenings in Life Update: New Job, Same House, and Same Awesome Family!

Jack turned 20 in August. He didn't try out for the CU basketball team, but still plays a lot. Near the end of the year, he made things official with a love interest and is experiencing a whole new range of emotions.

Abbie celebrated 22 in November. It's her senior year at CU and she shocked us over the Christmas break by breaking up with her boyfriend of five years. Her puppy, Gracie, has been a good emotional support companion.

Hefe the Bus and Stout the Syncro

We rested Stout the Syncro again for most of the year, save for my Utah JUG road trip and a weekend adventure to Rhythms on the Rio in southern Colorado. They had a VW-only camping section right next to the stage, which made the community aspect all the more enjoyable.

Hefe the Bus kept truckin' along. He didn't win any trophies at VWs on the Green this year, but we still had a great time.

We did a cruise to Red Rocks with the Colorado VW Bus Club.

And I replaced our mailbox with something more stylish.

Professional

With a new job at CrowdStrike, most of my time was spent getting up to speed on cybersecurity and CrowdStrike's Falcon-related products. I created developer.crowdstrike.com (powered by Hugo) in my first month. I've been practicing Go and Python and published two blog posts:

I've started working on screencasts too, but none have been published yet.

I studied for and achieved a CCSK (Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge) certification. I also got my CCFA (CrowdStrike Certified Falcon Administrator) certification last week, but technically that didn't happen in 2024.

Speaking

According to TripIt, I took 13 trips to 15 cities in two countries. Only two trips were for conferences: Devnexus and KC/DC. Normally, I'd say they were work-related, but since I was unemployed at the time, community-related is probably a better term.

Community

I continued helping the Denver JUG find speakers and a venue for our meetups. We switched to meeting in south Denver, at Thrive Centennial. This was mostly my decision because they have a larger room and it's closer to my house. We return to Thrive Cherry Creek when the Centennial location is booked.

Projects

The main open source project I worked on in 2024 was JHipster. I became a project co-lead in the spring, mostly to help do releases in a timely manner. JHipster had 10 releases and ~2 million downloads in 2024 (up 700K from 2023). Our most downloaded release was JHipster 8.7.3 on November 1st. We started updating and releasing blueprints before announcing releases.

I love the new website we published on August 28th and releasing JHipster 8.8.0 (with Spring Boot 3.4 and Angular 19 support) on Christmas Eve was a nice way to end the year.

2025

Professionally, I'll be writing (and helping others publish) more blog posts about CrowdStrike's Foundry, Fusion, and Next-Gen SIEM. I might speak at a conference or two. I've submitted to a couple of CFPs and got accepted, but getting approval to speak has been a challenge. As one of the top cybersecurity companies, we traditionally make our documentation and tutorials only available to customers. When folks talk about our APIs and (open source) SDKs, it's at one of our Fal.Con conferences.

My leadership team would prefer I do talks and workshops about Foundry, Fusion, and Next-Gen SIEM. Since these are products we sell, I feel like any talk I'd do about them would be a vendor pitch, even if I live-coded the whole time. This is a no-go for most developer conferences. It should work nicely for Fal.Con, though. And that might be all that's required since it sells out every year.

Personally, our big family vacation already happened with a visit to Puerto Rico in early January. I'll write about that in a blog post shortly. Abbie graduates from CU in May and starts her career this summer. We'll be celebrating, supporting, and planning some adventures with her when she moves back in. We hope to work remotely from Winter Park in June and Montana in July. We figure if we can work East Coast hours, we can have some fun rafting/biking/golfing adventures in the afternoons and evenings.

I have only one goal for 2025: be grateful.

I have a lot to be thankful for with an awesome family, a gorgeous place to live, adventurous hobbies, and fun VWs to drive. And, Trish got us VIP tickets to Dead & Company at the Sphere in May! She started following the Grateful Dead in the 90s with multi-day shows and wanted to finish her long strange trip in a similar fashion.

If you want to stay in touch, please connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on Flickr.

2023 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Sat, 6 Jan 2024 18:16:02 -0700

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

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

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

From last year's review:

I only have one goal for 2023: be present.

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

I will look back on 2023 using the following categories.

Personal

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

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

Recharging in the backwoods of Montana with family. Started the day with coffee, mimosas, and huckleberry pancakes. ☕️🥂😋

Happy Mother's Day to all the incredible moms out there! ❤️? pic.twitter.com/sjmChuzNpo
— Matt Raible (@mraible) May 14, 2023

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

We celebrated our son Jack's high school graduation this week and had a fabulous time with family and friends. Here are a few of my favorite photos.

See the full album on Flickr with Julie and Trish's awesome photos: https://t.co/XSoUZnjOSk

Congratulations, Jack! 🥳 pic.twitter.com/1Ea1LZrFML
— Matt Raible (@mraible) May 27, 2023

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

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

In 24 hours, I'll be starting my summer vacation. @okta has an unlimited vacation policy, and I'm taking full advantage with a month off! 😃

What will I do?

⛳️ Golf, raft, and bike
🛶 Live down by the river in a van
⛰️ Shoot the breeze in Montana
🌊 Tour Cape Cod#LifeAtOkta
— Matt Raible (@mraible) July 13, 2023

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

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

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

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A post shared by Matt Raible (@vwsforlife)

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

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

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

Hefe the Bus and Stout the Syncro

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

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

Professional

For those stumbling upon this post with no context, I'm an open source developer that works at Okta. My title is officially "Developer Advocate Architect" and all the code I write is open source.

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

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

I published two blog posts on the Auth0 blog:

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

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

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

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

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

We had a lot of fun interviewing @errcraft and @Stephan007 at #Devoxx Belgium. 🤩 pic.twitter.com/XtIij77YI8
— Matt Raible (@mraible) October 7, 2023

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

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

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

Speaking

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

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

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

Digging into all things @Java with the founder himself, James Gosling!

Developer Advocate @mraible had an insightful chat covering @Devoxx, Java and everything in between! 🚀 pic.twitter.com/2pfRIlZVhi
— OktaDev (@oktadev) November 27, 2023

Community

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

Projects

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

I updated my Bare Bones Angular tutorial for Angular 17.

I updated my Bare Bones 🦴 Angular tutorial to use #Angular 17.

?? https://t.co/7fsyzOOaNP

It includes:

✅ New syntax for control flow
✅ Standalone components
✅ Unit, e2e, and CI testing
✨ Bonus: Angular Material, Bootstrap, and @auth0

I hope you find it useful!
— Matt Raible (@mraible) December 4, 2023

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

Can you believe that @jhipster is 10 years old today?!

Happy Birthday, JHipster! And congratulations to its proud Papa, @juliendubois! 🎊

⭐? 21K stars on GitHub
🤝 52.4K used by
❤️ 696 contributors

It's been an excellent adventure! 🤓 https://t.co/VqZdoDRtBS
— Matt Raible (@mraible) October 21, 2023

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

My Getting Started with JHipster 8 tutorial is now available!

🤓 https://t.co/6nBfPR33Dk

Features:

🌹 Enhanced UI with Angular
🔐 Increased security with ownership checks
💜 Deployment to Heroku
🤠 CI/CD with GitHub Actions#jhipster #java #typescript pic.twitter.com/xE8Ra9E9w6
— Matt Raible (@mraible) December 14, 2023

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

2024

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

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

I have only one goal for 2024: breathe.

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

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

2022 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 09:34:31 -0700

When 2022 started, I was excited to start traveling again. We started things off with a trip to Mexico and worked remotely from the Cabo San Lucas marina for a couple of weeks. In March, the kids and I ventured to the Cayman Islands for spring break. We arrived home to a red-hot DU hockey team and followed them all the way to the Frozen Four. I went to college at DU, aka the University of Denver, and I'm a proud alumnus.

I made my way to Boston to work on a presentation with a co-worker, nicely coinciding with the Frozen Four tournament. A few friends and I had the time of our lives watching DU win the NCAA championship. After staying up late and celebrating, I felt awful the next day. I flew home and still felt terrible on Monday. Figuring it was a bad cold from over-indulgence, I took a COVID test, tested negative, and hopped on a plane to Devnexus on Tuesday. That week did not end well.

I tested positive for COVID this morning. I'm so sorry to all the people and friends I came in contact with at @devnexus this week. I feel like such an ass.

I thought I was OK because I tested negative Tuesday morning and never lost my sense of taste and smell. https://t.co/lR5tdOM2gP
— Matt Raible (@mraible) April 15, 2022

From last year's year in review:

I only have one goal for 2022: smile more.

I rediscovered one of the things that makes me smile a lot: in-person meetups with friends. I had so much fun at Devnexus seeing old friends from the conference circuit. This continued at Spring I/O in Barcelona and at JavaOne in the fall. Being with family always makes me smile too. A trip to Alaska to celebrate my parent's 50th wedding anniversary was a highlight of the year!

I will look back on 2022 using the following categories.

Professional

For those stumbling upon this post with no context, I'm an open source developer that works at Okta. My title is officially "Developer Advocate," but all the code and words I write are distributed as open source.

This year, I focused on creating YouTube videos more than blog posts. On the OktaDev YouTube Channel, I created 12 videos (same as 2021). My most popular video (11K views) was based on a blog post I wrote in January called Full Stack Java with React, Spring Boot, and JHipster.

I published the Angular Mini-Book 2.0. When writing blog posts, I focused mostly on Java, REST APIs, and JHipster, with a bit of JavaScript too. I authored 11 blog posts on the Okta developer blog:

I published four blog posts to the Auth0 blog.

Last year, I was celebrating new teammates Deepu K Sasidharan, Alisa Duncan, E. Dunham, and Tanay Pant. This summer, I moved to the Auth0 DevRel team and have a plethora of new teammates to collaborate with. I'm excited to help grow Auth0 usage in the Java community, and I'm pumped to work closely with Deepu to make it happen.

I continued to stream meetups for the Denver/Boulder JUG and Denver Open Source Users Group (DOSUG). We used StreamYard and YouTube to broadcast our meetups. We published nine videos to the Denver JUG YouTube Channel. We only published two videos to the Denver Open Source Users Group Channel, but we did meet in-person! We're grateful to the folks at Thrive Workplace for donating their space.

Denver JUG is now up to 3,688 members. Our most popular video in 2022 was from Gordon Weakliem on Coding Interviews for Java Developers.

Speaking

According to TripIt, I took 24 trips, to 45 cities, in 11 countries. 13 trips were work-related, and the rest involved traveling to see family. That's 11 more trips than in 2021, and I had 123 days on the road (+46 from 2021). United 1K was achieved.

My Speaker Deck profile shows 12 presentations at 12 events. 11 of those were in-person. I missed Devoxx France because I caught COVID in April at the NCAA Frozen Four tournament. I later live-streamed my presentation on Comparing Native Java REST API Frameworks. This was also my most-viewed presentation on Speaker Deck with 3.1K views.

I had a full room of attendees for my talk on Reactive Microservices at Spring I/O in Barcelona. Even the overflow room was packed!

My @jhipster talk at @spring_io had a lot of awesome people in it! Thank you all for your enthusiasm and smiles. 😃 pic.twitter.com/u4pOtOSbkl
— Matt Raible (@mraible) May 26, 2022

I had a lot of fun doing a September JUG tour in Ireland. My folks tagged along. It was a fast-moving trip with new hotels most nights. At their age, they'll unlikely join me for a JUG tour again. 😅

We stopped by the @okta Dublin office this morning in the Bloodstone building. Great location with a fun vibe about it. 👍 pic.twitter.com/vvaeswAvT0
— Matt Raible (@mraible) September 29, 2022

JavaOne returned in October and was held in Las Vegas for the first time. I spoke about Micro Frontends for Java Microservices and loved spending time with the Java community.

The community at #JavaOne is amazing! pic.twitter.com/IwOdr3V7gx
— Matt Raible (@mraible) October 19, 2022

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

It was a pleasure talking with the @ljcjug tonight about web app security for Java developers. The #Java community is strong in London! 💪

Thanks to @OctopusDeploy for sponsoring and @okta for hosting. It was fun to see a full house with all the seats filled by the end. 😃 pic.twitter.com/SmtvRgw1Jh
— Matt Raible (@mraible) October 27, 2022

I originally planned my UK JUG tour to coincide with the Broncos playing in London, but their record was so bad by then that I flew home early. Coincidentally, they won that weekend.

Oktane followed soon after. It was the first time meeting some of my teammates in-person. I wore an { okta } cape and thoroughly enjoyed the developer track we assembled.

Excited for the developer keynote at #Oktane22! pic.twitter.com/Jy2XPDoIxx
— Matt Raible (@mraible) November 9, 2022

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

Had a blast at the @denverjug holiday party tonight! Thanks to all the local @java folks that joined in the fun. 😀 pic.twitter.com/sI9tsbrlk7
— Matt Raible (@mraible) December 15, 2022

We've had a couple of meetups since then but are still looking for a nice venue to gather. Frank Delporte recently interviewed the organizers for the Boulder and Denver JUGs on the Foojay Podcast. Check out Episode #13 if you're interested in hearing about our group's history.

Community

In the past, I used this section to talk about meetups I've started, like Developer Ski Days and Devoxx4Kids Denver. We didn't host any events in 2022, but I might organize a developer ski day soon. Right before COVID hit, we had a ski train to Winter Park adventure planned. It was supposed to happen right after Venkat's dev.next conference. I'd love to try and do that again.

Projects

I continued to maintain OktaDev Schematics in 2022. The project had five releases. I added support for Auth0's SDKs, which helps ensure I know how to use the latest versions. According to npm-stat.com, it had ~62K downloads in 2022 (+2K from 2021).

My other projects are related to JHipster. I helped upgrade the main generator to Spring Boot 3 and did a lot of QA for micro frontends. We had eight releases and ~1.5 million downloads in 2022 (down 300K from 2021). We've worked hard on JHipster 8 and hope to release an alpha version soon.

I spent most of the year (in fits and spurts) working on the JHipster Mini-Book.

My author *finally* finished updating my intro and chapter 1 for @jhipster 7. He started working on this PR in March!https://t.co/R0h09xXle2

What took so long? 🧵
— The JHipster Mini-Book (@jhipster_book) December 2, 2022

I sent the book to tech editing just before Christmas vacation and got it back from the copy editors at InfoQ this week. Hopefully, it'll be available for download by the end of this month!

I helped create the JHipster Native blueprint in early 2022 and wrote about how to use it in Introducing Spring Native for JHipster: Serverless Full-Stack Made Easy. We converted Ionic for JHipster into a blueprint and updated JHipster React Native. I wrote about them both on the OktaDev and Auth0 blogs:

Personal

We started the year with a trip to Cabo San Lucas with my parents and sisters. My parents like to do a "chasing the sun" trip in the midst of winter because they live in the backwoods of Montana, and the sun doesn't shine a whole lot.

I had difficulties getting my passport renewed in March, but succeeded after learning a local government official can help expedite things. Once I got a new passport, Abbie, Jack, and I had a blast with Trish's brother's family in Grand Cayman.

The 2021-2022 ski season was pretty good. This year is shaping up to be much better! I already have 24 days in, and we're only halfway through the season!

For the third year in a row, I took a long summer vacation thanks to Okta's unlimited vacation policy.

In 24 hours, I'll be starting my summer vacation. @okta has an unlimited vacation policy and I'm taking full advantage with a month off! 😃

What will I do?

🏔 A week in Alaska
🤠 A RV trip to Montana
🛶 A week-long rafting trip
🤘 Def Leppard / Mötley Crüe concert#LifeAtOkta
— Matt Raible (@mraible) June 16, 2022

Celebrating my parent's 50th in Alaska was fantastic!

And so was the Colorado Avalanche's Stanley Cup victory. 🥳

We managed to go rafting a lot in July. Five nights camping on the Green River was our favorite trip.

I celebrated 20 years of blogging in August. Jack turned 18 at the end of the month.

I took the kids to the first game of the Broncos' season in Seattle. Their stadium had a sweet view of the city. We did not expect to lose that game.

We enjoyed a beautiful @Broncos sunset in Seattle last night. 😊 pic.twitter.com/OVchzB6zYe
— Matt Raible (@mraible) September 12, 2022

The fall was filled with a disappointing Broncos season, Abbie's 20th birthday, and an even more disappointing CU Buffaloes football season. We have elevated hopes for both the CU Buffs and the Denver Broncos in 2023!

We had a blast celebrating @AbbieRaible's birthday this weekend! 🥳 pic.twitter.com/69AKuDOp17
— Matt Raible (@mraible) November 7, 2022

In the meantime, we're big Nuggets and Avalanche fans and are excited for their playoff runs this spring.

Trish and I ended the year celebrating love in the Philippines.

Hefe the Bus and Stout the Syncro

Stout the Syncro's Subaru engine died in February. Because of this, I decided it was a good time to restore him like Hefe with a new paint job, interior, and other improvements. We hauled him to our favorite Vanagon mechanics, Mr. Mechanic, to install a new Subaru Outback engine. Trish bought me a temporary Tesla to tide me over because we figured the restoration might take six months to a year. I named it White Lightning.

As luck would have it, we couldn't find anyone to do the bodywork and paint, so we ended up getting it back with a new engine in June. After experiencing several expensive adjustments after the new engine, I'm still driving my temporary Tesla, and Stout is parked in our barn. Trish wants to trade White Lightning for an RV (a 20-year dream of hers), while I'm hoping to swap it for an ID Buzz.

The year's VW highlight was the Colorado Bug-In at Bandimere Speedway. Stout won runner-up in his class, while Hefe won the whole kit and kaboodle: Best in Class, Best Interior, and Best of Show!! 😆

I'm back from summer vacation today and feeling fantastic! #HefeTheBus won Best of Show, Best Interior, and his class at the Colorado Bug-In yesterday!!

Winning Best of Show at the Bug-In was a bucket list item for me when I bought him way back in 2004. So proud! 🥳 #vwbus pic.twitter.com/Vm4p1KQNcl
— Matt Raible (@mraible) July 25, 2022

We're still featured on the Bandimere website as the Best of Show winners.

2023

Professionally, I hope to do some JUG tours in the US this year. I joined the Auth0 product unit at Okta in August, and they're much more regionally focused than my former OktaDev team was. This is largely because we have developer advocates worldwide, and it's more sustainable if Deepu hits the Java conferences in Europe while I focus on the US. If you're interested in seeing where my team will be in 2023, see developer.auth0.com/events.

This will be a big year for our family. Jack graduates high school in May, and we'll become empty nesters in August. He got accepted to CU a couple of weeks ago and will join his sister up in Boulder! With Coach Prime on board, we're hoping for some good CU football games this season. Because it's his last six months at home, I'm skipping conferences that happen while he's at our house.

I only have one goal for 2023: be present.

I've noticed that this is easy if I'm playing with friends or visiting family. Putting down my phone, listening, and paying attention on Zoom calls is my jam this year.

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

2021 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Sun, 2 Jan 2022 22:38:01 -0700

I didn't expect to travel much in 2021, mostly because of my promise to myself to take a year off. When I got fully-vaxxed in April, I expected things to return to normal and we'd all be traveling to conferences again by early fall.

I'm happy to announce that I'm #FullyVaccinated. Had 2nd @pfizer shot on Apr 14. I feel lucky 🍀 to have experienced no symptoms other than extreme joy. 🥳@TrishPhoto and I just finished a 23-day sugar detox too. We're feeling good!! ✌️ pic.twitter.com/6chqkFbPB7
— Matt Raible (@mraible) April 28, 2021

2021 was a milestone year for our family. It's the year Abbie graduated from high school! We planned and executed a fun party with family and friends at the Raible Ranch in early June.

She did it! Congratulations @AbbieRaible!! 🥳 pic.twitter.com/G1Zz3QTHa4
— Matt Raible (@mraible) June 4, 2021

From last year's year in review:

I only have one goal for 2021: dance more 🕺

When I mentioned this to Trish, she laughed and pointed to our living room, which she recently re-arranged to open up a nice dance floor. I probably danced more in 2021 than 2020, but that's not saying much. My favorite concert this year was Greensky Bluegrass at Red Rocks. It helped that I was with old friends Bruce Snyder and Matt Good and Bruce got us front row seats.

We tried to go to Jazz Fest in October, but it got cancelled because of COVID.

I'm going to look back on 2021 using the following categories.

Professional

This year, I focused on creating YouTube videos more than blog posts. On the OktaDev YouTube Channel, I published 12 videos (-8 from 2020). My most popular video (13K views) was based on a blog post I published in January called Reactive Java Microservices with Spring Boot and JHipster.

I only published five blog posts to the Okta developer blog. You can see that I focused on Spring Boot, JHipster, and GraalVM.

It's interesting to look back and see I didn't author any JavaScript topics. I like to think that's because I spent all my JavaScript time working on the Angular Mini-Book. I smiled a lot after finishing v1.0 in November.

The Angular Mini-Book 1.0 is now available! 🥳

🅰️ https://t.co/JEKxQ2A9hr #angular #typescript #springboot #kotlin pic.twitter.com/MYcXH5fQ1i
— Matt Raible (@mraible) November 17, 2021

My team published 12 JavaScript-related blog posts in 2021. To compare, we published 20 Java-related posts. We hope to publish more posts for both topics and many others in 2022. I'm super excited to work with new teammates Deepu K Sasidharan, Alisa Duncan, E. Dunham, and Tanay Pant!

I continued to record meetups for the Denver/Boulder JUG and Denver Open Source Users group (DOSUG). We used StreamYard and YouTube to broadcast our meetups. We published 10 videos to the Denver JUG YouTube Channel. We only published three videos to the Denver Open Source Users Group Channel, but we did successfully hold two of those meetups in-person! We're grateful to the folks at Thrive Workplace for donating their space.

Denver JUG is now up to 3,618 members. Our most popular video in 2021 was from yours truly on Reactive Microservices with Spring Boot and JHipster. 🥳

In 2020, I published 15 blog posts on the Okta developer blog. In 2021, I only published five. My reduction in content can be explained by a three-month gap in publishing where I worked on updating 200+ blog posts to use the Okta CLI (because our admin UI changed). My lack of thought leadership posts didn't help either. 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. They're usually quicker to write, and I plan to write more in 2022.

Speaking

According to TripIt, I took 13 trips, to 15 cities, in one country (USA). Only a few were work-related. That's three more trips than 2020, and I had 77 days on the road (-8 from 2020).

My Speaker Deck profile shows 16 presentations at 14 events. Four of those were in-person, the rest were virtual.

jChampions Conferences with Ray Tsang
Richmond JUG
JavaLand
Colorado Springs Open Source Users Group
St. Louis Java User's Group
Denver Java Users Group
SpringOne with Brian Demers

Denver Open Source Users Group
The San Francisco Java User Group with Josh Long
ÜberConf
Joker<?> with Brian Demers
Connect.Tech
The Progressive Web Experience
Garden State Java User Group with Josh Long

My most-viewed presentation was Java REST API Framework Comparison from the Progressive Web Experience with 3.1K views.

My favorite conference experience was Summer Tech Forum in Crested Butte. My involvement was inspired by James Ward.

Look ?? -- I found @_JamesWard in the woods today! #CrestedButte #Singletrack #Colorado #SummerTechForum pic.twitter.com/rKbSMbbOa9
— Matt Raible (@mraible) August 18, 2021

I thouroughly enjoyed traveling to San Francisco to speak with Josh Long at the San Francisco JUG. It was a virtual event, but we spoke together from his home.

Let the games begin with @starbuxman! #Java #SpringNative #JHipster pic.twitter.com/0KSRTd89e5
— Matt Raible (@mraible) September 28, 2021

I hope to do more of this in 2022. ÜberConf, Connect.Tech, and the Progressive Web Experience were also in-person. Hanging out with fellow speakers (especially James Ward and Pratik Patel) after speaking was a rejuvenating experience for my soul. 🤗

There's even some #UsualSuspects here! Good to see you @_JamesWard and @knight_cloud. 😀 pic.twitter.com/2CSBTRvG7U
— Matt Raible (@mraible) October 7, 2021

Community

In the past, I used this section to talk about meetups I've started like Developer Ski Days and Devoxx4Kids Denver. We didn't host any events in 2021, but I might try to organize a developer ski day soon.

Projects

I continued to maintain OktaDev Schematics in 2021. The project had 16 releases. Working on it helps me keep up with changes in Angular, React, Vue, Ionic, and React Native and helps ensure I know how to use the latest Okta SDKs. According to npm-stat.com, it had ~60K downloads in 2021.

My other projects are related to JHipster. I didn't contribute anything significant, but I helped QA Micro Frontends support and Spring Boot upgrades. We had eight releases and ~1.8 million downloads in 2021. 🤓

I did not work on the JHipster Mini-Book in 2021, but I hope to update it for JHipster 7 this year. I said that last year, but it's actually on my calendar for February 1. You can watch my progress on GitHub.

Ionic for JHipster had four releases in 2021 and around ~12K downloads.

Personal

My parents are city kids that retired in the backwoods of Montana. They can't explain why they did it, but they know that a chasing the sun trip is part of what makes them happy in the winter. We started doing this family trip in the last few years, starting with New Orleans in 2020 and continuing with Hawaii in 2021.

I was gung ho for ski season last year and rented a condo for six weeks in downtown Winter Park to ski during the week. My stats for the season were decent: 28 days cross-country skiing, 23 days downhill. I had 51 combined days!

Abbie Graduates!

Shortly after ski season is high school graduations. We had a graduate this year and couldn't be prouder of Abbie! Jack was looking pretty suave too.

We enjoyed a rafting trip near Salida on Father's Day.

I took July off and we traveled to Washington, Montana, and Cape Cod.

Abbie moved on to college at the University of Colorado at Boulder. It's been really nice having her close (60 minute drive) and far enough away that she doesn't plan parties at our house. Jack planned his birthday party at the ranch this year. It exceeded all expectations.

We lost one of our cats, Mittens, while we were in Hawaii. Sagan, our crazy border collie, passed away this fall. They both lived full lives and made us smile a lot. 😢

Hefe the Bus and Stout the Syncro

We didn't do much with Hefe and Stout this year show-wise. I did enter both of them in the VWs on the Green virtual show. They both won first place in their respective categories. I have high hopes for more events in 2022! My favorite car-related event of the year was when I talked some fraternity brothers into bringing their cars to a show in my backyard. If you have a classic car and live in Colorado, you should join us next year. Search for "Chenango Car Show". It's typically in early August.

2022

Professionally, I hope to travel a bit this year. Okta is expanding globally, and I'd love to visit Australia and Japan to help make that happen. I have Devnexus, Devoxx France, and Spring I/O on my radar for conferences.

I hope to contribute frequently to JHipster. Microfrontends support works excellent for Angular; I hope to see the same for React and Vue. My Q1 goal is to make Spring Native work with JHipster. I also hope to help integrate GraphQL. I said that last year, but now Spring has official support with Spring GraphQL!

I'll be on summer vacation for a month, once again. It's a tradition I started a couple of years ago to prove that full-time can be as good as contracting (because of unlimited time off). This year's adventure will start with a trip to Alaska to celebrate my parents' 50th anniversary!

Last year, I said I'd like to ski 42 days for both downhill and nordic. Looking back, that seems a bit ambitious. I ended up with 28 days of cross-country skiing and 23 days downhill. That doesn't seem too bad. For 2022, I've purchased both the Epic and Ikon ski passes, and I hope to exceed my stats from last year. Heck, I'll be happy with 20 days of each! The snow conditions have been terrible until two weeks ago.

Last year, we failed to pull any rafting permits. That means we had no lengthy family trips with our rafting family. We had a few day trips, but were often left with a longing for more. Our rafting family is anxious to rendezvous in 2022.

COVID motivated us to become homebodies and our landscaping project turned out quite nice. We now have several beautiful flower gardens, trees, a fabulous fire pit, a basketball court, and a new carport.

I only have one goal for 2022: smile more.

I think that goal will be easily accomplished if I see your smiling faces. I hope 2022 is your best year! 🥳

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

2020 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 16:34:30 -0700

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

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

Matt Raible — Sun, 9 Feb 2020 20:56:56 -0700

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.

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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

Matt Raible — Tue, 29 Jan 2019 13:25:24 -0700

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

2017 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Wed, 31 Jan 2018 16:16:39 -0700

2017 was a year with many changes. We changed presidents, Stormpath joined forces with Okta, our daughter started high school, and we lost two of our precious pets. On the upside, I traveled to many beautiful places, talked to developers around the world, and became a Devoxx Champion. Not only that, but our two classic VWs ran like champs the whole year. We put upwards of 10K adventure miles on our Syncro, and another couple thousand on Hefe the Bus.

I'm going to look back on 2017 using the following categories.

Professional

2017 was the first year I started with a full-time job in January since the turn of the century. I'd been an independent consultant for most of my career. Stormpath enticed me enough with their people and vision that I became a full-time employee with them in September 2016.

January started slow, but I started to hit my stride in February when I traveled to Sweden for Jfokus and skiing. Coincidentally, it was shortly after the conference that I found myself negotiating with Eric Berg about joining forces with Okta. I remember it well: I was sitting in the hotel lobby, with James Ward and Ray Tsang, when it all happened. Shortly after, we were sitting in the back of the bus on our way to a skiing adventure.

A week later, I was back in the states and the deal with Okta was happening. Throughout January, I thought the possibility was 20%. When I returned home from Jfokus, it was full-on happening. In fact, I was one of the last ones to sign the deal, causing panic and a few phone calls in the process. Most of the folks at Stormpath became Okta employees on February 27.

The awkward part was we knew about the deal when we traveled to Devnexus. We had a Stormpath booth there, and we were unable to tell everyone there would be no more signups after Friday, February 24.

The following week, we had a massive onboarding with everyone. There was excitement in the room and many high spirits, so it was a fun day. Shortly after, we entered into a 90-day quiet period for Okta's IPO. It was strange to start a new job with a new company and not be able to talk about it.

Okta didn't have much for SDKs when we started writing blog posts in March. However, it supports standards like SAML and OAuth, so I was able to put together some posts using Spring Security.

I wrote about my anticipation for Devoxx US and France in mid-March.

Towards the end of March and early April, I had some luck integrating with Angular, both with Okta's Sign-In Widget and OpenID Connect.

In early April, I hosted an Angular Workshop and spoke about Cloud Native Progressive Web Apps with Josh Long at Devoxx France.

We're about to kick off the part deux of our Cloud Native Apps series with @mraible @DevoxxFR pic.twitter.com/0GCSAiUgs4
— Josh Long (???, ???) (@starbuxman) April 6, 2017

On my flight home from that trip — on April 7 — Okta had its IPO. Things started trucking along after the IPO. I wrote a plethora of blogs posts in April and published them over the spring and summer months.

Speaking

This year, speaking became a part of my job, so I spoke frequently. According to TripIt, I took 29 trips, to 41 cities, and 14 countries. I traveled 115,456 miles and spent most of my time on United. By my count, I spoke at 22 events.

I wrote about my experiences at J-Spring, Devoxx UK, GeeCON, and Spring I/O in May, and Devoxx Poland in June. Spring I/O was especially fun because Trish met me in Barcelona.

I was featured on the main Okta blog in late September in Developer DNA: A Day in the Life of Matt Raible.

As the year was waning, I wrote about life as an open source developer and my adventures to Devoxx Belgium and Devoxx Morocco.

In my blog post about SpringOne and The Rich Web Experience, I included a picture of my 2017 conference lanyard collection.

To end the year, I published some popular posts on the Okta Developer blog:

Devoxx4Kids

We held two Devoxx4Kids Denver workshops in 2017: MIT App Inventor - Anyone Can Build Apps and Fruit Ninja with Scratch. These classes were taught by Regina Peyfuss and Melissa McKay, respectively. I'm happy to announce they've both since joined the board for Devoxx4Kids Denver and have been doing a great deal to help organize things.

I ?? the smell of learning in the morning. #Devoxx4Kids Denver in full swing w/ @rpeyfuss at @ThriveWorkplace. Awesome space and instructor! pic.twitter.com/a6Ac1qAJh0
— Matt Raible (@mraible) June 3, 2017

Our next meetup will be on March 10 and will be taught by Melissa's daughter, Kaitlyn! I think it's pretty cool we have an opportunity to have kids teaching kids. I've also been working with Jay Zimmerman and UberConf to have an UberKids this summer.

Projects

AppFuse is no more, so I primarily work on JHipster and the JHipster-Mini Book these days. I refactored JHipster's OAuth authentication in September to use an external identity provider (e.g., Keycloak or Okta) instead of an embedded one. I wrote about how to use OpenID Connect with JHipster on the Okta Developer blog in October.

With the help of InfoQ, we released v4.0 of the JHipster Mini-Book on September 22nd. It's hard to believe, but it's still up-to-date!

Personal

I wrote down my goal at the beginning of 2017: to drive Hefe up the California coast. In July, I wrote about why that goal got moved to my bucket list:

I wanted to spend our summer vacation driving our VWs up the California coast, on a mammoth 3500-mile road trip over two weeks. However, when a landslide happened near Big Sur, I knew it was probably best to move this road trip from my yearly goals to my bucket list. Instead, we opted to drive to Montana and spend a couple of weeks vacationing in my childhood playground.

We had a blast road-tripping, hiking, and rafting in Montana. A highlight for me was hiking to Rumble Lake, somewhere I hadn't been to since I was a kid.

The drive home through Jackson Hole and the Flaming Gorge was pretty nice as well!

My only other personal post in the first half of 2017 was Farewell to the 2016-17 Ski Season.

I had a blast skiing in Winter Park, Copper, Crested Butte, Sweden, Steamboat, Tahoe, and Montana.

The highlight of the season was skiing at Big Sky Resort in Montana. We're super pumped that next year's ski pass includes Big Sky!

In early August, we rafted the Salmon River in Idaho with our rafting family and had an epic trip.

Jack turned 13 in late August and we had a splendid weekend with my folks in town.

Abbie and Tucker won their division at the SummerFest Horse Show in September!

Abbie didn't want a birthday party this year, so we surprised her with one instead. It's hard to believe she's a freshman in high school. She's even driving us around with her learner's permit these days! Her birthday was a bittersweet celebration since we had to say goodbye to Jake earlier that day.

We welcomed a new Australian Shepperd-Border Collie mix puppy into our home in December. Her name is Daisy.

A post shared by Matt Raible (@vwsforlife) on Dec 2, 2017 at 3:24pm PST

Stout and Hefe

Stout 5.0 and Hefe 3.0 were released in early May. Stout had his hood painted and Hefe got a kick-ass stereo system installed.

For Hefe's stereo, I tried going phone-only for a controller. This turned out to be a bad idea, mostly due to bit Play HD and its terrible mobile app. Also, Hefe is lowered and a bit bumpy in the front, so trying to use a touch screen while driving doesn't work very well. He's in the shop now getting a new deck installed.

We drove Stout over 5000 miles this summer and he's been super dependable. Now that he's reliable, we often marvel that he really is the greatest car ever built.

2018

Professionally, I'll be speaking at a lot of Java User Groups in 2018. The Developer Relations team at Okta is focusing on large US cities this year, so you won't see me overseas as much. This is nice because it means I get to spend more time with my family. I have received offers to speak in other countries where they'll pay for all my expenses. If expenses are covered, Okta will allow me to travel overseas. However, I've been telling people I'm only willing to speak if they'll pay for a family member's flight too. It seems to be a win-win so far: most conferences have declined, and I don't have to travel as much. If I find a conference that is willing pay, I'll get to travel with someone from my awesome family!

I'll be coding loads of example apps and writing heaps of tutorials for the Okta Developer blog and I'm super excited about our Iterate Conference next month. I'll also continue to help organize DJUG and Devoxx4Kids Denver.

Romantically, Trish and I hope to never stop dating with the 2-2-2 rule. I look forward to a year with running VWs, long dog walks, and disconnecting to connect. As for goals, I'll go for the ol' standby: to be happy and content with what I have. 😊

2016 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Wed, 1 Feb 2017 17:46:59 -0700

When I wrote my 2015 year in review blog post, I was certain my '66 VW Bus would finally be finished. AND IT IS! Do I need to even write this year's post? Yes, because I want to tell you how awesome it is to own this incredible-looking, awesomely-fast, mean machine.

But first, let's review the year using the following categories.

Professional

I had two different clients in 2016: CA Technologies and Stormpath. I worked full-time for CA in January and February, helping them adopt AngularJS. To help them learn about Angular 2, I rewrote my AngularJS getting started and testing tutorials for Angular 2. The first versions were published at Getting Started with Angular 2 and Testing Angular 2 Applications. I refactored both tutorials to use Angular CLI in August and published Getting Started + Testing with Angular CLI and Angular 2 (RC5). Since then, I've been maintaining an up-to-date version on GitHub.

In April, I started working half-time for CA and half-time for Stormpath. For Stormpath, I worked on their Java SDK and helped them launch their Java SDK 1.0. I really enjoyed working with the team at Stormpath. This led to me think about my priorities in life. I realized that I wanted to work remotely, get paid to speak at conferences, and get paid to work on open source. Stormpath provided me with all of these opportunities and I started working full-time for them on September 26, 2016.

In May, I joined the board of the Denver Java User Group. I've been helping organize meetups, find speakers, and secure location sponsors. If you're interested in speaking at DJUG in 2017, please let me know!

I wrote about life as an open source developer in early November. At that time, I mentioned being more stressed than I was used to. My stress levels continued to be high through the end of the year because I get to create my own job. I get to choose the conferences I submit too, the talks I create, the example apps, the blog posts, everything. There's so much I want to do that I've had to learn to scale back and not try to do so much at once.

I didn't blog much on raibledesigns.com in Q4 of 2016, but I wrote a bunch of technical posts on the Stormpath blog.

According to TripIt, I flew 59K miles in 2016.

Speaking

I spoke at nine different events in 2016. You can find links to my presentations on my presentations page.

February: Denver Open Source Users Group
April: Colorado Springs Open Source Software Meetup Group and Devoxx France
June: Devoxx UK and GeekOut
August: HTML5 Denver Users Group
September: vJUG24
November: Rocky Mountain Software Symposium
December: The Rich Web Experience

My most memorable conference in 2016 was Devoxx France because I took Abbie and we experienced springtime in Paris together.

Becoming a Java Champion at Devoxx France was certainly a surprise too!

I really enjoyed taking my mom with me to Devoxx UK and GeekOut. It was my first time speaking at both conferences and I was impressed by both personnel and venues.

Devoxx4Kids

We only had two Devoxx4Kids Denver workshops in 2016: Introduction to Object-Oriented JavaScript using Bitsbox and Exploring JavaScript. The second one was taught by the world-famous Venkat Subramaniam.

The great @venkat_s teaching #Denver kids about JavaScript. So awesome! #Devoxx4Kids pic.twitter.com/CqOW5ma6Cq
— Matt Raible (@mraible) September 10, 2016

I'd like to plan a few Devoxx4Kids Denver events in 2017, so please let me know if you have a topic you'd like to present.

Projects

I stopped working on AppFuse in February and announced I was mothballing the project in April. Reminder: the demos, documentation and bug tracker will cease to exist on April 30, 2017.

I spent many late nights in July through October updating the JHipster Mini-Book for JHipster 3.x. On the book's blog, I wrote about what's changed and how to buy a print version.

Personal

I wrote down my goals at the beginning of 2016:

Finish the bus
Win a trophy
Ski a lot
Raft a lot
Stay in shape
July in Montana
Happy Trish
Ionic/Angular2 app
Learn how to make a good dirty martini

I'm proud to the bus is finished and it won Best in Class at VWs on the Green.

Today was a great day! Won best in class Bus, Camper, Pickup Custom 1949-67 Split Window. #vwbus

A photo posted by Matt Raible (@vwsforlife) on May 15, 2016 at 2:41pm PDT

We skied a lot, but never took our own raft on river. I stayed in shape and have records to prove it thanks to 21-Points Health and dailymile. This summer, I spent seven weekends in a row away from home; with three weeks in Montana. Not quite a month, but close. Trish was happy because we journeyed to Hawaii to celebrate her parents' 50th anniversary.

Her happiness continued when she found her dream home in July. We moved into The Raible Ranch in September.

Weeks later, she and Abbie bought their dream horse named Tucker. I wrote about him in Abbie's 14th birthday post.

I learned how to make an excellent dirty martini, but did not find the time to create an Ionic/Angular2 app.

The Ski Bus (aka Stout)

Stout the Syncro spent a couple months getting upgrades in late 2015: transmission rebuilt, fridge installed, Propex heater installed, and new headlights. We leveraged these improvements on an epic family road trip to Jekyll Island (Georgia) for my Dad's 70th birthday.

We made it back to Denver just in time for the AFC Championship game and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves tailgating beforehand.

Watching the Broncos win Super Bowl 50 was definitely a highlight of 2016.

We took Stout on a bunch of ski trips and winter camped several times. The Propex heater and Reflectix insulation worked great and kept it around 50°F even when it was 0°F out.

I bought a new mountain bike (Yeti SB 95) in May and Trish and I drove the van to Syncro Solstice in Moab. We were hoping for a weekend of mountain biking and 4-wheeling, but Trish had a bad crash and stabbed herself in the chest with a handlebar. That ended our 4x4 aspirations for the weekend, but the van ran great!

The other major road trip for Stout was when I drove from Colorado to Montana over four days. I drove to Grand Junction on Monday evenning, worked during the day on Tuesday, went mountain biking in the afternoon, then drove to Jackson Hole that night. Wednesday, I worked in Jackson Hole, went mountain biking, then drove to Montana that night. I woke up early on Thursday and made it to Missoula to start working promptly at 8am. That evening, I drove to Seeley Lake and setup camp at the first annual Bob Marshall Music Festival. Trish flew in on Friday and we danced and celebrated my birthday all weekend.

The Porsche Bus (aka Hefe)

Hefe's debut at VWs on the Green was a wild success and we had a lot of fun that day. In June, we showed him at Colorado Concours d'Elegance and won a blue ribbon. We trailered him to Montana and drove him in the Swan Valley parade and the Seeley Lake parade.

We hauled him back in Denver to be in the Colorado Bug-In at Bandimere Speedway, where he got second in the custom/radical class.

On the way home from that event, one of the rear shocks blew up from rubbing against the axle. That was the beginning of the end for my air suspension. I drove Hefe to Kustom Coach Werks in early August to have fix the doors (they had gaps) and tune the suspension. When they finished, I called it "release 1.5".

I drove Hefe for a month without rear shocks and didn't have too many issues; it was just bouncy in the back. Buses at the Brewery in Colorado Springs was a fun event and the first time that Hefe went viral on Facebook. This has happened a few times since then. He gets thousands of likes from being featured on a VW fan page.

Before the drive to Colorado Springs, I noticed the rear suspension was missing bolts, causing the rear end to shimmy. I was able to find a new bolt and fix it, but the problem with bolts falling out continued in September. I tried smaller wheels (15" Fuchs), but the suspension was still really stiff in front. Because of the suspension issues, I shipped it back to KCW in October. They ripped out the air suspension and replaced it with coil over shocks, making for a much better ride. It now can cruise at 90 mph easily and looks great all the time! After these repairs, it's now Hefe 2.0.

If you're interested in reading about the suspension decision process, or to see pictures, see this thread on KCW's forums.

2017

Professionally, I'll be speaking at a lot of conferences and meetups this year. As a Developer Evangelist for Stormpath, I'm expected to speak at least once a month. I did a webinar on Getting Started with Angular in mid-January and I'm traveling next week to Jfokus in Stockholm. See my future engagements for more scheduled events.

I suspect most of the coding I'll be doing will be related to Stormpath's SDKs, both Angular and Java. Of course, I'll help out on JHipster as much as I can too. With JHipster 4 on the horizon, there will be a lot of work to update the JHipster Mini-Book.

Hefe 3.0 will be released this spring after I get a sweet sound system installed. As far as personal goals for 2017, I have only one: to drive Hefe up the California coast. With a new house, two running VWs, and a job that's a helluva lot of fun, life is pretty awesome right now.

2015 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Tue, 12 Jan 2016 16:21:15 -0700

2015 was the year The Bus was supposed to be finished. If you read my year in review from last year, you'll see I was certain of it. To be fair, I did have estimates from people that had me expecting it to be done in July. The good news is the interior was finished in July. Since then, it's been back at Reincarnation getting the finishing touches applied. I believe if it was worked on for a week straight, it could be finished. It's that close. So close I can taste it. THIS will be the year!

For this Year in Review post, I'll same the format I've used the last few years.

Professional

I had four different clients in 2015. The first was in the healthcare industry, the second in the API hosting space, one in the fashion industry and one in computer software. For the first client, I wrote about integrating Node.js, Ruby and Spring with Okta's SAML support. I also helped them adopt and learn AngularJS. Learning about Foundation and Angular was a nice treat too.

In March, I revisited how to setup your own software company. In that post, I wrote about how I felt when valuing time over money.

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to work 20 hours per week instead of 40. It was one of the greatest work-life experiences I've had to date. I was still able to pay all my bills, and I had time during each-and-every-day to do something fun. When working 40 hours per week, exercising and cooking dinner were somewhat of a chore. When I flipped to working less, work became the chore and exercise and cooking became the fun parts of my day. I read somewhere recently that if Americans valued health over wealth, we'd be a lot better off. I felt like I did this when working less and that I was rich in time.

The second client asked me to do a research project where I tried a bunch of API platforms (e.g. Apigee and 3Scale) and wrote up an analysis about five different stories they provided. It was a fun project where I learned a lot.

In April, I went to work at a fashion industry startup in downtown Denver. I wrote JavaScript, CSS and HTML for them for most of the year. The location afforded me the ability to discontinue my office at Thrive, a co-working space in Denver. While I missed having kombucha and local craft beer on tap, I loved the standup desk and the office environment with conversations, banter and laughter between desks.

In November, I picked up a new client that I'm currently working with. They've recently adopted Angular and I've enjoyed the experience of working with a team of UI developers. We're putting a fresh UI on a legacy product and the team has been able to move really quickly. They're also in the Bay Area so it's been fun traveling to Silicon Valley once a month. My contract with them ends this spring.

Speaking

I spoke about Angular at Denver's Open Source User Group in February and about JHipster at Denver's Java User Group in April. In the second half of the year, I re-joined the conference circuit, starting with UberConf in July. September brought me to SpringOne 2GX in Washington, DC and the Angular Summit in Boston.

Trish and I giggled with glee as we returned to the Devoxx Belgium in November.

My JHipster talk was a hit and we loved our brief tour of Brugge.

As always, the people and the memories were the best part.

To end the year, I journeyed to Fort Lauderdale for the Rich Web Experience. After speaking, I worked remotely and networked for a few days. The networking lasted until the wee hours of the morning and good fun was had by all.

Devoxx4Kids

I didn't plan any Devoxx4Kids events until later in the year. The Denver Chapter watched Arun and Aditya Gupta speak about modding Minecraft in August. I also presented on setting up a Minecraft server in the cloud. In October, the talented Kellyn Pot'Vin-Gorman taught a class about coding simple games with the Raspberry Pi. It's always fun to see the kids' faces light up when they solve a programming problem.

This year, with the help of Tuliva, we hope to host one Devoxx4Kids class per quarter. If there's a particular topic or speaker you'd like to see, please let me know.

Projects

I released a new version of AppFuse in February and started working on the JHipster Mini-Book in March. To help provide updates about the book, I created a blogging app with JHipster and started www.jhipster-book.com. I wrote the book and created 21-Points Health as its example application. I open-sourced 21-Points on GitHub during my Devoxx presentation. Because of my writing and speaking about JHipster, I was invited to join the JHipster Team. I happily accepted; it's been a great group to work with.

The JHipster Mini-Book 1.0 was released on October 30, 2015. I wrote about how I wrote it a few days later.

Personal

I wrote down my goals at the beginning of 2015:

21-Points Fitness App
JHipster Mini Book (InfoQ)
Finish Bus
New House
Good Blood Pressure

I'm proud to say I accomplished three out of five. The Bus didn't get finished and we failed to sell our house. I did create 21-Points Health, wrote The JHipster Mini-Book and maintained good health all year.

We weren't planning on selling our house this year; we wanted to find a new house and rent out our current one. However, we found a house we loved (small house, lots of land) in the heart of DTC and putting our house on the market was the best way to try and get it. Our offer failed and we endured the house-is-on-the-market dance through July and August. It was pretty sweet living in such a clean house, but we got tired of living in a de-personalized abode. We took it off the market in September and plan on renting it once we find our next home.

The worst part of the year started with a phone call from a friend in the early afternoon on October 7. My good friend, Cletus, called to notify me that he'd found our friend, Jason Miller, dead that morning. Jason was a pledge class brother of Cletus and mine in the Chi Phi Fraternity at DU. You might remember Jason from my trip to Oktoberfest in 2008. He was one of my best friends.

Jason was a heckuva guy and an awesome friend. He always inspired laughter and smiles with his witty humor. He will be missed, but not forgotten. Jason had a zest for life and a good time that we've resolved to remember annually with a brother's trip to an exotic gambling destination. This year, we'll be traveling to Las Vegas for St. Patty's Day and March Madness.

The Ski Bus

The Syncro Ski Bus had a pretty good year. We took it on many skiing adventures, with trips to Steamboat, Crested Butte, and Telluride.

We enjoyed a couple overnights and tailgated a few times at our favorite ski area: Mary Jane.

I took Jack and we met my parents in Moab in May for Syncro Solstice 2015. We took it for some off-roading, busted a cooling hose a couple times, and almost made it back to Denver.

That next weekend, we took it to VWs on the Green and showed it alongside The (under construction) Bus.

In July, we journeyed to Montana for the 4th of July. We drove our Westy in the Swan Valley parade while the kids rode on top and threw water balloons and candy to the crowd. We drove back from Montana in a single day (900 miles). I remember Wyoming well. Sirius XM was broadcasting the last Grateful Dead concert from Soldier Field and Trish was driving. She sang for hours, driving through the rain and fog while I dozed periodically.

Sewfine finished The Bus's interior in July. I wrote about this and many other things in Life Update: The Bus Project, New Gigs, New House and More.

A week later, I won a runner-up trophy for the Syncro at The Colorado Bug-In at Bandimere Speedway. On my birthday, July 16, we drove it to Dinosaur National Monument for a week-long raft trip, starting at Gates of Lodore. I hit my first deer that night, driving at 3am and doing minimal damage to our German-engineered RV. The deer broke the headlight, but not the bulb.

We had some more camping/rafting adventures with it in the fall, but eventually had to take it to the shop for a transmission rebuild in November. While it was getting repairs, we upgraded a few things. It now has a South African grill, modern headlights, a new fridge and a Propex heater. It's finally become the ultimate camping vehicle, for summer or winter.

2016

Professionally, I plan to continue speaking at conferences this year. I've submitted a few proposals to Devoxx France, Devoxx UK and I've agreed to speak at Geek Out. And did you hear that SpringOne 2016 is in Las Vegas?!

I suspect this will be the year of Angular 2 and microservices. Watch this project to see how JHipster implements microservices. I plan to pump out a release of AppFuse in the near future, implementing #NoXML and moving to Java 8.

Trish and I hope to move into a new house this year, but won't be disappointed if we don't find the right one. We have another year before Abbie starts high school at 7am.

I have no real big projects planned, except for driving The Bus. We do have a few fun vacations planned. In fact, I'm writing this while riding in the back of our Westy. My parents and I are road-tripping from Denver to Jekyll Island, Georgia. We're taking the scenic route to see some places we've never been and staying at RV Parks with the top popped. We arrive in New Orleans this afternoon and will be staying two nights to enjoy the culture and cuisine.

My Dad turns 70 this weekend and we planned a family vacation to celebrate. His brother and sister are joining us and Trish and the kids are flying in this weekend. We figured a road trip across the country was appropriate since we've done so many together and I happen to own the ultimate vehicle for car camping. Below is a map of our route.

In June, we'll be celebrating Trish's parents 50th wedding anniversary in Kauai. With Trish's brother, sister and children joining in, everyone is sure to have a fantastic vacation. I hope to continue the fun by working remotely from Montana in July.

When I drive the finished bus in the Swan Valley parade on the 4th of July, I'll be smiling from ear-to-ear. 2016 is the year! The long wait will be over soon...

2014 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Sat, 31 Jan 2015 09:37:43 -0700

2014 was destined to be a spectacular year. When I wrote my thoughts down last January, I thought the Broncos would win the Super Bowl and my VW Bus restoration project would be finished by summer. To focus on finishing the bus project, I didn't submit any talks to conferences. Instead of traveling to exotic locations, we opted to visit a bunch in our own backyard instead.

I should've known it'd be an interesting year when the Broncos flopped in the Super Bowl.

For this Year in Review post, I'll use the format I've used the last couple of years.

Professional

I had three different clients throughout the year, all in the health care industry. I continued working on a project with John Muir Health where we developed a hybrid mobile app. I wrote about what I learned in Documenting your Spring API with Swagger and Developing an iOS Native App with Ionic. Since I wrote the article about Swagger's Spring MVC support, it has become much easier to integrate; now it only requires an @EnableSwagger annotation.

In April, I started consulting with a small company in Alabama. I helped them modernize their tech stack and implemented a number of web services with Apache Camel. I wrote about this in a four-part series in September and October.

I continued leveraging Spring Boot in my client projects and wrote about Building a REST API with JAXB, Spring Boot and Spring Data at the end of that engagement.

In November, I had time off between clients. I visited my parents and their awesome retirement home in Montana. I also took some time to refactor AppFuse to be a bit leaner and meaner. I signed up with a new health care client in December. It's been an enjoyable experience so far, especially since I'm only working 20 hours per week this quarter.

I'm currently booked with clients through the end of March, but hoping to find one with a challenging project in April.

Speaking

To optimize cash flow towards the bus project, I didn't submit any talks to conferences in 2014. However, I did talk about Comparing JVM Web Frameworks at the Denver Open Source Users Group and vJUG in February. I also spoke at local user groups (DeRailed and HTML5 Users) about The Art of AngularJS in the first part of the year. In the fall, I participated in panels on unit testing at Denver Startup Week and building a personal brand at AirConf.

I hope to attend and speak at more conferences in 2015. To help facilitate this, I've published a list of talks I'd like to present.

Devoxx4Kids Denver

2014 was the inaugural year for Devoxx4Kids Denver. In April, I announced our first meetup. It was an Introduction to Server-Side Minecraft Programming, taught by Denver's own Scott Davis. It was a wild success and the kids had a great time hacking.

I didn't plan any events during the summer, but we held a couple workshops in the fall: one on littleBits and a second on Greenfoot. The kids had a lot of fun with littleBits thanks to Juan Sanchez of Tack Mobile.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend the Greenfoot workshop with Steve Pousty, but I heard it was awesome. Thanks again to Dan Allen for assisting with this class.

I haven't scheduled any Devoxx4Kids Denver meetups for 2015 yet. If you're interested in speaking, please let me know!

Projects

AppFuse: I didn't have many posts about AppFuse in 2014, but I did work on it from time to time. Upgrading its dependencies was a good way to stay up-to-date with open source frameworks, in addition to lots of reading. InfoQ covered the AppFuse 3.0 release and I continue to write for them.

In December, I removed 10,000 lines of XML from the project without affecting any functionality. In the past month, I've added support for generating CRUD for all its web frameworks (including AppFuse Light's). This includes Spring + FreeMarker, Stripes and Wicket. GWT support is still in progress. I hope to do a release soon; there's only 10 issues left as of this writing.

Roller: I didn't contribute any code to Apache Roller in 2014, but I upgraded this site to the latest release, upgraded to Java 8 + Tomcat 7, and integrated Wufoo Forms. I hope to make some scalability improvements to how I've deployed Roller in the near future.

Personal

I started off the year with a trip of a lifetime: Heli Skiing in British Columbia with CMH Gothics. An excerpt from my blog post:

Everyday was awesome, but Wednesday was incredible. It snowed 10 cm on Tuesday night, which turned into knee-deep powder and face shots. The hoots and hollers from everyone floating down forced my face into a sorta perma-grin. For many of us, it was the best skiing day of our entire lives. The video below tries to capture how much fun we had throughout the week, but ultimately fails. It's one of those things you have to experience to really appreciate. I ended up skiing around 80,000 vertical feet in four days.

After returning from British Columbia, Trish and I skied Breckenridge and Copper before taking the kids to Aspen for three feet of powder on Super Bowl weekend.

We skied all over Colorado in February and March. We even did some winter camping in the Syncro for Valentine's Day. It snowed a lot that night.

I wrote about all our skiing adventures in Farewell to the 2013-2014 Ski Season.

On April 10th, I reminisced that 10 years ago today, I bought a VW Bus. In that post, I explained some body-work quality issues the current restoration shop found. Nevertheless, I still thought it would be done in just a few more months.

We journeyed to Florida with Abbie and Jack for Spring Break. We relished in a super-fun family vacation where we golfed, swam and even spent a day frolicking with their Mom and fiancé (now husband), Dave. We're pretty proud that we're all still a family even though Julie and I are divorced. I wrote about our vacation in Spring Break in Florida: Golf, Beaches and Boats!

The hospitality from Trish's parents was like no other. I especially enjoyed a fishing trip with her Dad Joe in the Everglades. I love these people!

Our winter activities in the Syncro were incredible. Trish sold her Nissan Xterra (the one with the sick bass) in December. Yes, that's right - we only had one vehicle during ski season last year. The fact that it worked so well is amazing. In May, we kicked it up a knotch and drove it to Moab for Syncro Solstice. My parents went with us and we experienced fabulous weather and met a bunch of super-cool Vanagon owners.

We made record time from Moab back to Denver (5 hours). The next day is when things started to go downhill. I washed the engine for the VWs on the Green show. On that Monday, the engine started "lurching" where it seemed like it wasn't getting gas (it turned out to be caused by a lack of air). We drove the lurcher for several weeks, journeying to Campout for the Cause and a exhilarating raft trip down the Yampa River.

We had the lurching examined in mid-June by Rocky Mountain Westy; we also had them install some bumpers (for a better trailer hitch) and refreshed the tires.

The ol' van looked pretty good when our Dads arrived in Denver for some whitewater on the Arkansas.

In July, we skipped the annual road trip to The Cabin in favor of a romantic road trip to see old friends in Santa Fe. The Syncro's engine seized on that trip and I experienced my favorite breakdown ever. The engine froze at a gas station near our Ski Shack and I was able to walk home. Luckily, Trish's Dad had recently (over Father's Day weekend) gifted his Nissan Maxima to us. After a train ride to fetch our other car, our road trip continued and we celebrated our first anniversary at The Broadmoor.

After we returned from Santa Fe, I turned 40 years old. We rocked out a Journey concert to celebrate and Trish surprised me with a birthday visit from my kick-ass sister. The following evening, a bunch of friends took me on a Craft Brewery Tour in a school/prison bus. Both nights were epic.

At the end of July, Trish had one of her favorite photos featured on the cover of Whisky Magazine.

In August, we flew to Boston to celebrate Trish's Dad's 75th birthday. My parents joined us, we visited my Dad's family in New York and took the kids to the Big Apple. They loved the Statue of Liberty.

Abbie started middle school (6th grade) in mid-August and Jack started 4th grade. They looked great on their first day of school.

We were pumped about our new engine in the Syncro when we left Denver for Rafting the Green River through Desolation Canyon. We celebrated Jack's 10th birthday on that trip and had a very memorable expedition with some really cool people.

Trish's photo from our last night on the river makes me want do it all again.

In October, I started considering health over wealth when we embarked on a 21-day Sugar Detox. I'm proud to say that, as a result, I'm off blood pressure medication and continue to lose weight and feel better. We're cooking at home more than ever, exercising daily and I've lost almost 20 pounds in the process.

Medallion, the horse that Trish and Abbie were leasing (and almost ready to buy) got sick with colic on Friday, October 10. I remembered the day without looking at a calendar because Trish called me to tell me about his illness. She was out of town on a business trip and was absolutely distraught. She told me about the situation and asked me to visit Medallion while he endured extreme pain. I worked out of my van at the stables that day, checking on him every couple hours. They had to put him down that evening. Abbie took it pretty well when I told her a couple hours later, but there were heaps of tears later that night.

Our little girl turned 12 a few weeks later. The kids put on some dark costumes for Halloween.

A week later, I visited my parents in Montana. We played cribbage, ate scrumptious meals and trounced around the woods looking for bucks. I marveled at the beauty of my parents' retirement home.

I neglected to blog or tweet about my self-caused Syncro accidents in Q4 of 2014. Long story short: it's been getting body work done for quite some time (two accidents!) and I look forward to getting it back in tip-top-shape next week. Thank goodness for USAA insurance.

The biggest event of the year happened just before Christmas: THE BUS IS PAINTED!! HOLY CHRISTMAS PRESENT BATMAN!

2015

It's hard to believe that 2015 could possibly top 2014. I started the year heli-skiing and ended it with a painted bus. However, the bus isn't done yet. Last year, I wrote:

My goal for 2014 is singular: finish The Bus.

I continue that mission this year. I've negotiated a deal with ReinCARnation to have it done by April 1st. Yes, it seems strange that April Fools is the finished bus delivery date. However, I'm confident they'll make it happen. This could be the year I've dreamed about since I was in high school. It was in 1991 that I first fantasized about putting a 911 engine in a VW Bus.

This year, I hope to be cruise around Colorado in two running VW Busses. From there, I plan to surround myself with the laughter of our children, the enthusiasm of our border collies and the warmness of Trish's love. It's gonna be a really great year!

2013 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Fri, 31 Jan 2014 08:53:10 -0700

2013 was an amazing year: Trish and I got married, celebrated on a 'round-the-world honeymoon and invested in a new 4x4 VW Bus. I finally achieved my goal of vacationing 25% and I got to spend more than two months in the presence of my wonderful parents.

For this Year in Review post, I'll use the same format as I did last year:

Professional

For the last few years, I've generally had one client per year. That changed this year when my contract with Oracle ended in May. Fortunately, I had the opportunity to develop a cool dashboard application before I finished. I wrote about it in a four-part series.

I engaged in a month-long contract with Travelport to keep me busy in June. They hired me to develop a portal consolidation prototype, which I did with AngularJS, Grails and LDAP. I showcased that application at Devoxx in November.

In September, I started a new gig with John Muir Health. I was hired to help with their mobile architecture, and spent my first couple months doing front-end optimizing and helping get their MyJMH product released. Once the release was complete, I proposed a mobile architecture and started assisting with the development of their mobile application.

We're developing the Mobile API with Spring Boot. I wrote about my initial experience in A Webapp Makeover with Spring 4 and Spring Boot. My contract with John Muir Health is through the end of March and I hope to start something new shortly after.

In October, I started Writing for InfoQ and I've really enjoyed it so far. You can see the articles I've written on my author page or by clicking the links below:

Speaking

I spoke at five events in 2013:

Denver JUG on The Modern Java Web Developer and Java Web Security
Devoxx France on Comparing JVM Web Frameworks and Play vs. Grails
HTML5 Denver on Bootstrap
JavaOne: I spoke for the first time and received a Rock Star Award
Devoxx and a Nordic Countries Speaking Tour on The Modern Java Web Developer

It seems that folks liked my presentations since they were in the top 1% of most viewed on SlideShare in 2013.

Trish took many beautiful photos as part of our trip to Devoxx France.

We stopped in Iceland on the way home to see the Northern Lights.

Projects

AppFuse: I released AppFuse Light 2.2.1 in January and switched AppFuse from JSF's MyFaces to PrimeFaces in February. I blogged about AppFuse's GWT integration in March and celebrated the project's 10 year anniversary in April. AppFuse 3.0 was released just before Christmas.

Roller: I didn't contribute any code to the Roller project in 2013, but I did make this site responsive with CSS media queries.

Personal

Trish and I started our world travels in March with a trip to Magnificent Mexico. We had a wonderful time playing with old friends and renting a house on the beach.

Our trip to Paris and Iceland was a dream come true for Trish. Watching the Aurora Borealis dance in the sky is something I'll never forget.

To end the ski season in April, we completed the trifecta (3 ski resorts in 3 days) with a fun family weekend.

The last week of the ski season was epic, as I described in a life update.

The last week in Winter Park was the best skiing of the year. The first (Tuesday) afternoon, I started skiing around 1pm and it snowed all afternoon - resulting in several inches by the end of the day. The next day was smooth and empty, followed by a day of deep powder and knee-deep runs down Eagle Wind. I had one of the best runs of my life that day.

I wrote about the '66 Bus Project and how I removed it from Motorworks Restorations after six years.

We spent the first weekends in June on the Colorado River. One of the biggest highlights for me was catching a 16" Trout, right after Trish saw it jump and told me exactly where to cast my line. The fact that I was able to cast it to the precise spot was cool enough, but getting the fish on my line moments later was exhilarating. Shortly after, a majestic Bald Eagle flew over us and we all dropped our jaws in amazement.

Trish and I started a two month sabbatical in July to get married in proper fashion in the town I grew up in. She looked absolutely stunning.

During the ceremony, I surprised her with a 162-page book I built with my words and her pictures.

When asked if I'd take her as my lawfully-wedded wife, I shouted as "YES!" at the top of my lungs. Trish agreed enthusiastically and we were pronounced husband and wife.

Our wedding week was an unbelievably fun experience with many, many friends and family. We look forward to celebrating it over and over again as long as we live.

We had a day of rest following the wedding, then drove back to Denver to begin our 'round-the-world honeymoon without phones. We spent a month traveling to Ireland, Italy, Thailand and Fiji. It was a wonderful journey and we greatly enjoyed all the people, places and experiences.

We arrived back in the US at the end of August, just in time to celebrate Jack's 9th birthday.

In September, we got loud at the Broncos Home Opener, and experienced beautiful Colorado fall weather with trips to Estes Park and Aspen. In October, we traveled to Minnesota for a best friend's wedding. We also visited Pennsylvania to spend some time with Trish's parents.

We Bought a Ski Bus in October and celebrated Abbie's birthday in November. Shortly after, we departed on a whirlwind six-country speaking tour in Europe. We visited 14 countries in 2013.

In early December, we flew to Idaho to pickup our new Syncro. We anticipated a few VW Adventures when we bought the bus and haven't been disappointed.

The Syncro drove back to Denver just fine, but started experiencing cooling issues driving around town. We got it fixed and drove to Montana for Christmas. We broke down on Christmas Eve in Bozeman, tried to fix it, but eventually gave up and rented a car. Straightaway Motors replaced the thermostat over the next week and we were able to drive it back to Denver with no issues. It started overheating again a couple days later. We've only recently got it running smoothly, with help from Rocky Mountain Westy. You can read the full story on thesamba.com.

Christmas Vacation was spent at The Raible Homestead, enjoying my parents new retirement cabin and a sweet sledding hill.

We finished the year skiing at Big Mountain, where I learned how to downhill ski in grade school.

2014

My goal for 2014 is singular: finish The Bus. I finally found the restoration shop I wish I would've found years ago. They're very quick and efficient, and send me daily (picture) updates of their progress. With any luck, it'll be done in a couple months (sound familiar?).

Last year, I wanted to slow down and I feel like I did that on our honeymoon. My wife scoffs at that notion. This year, I hope to simply take more time to do things, instead of trying to cram many things into tight timelines.

I plan to spend less time traveling and speaking at conferences and more time at Volkswagen shows. With our 4x4 VW Syncro, we hope to camp, raft and spend quite a bit of time in the Rocky Mountains. We also hope to take the busses to a few art shows to show off Trish's majestic photos.

Professionally, I hope to continue developing HTML5 apps and APIs with JavaScript, CSS, Java and Groovy. I might dive back into Scala and I'm intrigued by Node.js and Spring Boot. Since I won't be doing as many conferences, the technologies I use will likely be driven by client engagements. I expect 2014 to be a big year for HTTP/2.

Last year, and the year before, we watched the Broncos fail miserably in the NFL playoffs. This year, they're in the Super Bowl. With a kick-ass Ski Bus, a Porsche Bus on the way, awesome kids and a great wife - 2014 is destined to be spectacular. I hope the Broncos are too!

2012 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Tue, 8 Jan 2013 13:15:24 -0700

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.

2011 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 09:45:20 -0700

2010 was an awesome year, but 2011 rocked the house! At the end of last year, I kept my goals simple:

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

As predicted, it was a spectacular year, but I only accomplished 50% of my goals. That is, Trish and I had a great time skiing (especially in Utah), moving in together, traveling the world and getting engaged in Versailles. I even satisfied some 5-year goals: building a sauna in my basement and getting a ski shack in the mountains.

However, I didn't get much done with The Bus. Or rather, the guys at MotorWorks Restorations didn't drain me for all I'm worth in 2011. We did make good progress with estimating the final cost and obtaining many hard-to-find parts though. I now have a Porsche 911 Engine (1983 3.0L 6 cylinder), a Porsche 901 5 speed transmission, Porsche "Turbo Twist" wheels and a Custom Air Ride Front Beam from Franklin's VW Works. The thing that slowed our progress the most was the custom beam, as it took almost 6 months from order to delivery. When it arrived in September, I decided to put things on hold. I didn't want to get my bus back in the midst of winter and not be able to drive it.

In January, I started working at Overstock.com and flew out to Salt Lake City the first two weeks to ramp up. In setting up my development environment, I discovered some inefficiencies and wrote about how I fixed them in Making Code Generation Smarter with Maven. I also discovered that JRebel slowed my build process down by almost 50% and stopped using it as part of my daily process. Now I simply run in debug mode or use fancy frameworks that allow instant reload.

At the end of the month, I skied Alta for the first time on a blue bird day. That night, I flew back to Denver, had a gorgeous lunch ride in 70°F weather on Friday afternoon, then picked up my lovely girlfriend, Trish, and drove to Crested Butte for a weekend of skiing with James Ward and friends. It was my first time visiting Crested Butte and I can see why people call it Paradise.

As of February 1st, Trish and I both had 17 ski days. As I'm writing this, we're both up to 14 for this season and very proud to say Abbie and Jack each have 10. Both kids are shredding like I've always dreamed they would.

My parents (both retired) came to visit for the month of February and helped me start building a sauna in my basement. This was something I've wanted to do for years, so it was a lot of fun getting things started. While we didn't finish construction, we did get the plumbing/electrical done, stove installed and walls framed. We also had a fun night with Chef Navarro and Friends.

The rest of my posts in February were purely technical. I wrote about how I implemented extensionless URLs with Tapestry, Spring MVC, Struts 2 and JSF. Then I started delving into security-related topics, largely motivated by a new feature I was working on at Overstock. When I wrote about Implementing Ajax Authentication using jQuery, Spring Security and HTTPS, I explained what I was trying to accomplish.

The feature hasn't been released yet, but basically boils down to allowing users to login without leaving a page. For example, if they want to leave a review on a product, they would click a link, be prompted to login, enter their credentials, then continue to leave their review. The login prompt and subsequent review would likely be implemented using a lightbox. While lightboxes are often seen in webapps these days because they look good, it's also possible Lightbox UIs provide a poor user experience.

I was able to get everything working, posted a demo and wrote about upcoming conferences in Las Vegas and Kraków. In that article, I described a new talk I was going to create: Webapp Security: Develop. Penetrate. Protect. Relax. I ended the month with a post on how to fix XSS in JSP 2.

On February 25th, I experienced The Greatest Snow on Earth with thigh-deep powder and face shots on every run.

That night, we saw Hot Buttered Rum and woke up early for 27" of fresh powder at Alta. The picture of Trish free-heeling at Alta is one of my favorites of the year.

In early March, we experienced a suite night at the Avs game, then I kept it technical and upgraded this blog to Apache Roller 5.0, RC4. I upgraded AppFuse to JSF 2, wrote about JSR 303 and web framework support and added search to AppFuse using Compass. When writing about JSF 2, I mentioned replacing Ajax4JSF with RichFaces. 9 months later, it seems like PrimeFaces has more momentum, so I may try that instead.

For St. Patrick's Day, we flew to Vegas for TSSJS and had a blast. Not only did my talks go well, but we had a bunch of friends in town and had much success gambling the nights away.

After delivering my Comparing JVM Web Frameworks talk, I had a very interesting conversation with James Strachan. He recommended I take a look at CoffeeScript and Jade. A couple months later, when I was thinking of talks for Devoxx, I added these to my list of technologies to learn and submitted a talk about HTML5 with Play Scala, CoffeeScript and Jade.

That Friday, we returned to Denver, got a good night's sleep then headed on a hut trip in Colorado's High Country. The name of the hut was Peter Estin Hut and it was a bit of a hike to get to. My friend, Joe, set my expectations correctly when he warned me it'd be a 5 hour death march. It took us 4 hours, 30 minutes and we skied up 2200 vertical feet of switchbacks.

Trish and I started off April with a bang by moving in together, then embarking on a whirlwind trip of two opening days with a stopover in Kraków. We flew Business Class from Chicago to Munich (releasing AppFuse 2.1 just before departing) and were very impressed with Kraków's Old Town upon arrival.

On that trip, I especially enjoyed meeting Trish's brother for the first time and watching the Red Sox win their first game of the year.

After returning, I realized I lost a lot of data in my Roller 5 upgrade and wrote about what happened and how I recovered it. Then we bid farewell to the 2010-2011 ski season and got ready for mountain bike season.

For next year, I think I'll keep my goal at 30 days. If everything works out as planned, we'll have a place in the mountains this fall and it'll be a bit easier to hit the slopes without sitting in traffic. For now, I'm pumped about the beginning of mountain bike season.

May arrived and Trish and I started looking for a place in the mountains. We found an very cool cabin, but later decided it was too nice and we'd rather have a condo. I finished The Basement Sauna Project and wrote about Java Web Application Security: Java EE 6, Spring Security and Apache Shiro.

On May 21st, we again visited Winter Park and Fraser to look at condos, then drove back to Denver for U2 at Mile High Stadium. I'm not a big fan of U2, but this was quite possibly the best concert I've ever been to. The experience of 70,000+ fans, all screaming, doing the wave, and loving life was epic. We decided that night that we liked one of the condos more than the rest and put in an offer the following week. The kids headed off to Florida for a month with their Mom and we drove to Utah for Desert Rocks and mountain biking in Moab.

I Upgraded to Roller 5.0 in June and showed how to add a Facebook Like button. Next, I transcribed a couple more Java Web Application Security articles: programmatic login APIs and penetrating with Zed Attack Proxy.

The kids returned to us just before the annual Father's Day Camping Trip. We drove to Lake Granby and stayed at Stillwater Campground for the weekend.

From my Father's Day post:

I really enjoyed spending so much time with my family this weekend. The good news is we get to do it again when I meet them at The Cabin in Montana next week. In the meantime, Trish and I are off to Jazoon for a few days of fun in Switzerland.

A few days later, we were in Zurich for the first time, enjoying our accommodations and marveling at Switzerland's excellent transportation system. I experienced an interesting situation while speaking, but quickly forgot when we visited Rhine Falls, celebrated our anniversary at Gruelich and played in the Swiss Alps.

We arrived back in Denver at 6pm on Sunday, June 26th and I flew to Montana at 8am the next morning. I worked from The Cabin that week and wrote a book review for Agile Hiring.

I think Sean [Landis] does a great job in showing how you can apply agile principles (people over process, tracking tools, failing fast, continuous improvement, constant feedback) to improve your hiring process. As a person that interviews often, I think it also gives great insights into how companies interview and what they're looking for. I've often thought that being honest about my skills and what I'm looking for is a good tactic and this book seems to confirm that.

That weekend, it was the "90s Reunion" for the Seeley Swan High School, which I attended my freshman and sophomore year of high school. There were several highlights of the trip, but one of my favorites was our float in the Swan Valley Parade. Abbie came up with the idea (Happy Birthday America) and we decorated an old trailer with streamers, balloons and a birthday cake to celebrate. Abbie made up a song and sang it throughout the entire parade (with a portable microphone and amp).

I went swimming with my iPhone 4 that Sunday and Trish and her Dad showed up a few hours later. On the 4th, we had a blast celebrating the holiday with mine and my parents' old friends. The next day, we adventured to Glacier National Park, where Trish shot an awesome sunrise at Lake McDonald. She also captured a beautiful picture of The Cabin at sunset that week.

In between vacationing in Montana and writing about it, I wrote some technical posts:

We returned to Denver in mid-July and shipped the kids off to Florida just before my annual Birthday Golf Debacle. We teed off at Wellshire Golf Course and had one of the most well-behaved rounds in a few years. The next weekend, we closed on our "Ski Shack" in Fraser and I penned Another Dream Realized: Mountain Views. Trish's October Sunset photo is one of my favorite glimpses of our view.

Next, I blogged about How do you get started in programming? and we headed to the airport a few hours later for a whirlwind trip from Oregon to Cape Cod. That was a wonderful trip and it took me almost a month to write about it. We flew into Portland and spent the weekend hiking in Silver Falls and drinking good beer at the Oregon Brewers Festival and Edgefield. We stayed with my good friends Clint and Autumn (married in Costa Rica in 2008), who had their first child only a few weeks after our visit (August 26th).

We had an awful early flight out of Portland to Boston that Sunday. On Monday afternoon, we picked up Abbie and Jack from the Boston airport. They flew up from West Palm Beach on their first unaccompanied minors flight. We drove them to Cape Cod and settled into Trish's parents house near the water. The rest of the week, we had a blast with our friends Chris and Julie and the entire McGinity clan.

We spent the rest of August going to concerts at Red Rocks, beer festivals in Winter Park, mountain biking, hiking, taking the kids to the Ski Shack and playing with Crazy Sagan. In my only August post, I talked a lot about the Broncos, Hawaii, Devoxx and leaving Overstock.

That pretty much catches you up-to-date with the goings on in my life. As you can tell, it's been a great summer so far. I'm really looking forward to the fall too. Broncos season, a trip to Hawaii, learning new technologies, talking about them at Devoxx and a new gig.
...
Tomorrow is Jack's birthday. I gotta run ... it's time to go buy a bike, play a little golf, hit the pool and go to the BBQ before tonight's CD Release Party.

We watched proudly as Jack turned 7 the next day and loved his excitement when he got his first mountain bike.

September started with mountain breezes and fishing at Lake Granby. Lots of friends, family and delicious food make for a heckuva 3-day weekend. Jack was the only one to catch a fish and you couldn't wipe the smile off his face for the rest of the day.

I described my Digital Diet and wrote my first article related to my Devoxx talk: Integrating Scalate and Jade with Play 1.2.3. The 2nd weekend in September, we enjoyed a September Sports Weekend, going to two Rockies games and the Monday night Broncos Opener before heading to Kauai. While the Broncos didn't win that game, Trish's shot of Brett, Joe and I sums up many-a-game this season.

As expected, Kauai blew our minds. We saw several spectacular sunsets, did some Stand Up Paddling (it's harder than it looks), played golf, took a doorless helicopter ride and kayaked along the Na Pali coast.

We never got bored of the view from our room.

Upon our return, I tried to make CoffeeScript work with Scalate and integrated HTML5 Boilerplate with Play.

October was a quiet month on this blog. I only wrote two articles, one about increasing my developer happiness and another about developing with HTML5, CoffeeScript and Twitter's Bootstrap. Watching the Broncos in October was painful at first, buy many rejoiced when Tebow started against Miami (10/23) and we had the amazing comeback to win. We went to the next game against the Lions and were quickly shown they had a long ways to go. We dressed up as the Scary Family for Halloween and had a ball.

I made up for October's lack of writing by writing 9 articles in November. I started with complaints about Play Scala's Anorm and PostgreSQL, then celebrated Abbie's 9th Birthday with a Magic Show.

The next week, I wrote about my new MacBook Pro and iMac and more Scalate goodness for Play. At this point, I was scrambling to finish up my Play More! application for Devoxx and worked a lot of late nights. That weekend, I used PhoneGap to turn my webapp into a native app and finished everything in the nick of time. We flew to Paris that Monday, took the train to Antwerp on Tuesday and settled in for a memorable week of interesting talks.

That Saturday, we took the train back to Paris and checked into our hotel for a few days of romance. I proposed to Trish at Versailles on Sunday at sunset and we rolled around in our joy for a few days before we told any of our friends.

We flew back to the US the Wednesday before Christmas and spent the weekend in Boston with Trish's family. For full details of that trip, see Our Engaging Trip to Paris and Antwerp.

To end the year, I kept it light and only spun up one blog post in December: What have I been working on at Taleo? A week after writing that post, we moved to the Ski Shack for 3 weeks and enjoyed a wonderful holiday break with many visitors.

Yes, 2011 was a spectacular year. We traveled to four different countries, did a lot of camping and mountain biking and accomplished 2/3 of my 5 year goals (basement sauna and mountain views). I wrote a lot of technical blog posts in the 2nd half of the year; most inspired my extracurricular activities. I plan to continue that this year as I learn more about HTML5, Play Framework, Scala and CoffeeScript. At the end of last year's Year in Review, I wrote:

In 2011, I plan on doing two main things: keep rockin' it with Trish and finishing The Bus.

I think I can safely say I kept it rockin' with Trish - we're living together, engaged and still amazed we found one another. As for The Bus, I think MotorWorks Restorations and I are in a good position to make a final push and finish the sucker. My hope is to have it done by May so I can start driving it and taking it to VW Shows. In the meantime, Trish has started working on McGinity Photo full-time and loving it. We have trips planned to Stockholm (for Jfokus), Madrid (for Spring I/O) and Paris (for Devoxx Paris).

Last weekend, we witnessed one of the greatest playoff games ever when the Broncos beat the Steelers. I think the picture of Trish celebrating the final touchdown pretty much sums up 2011.

I look forward to all the skiing, celebrating, camping, traveling and bus rides in 2012. It's gonna be a fantastic year.

2010 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 11:42:01 -0700

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

Matt Raible — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:06:09 -0700

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.

2008 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:56:32 -0700

In 2005 and 2006, I did "A Year in Review" entries. 2007 was the year I got divorced, which probably motivated me to write a bit less. This year I'm back and ready to spend the next few hours writing, copying/pasting and linking like a madman. Hope you enjoy!

2008 was the year I traveled the world and developed a true passion for skiing. In January, my good friend Jason Miller moved back to Denver after quitting his job at Bear Stearns in NYC. We spent the first weekend in Nebraska working on Cletus's feedlot. The next week, my car stereo got stolen and I wondered if my bad knee would make it through the ski season (the good news is not only did I ski the rest of the season, but my knee healed itself over the summer).

At the end of January, the kids and I hiked to the top of Green Mountain and Don Brown made Maven not suck. Then I wondered if there was room for both Rails and Grails at a company and quickly learned both.

February started fantastically with a 14" Powder Day at Steamboat. I wondered if there is no "best" web framework and reviewed Grails and Rails books. After spending an awesome weekend in Tahoe, I took the kids on The Ski Train and learned more about Selenium at Google.

This brings us to one of my favorite posts of all time. On February 28th, Jack got a bead stuck in his nose. After taking him to the ER and paying $800, we found out magic recipe for bead removal is to "hold one nostril and give him a CPR-type breath/blow into his mouth". The reason I love the post so much is it's solved the problem for other frantic parents when they Google for "bead stuck in nose". Whenever I get a new comment, it always makes me smile.

March started out with a Powder Day at Whistler. I thoroughly enjoyed the rest of the weekend with good friends Jarvis and Korn Dog. After returning to Denver, I was allowed to blog about building a UI Frameworks Team at LinkedIn and posted my thoughts on Grails vs. Rails.

In mid-March, I achieved an all-Mac family and traveled to Lake Chelan for my sister's birthday. Shortly after, The AppFuse Primer was released. At the end of the month, I attended TSSJS in Vegas and moderated a Web Framework Smackdown.

In April, the LinkedIn Denver office opened and we all celebrated by attending the Rockie's Home Opener. The ski season came to an end and I wrote a howto for configuring Apache with mod_proxy and SSL on OS X. Then I discovered the JavaOne parties and wrote about running Spring MVC Web Applications in OSGi.

April ended with 82°F and May started with snow. I attended JavaOne (or at least the parties), released AppFuse 2.0.2 and figured out how to do extensionless URLs with the UrlRewriteFilter. The kids and I spent an afternoon in Rocky Mountain National Park and I did some coding in my backyard.

On Memorial Day, I enjoyed a liver-wrenching, Rockies-filled weekend with my sister her girlfriend Mya and Mr. Miller. I also contemplated making AppFuse Struts 2-specific.

June started with some mountain bike riding, planning some excellent vacations and getting a dream machine. I rode the annual trip to Big Head Todd at Red Rocks with Matt and Bruce. I took the kids on their first camping trip for Father's Day and had a blast. It took us several hours to find the campsite and my car kept starting all night long. It's sure to be a family tradition from now on.

The next weekend, I attended the American Craft Beer Fest in Boston. To end the month, I embarked upon Raible Road Trip #12 with Abbie, Jack and my Dad.

In July, the bus project began and I posted pictures of the trip to Montana. This year, I hope to spend the whole month of July at the cabin. I bought an iPhone (one of my best technology-related purchases to date). OSCON was fun but the week after wasn't.

August revealed my favorite birthday present. I didn't blog much the rest of the month, revealing why later.

Jack's Birthday Weekend was an outstandingly fun mixture of old friends and good Colorado beer. In September, I went to see the bus at MotorWorks, Abbie lost her first tooth and co-workers and I performance tested Memcached.

What followed was wonderful. Miller and I headed to Oktoberfest for the Best. Vacation. Ever. We still talk about how much fun we had on that vacation. October finished with the Colorado Software Summit and a hunting trip to the cabin.

November was a crazy month. I got laid off and celebrated Abbie's birthday on the same day. Jack got a mohawk and I traveled coast-to-coast in the same week. To close the month, I announced what's next and headed to Costa Rica.

I had a fantastic time in Costa Rica and was impressed to see Abbie is a blue skier shortly after. I did a Dojo/Comet Research Project for a week and enjoyed the location of my newest client last week. A small adventure turned into a scary adventure and I enjoyed telling my stories to fellow Java Enthusiasts in Portland.

Phew! It's been quite a year. For 2009, I'm still hoping for what I tweeted shortly after Costa Rica. I'd like to visit 3 foreign countries, take 3 months of vacation and spend 1 month in Montana. I have technology goals too, but those aren't nearly as much fun to dream about.

Happy New Year!

2006 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 15:05:56 -0700

Looking back at 2006, it's amazing to see everything that happened. One of the main reasons I started this blog was to provide a history of my life. Now it's time to cash in on that cool feature and look back at the last 12 months.

In early January, I finished working on the Vongo project. I eventually had to shut off comments for my post on Vongo because there were so many complaints. The good news is I didn't work on the UI or service part of it, just the Spring/Hibernate/XFire backend. A week later, Apple announced the MacBook Pro and I purchased one immediately. I still have the same machine and couldn't be happier. A week after that, I quietly released AppFuse 1.9, went to the Broncos vs. Patriots game, then left the next morning for Cancun to celebrate my dad's 60th. I got to watch the Broncos season end after returning from Cancun. January 2006 is one for the books - I scored good tickets to two playoff games and spent a week in Cancun! I'd relive that month without hesitation.

In February, I began playing with Maven 2 , figured out how to use Tiles with WebWork and did a fundraiser for the CSS Framework design contest. I even posted some pictures of my ride to work. Prior to freezing my ass off, Jack had a rough week with Rotavirus and ended up in the Emergency Room.

At the end of February, I received my MacBook Pro and fell in love with everything but the wireless. My posts on the MacBook Pro and wireless issues still get comments weekly from other folks having similar problems.

On February 22nd, Daniel Steinberg's daughter Elena died of bacterial meningitis. Julie made me stop reading Daniel's Dear Elena blog because I was such an emotional wreck. I saw Daniel at a couple of conferences this year, but didn't talk to him until The Spring Experience in December. I didn't know what to say to him. He erased all my apprehensions with a simple "Thanks", a smile and a handshake. It's good to see you're still writing about Elena Daniel. I still have a hard time reading your posts.

February ended with a beautiful 72°F day.

In March, I started the CSS Framework design contest, rode to work in the rain and flew to Boston and Vegas. Memories of St. Patrick's Day in Boston with friends still brings a smile to my face. TheServerSide show in Vegas was a lot of fun and it was the first BOF I hosted with free beer. I later got to meet Mike Stenhouse (the inventor of The CSS Framework) in December and hosted two more "BOFs with Beer" at the Colorado Software Summit and The Spring Experience. Cost difference? Vegas: $800, Keystone: $350, Hollywood, FL: $220.

At the end of March, I came down with a nasty case of Carpal Tunnel. After seeing a specialist that massaged the hell out of my arm, everything was back to normal. I haven't had any issues since - but I also haven't had many multiple-no-sleep-night coding sprints in a while either.

In April, I quit working on AppFuse and moved to Rails. I posted my Tips for Productivity and Happiness at Work (my most popular blog entry of all time), shipped my bus off to the shop and celebrated Julie and I's 6th anniversary. Then I rebooted this site and lived it up in New York City.

May brought CSS Design Contest winners and a 2-week trip to San Francisco for The Ajax Experience and JavaOne. The highlight of that trip was the weekend I spent in Wine Country.

In June, AppFuse 1.9.2 and Seam 1.0 were unleashed. Tim O'Brien had an interesting post titled What Web Application framework should you use?. I responded and Struts became a more focused project. Shale moved to a TLP shortly after. We started planning Raible Road Trip #10 and I began traveling to Washington, DC for a project. Going for beers at Brickskeller was the highlight of our trip that week.

July introduced me to cancelled flights and redeyes and Jason Carreira started JSR 303. AppFuse 1.9.3 was released and Julie sold her house to the first people that looked at it. At the end of the month, Jim Goodwill and I drove to OSCON in Portland. Having beers with Bryan and Scott at The Kennedy School was a highlight of that trip. Following OSCON, the family and I headed to Montana for a week.

August was great, probably because I'd just hit 7 states in 7 days. I published an article on IBM developerWorks and had a device-free weekend (which I definitely need to do more often). I began working on AppFuse 2.0, a new sushi restaurant moved into our neighborhood and I got a new EVDO card (which I later lost in November). Jack turned 2 on August 28th.

In September, we got a new puppy. I traveled to the drunkest city in America, Las Vegas and New England. Julie met me in Boston and we had a blast at our good friends' (Chris and Julie's) wedding.

October brought the release of Spring 2.0 and a 2-week project for me at OpenLogic. Abbie and Jack got their pictures taken at school and I spent at week in Keystone at The Colorado Software Summit.

In November, my sister Kalin brought some hard cider to Abbie's 4th birthday. I attended Denver's NoFluff and hugged my kids. Jack and I had a boys weekend and we headed to The Cabin on Raible Road Trip #11.

To end the year, I did a bit more travel - first to Boise then to Florida for The Spring Experience. After a week of vacation in Florida, we returned to Denver for The Blizzard of 2006. Finally, we drove up to Steamboat for Christmas and took the kids skiing.

All in all, it's been a fabulous year. Watching the kids grow up, start to play together and even have conversations with each other has been very cool. I traveled more than I wanted to, but I also got to visit a lot of cities that I'd never been to. My goals for the year? To be happy, ski more and enjoy a few car bombs with family and friends.

2005 - A Year in Review

Matt Raible — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 12:13:25 -0700

2005 was quite a year for me. I found my dream job, after contemplating what's next in my career only a few months earlier. I attended TheServerSide Symposium in March and created some great memories with James Goodwill. There's nothing like losing all your money and then winning it all back at 6 in the mornin'.

Other March highlights include:

Geert Bevin saying Laszlo is a waste of time, then rescinded his statement two weeks later.
Heading to Microsoft for the Competitive Influentials Summit.
Getting my nuts cut off.

April was a fun month, and started off with a me heading to work for Microsoft. The joke worked so well it was picked up by news.com. DU repeated as NCAA Champions (again). The MySQL Conference and wine-tasting with Julie (for our 5th anniversary) rounded out the month.

May was a whirlwind month, where I headed to Norway after barely renewing my expired passport on time. My PowerBook died on the way over, but I still had a great time. I was featured on TheServerSide and started planning AppFuse 2.0.

The summer flew by: I got biled by Hani, toured with the "Bomb Squad" at JavaOne, drove through Yellowstone, bought a new bike, learned more about Ruby and Rails at OSCON (and learned how much fun a smackdown can be), and watched Jack turn 1.

Then things got busy: I had a great time at Java in Action, started The Bus Project, and enjoyed the beauty of Keystone with Bender and Snyder at the Colorado Software Summit.

To round out the year, I traveled and attended conferences like I was possessed (New Jersey, NFJS, San Francisco and Florida). Abbie turned 3, Roller 2.0 was released and the WebWork joined Struts after a multi-year rivalry.

Phew, it's been quite a year folks. Here's to 2006 being even better! My goals for the year? Happiness, health and more car bombs with family and friends.