Raible Designs

Hefe 3.5 Has Been Released! 🎉

"Open up the champagne, pop! 🍾" -- Flo Rida, My House

I’m thrilled to announce that Hefe, my 1966 21-Window VW Bus, is finally finished!

It only took 4,342 days, starting on April 17, 2006 and ending just a couple weeks ago (March 7, 2018).

When I last wrote about Hefe, I mentioned he was in the shop getting a better stereo.

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.

My dad and I visited Elevated Audio to pick him up two weeks ago today. I’ve known the owner, Andrew, ever since I hired him to install a sweet system in Stout the Syncro in 2013. Back then, his business was named Andrew’s Installs. Fast forward five years and his business is thriving. For a good reason too, his team and their attention to detail is magnificent.

It sounds fucking incredible.

Having Hefe finished sometimes makes me misty eyed when I drive him.

I was especially pumped to get Hefe back because we’d signed him up to be in Denver’s St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

That’s where the untold story begins.

Last Friday evening, I washed and polished him to get ready. While cleaning him, I accidentally sprayed a bunch of water on the engine. It’s a no-no to drench a car’s engine when it’s not running. I’d done this to our Syncro six months after we got it and it might’ve contributed to our engine’s untimely death.

After I finished, I tried to start Hefe. The engine turned over just fine, but it’d barely fire and never catch. I pumped the gas pedal a bunch and eventually gave up thinking I'd flooded the engine. I told myself to revisit the problem in an hour; maybe things would dry out by then.

I didn’t tell Trish about the problem until I’d tried (and failed) to start him an hour later. I took off the distributor cap and dried things out. I wiggled and re-routed some wires. Moving wires around made the spark plugs fire but in the wrong order. I reverted my changes and told Trish the bad news.

We couldn’t be in the parade without a running bus.

I cursed, loudly.

Trish’s high-school friend was flying in from NYC with her family that night. Trish left for the airport to pick them up, suggesting “we could go skiing instead” as she left.

Shortly after, I recognized my lousy attitude and vowed to turn things around.

“Now it’s flooded,” I thought. I knew the wires were correct.

I threw on my University of Denver hockey jersey and went to my living room to finish watching them in a playoff game. They beat the Minnesota Duluth Bulldogs 3-2, and I celebrated with a cold Guinness.

Then I strolled outside, sat in Hefe, told him he could do it and started him right up. 💥

Wahoo! He recovered!!

The parade was epic.

We all felt glorious; cranking the stereo, blowing bubbles out the top, dancing up a storm, and basking in the happiness that is downtown Denver on St. Paddy’s Day. 🍀🤗

Yes, there will likely be more to do to Hefe in the coming years. That’s OK. He inspires smiles every time I drive him and providing joy to people is a beautiful experience.

Kudos to all seven Colorado shops that made Hefe possible. I won’t say he’s worth every penny, but he’s pretty darn close! 😍

2017 - A Year in Review

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
  • Speaking
  • Devoxx4Kids
  • Projects
• Personal
  • Stout and Hefe
• 2018

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.

SpringOne, The Rich Web Experience, and Being Home for the Holidays

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of hitting two excellent conferences in one week: SpringOne and The Rich Web Experience. The primary reason I like both conferences so much is that there are so many familiar faces.

I had a gas hanging out with folks from Pivotal after I arrived on Monday night. On Tuesday, I thoroughly enjoyed the opening keynote. Seeing the unveiling of Spring Boot 2.0's most impressive feature was spectacular too!

I walked to the Okta office for some swag that afternoon, then proceeded to the Atomist happy hour. I talked with Rod Johnson about how Atomist might be able to help update our example apps and the Okta Developer blog. Since keeping our posts and examples up-to-date is a maintenance burden, I think Atomist could be a huge help.

After happy hour, a bunch of us joined Heroku for a delicious dinner and fun conversations.

On Wednesday, I delivered my talk on Bootiful Development with Spring Boot and React. You can find my slides on Speaker Deck.

It was recorded and published to YouTube as well.

After my talk ended, I only had 70 minutes before my flight took off for Florida and the Rich Web Experience. Luckily, there was hardly any traffic and I found myself boarding with 23 minutes to spare.

A Stressful, but Rewarding, Trip to Devoxx Belgium and Morocco

One of my favorite conferences in the world is Devoxx Belgium. First of all, it tends to have one of the most enthusiastic audiences I've ever seen. Secondly, its organizers are super awesome and challenge you to give great talks. Third, it was the first conference I ever took my Trish to. In 2011, I took her a second time and proposed to her in Paris afterward.

This year, I traveled to Devoxx Belgium for the first time without Trish. It was stressful because I didn't prepare well beforehand. However, it was also gratifying because I was able to make everything work, even it all happened at the last minute. Furthermore, I did the majority of my talks with good friends, which is always a pleasant experience.

The purpose of this blog post is to document my experience this year, so I can look back and say WTF was I thinking?!

I left Denver on Monday (November 6) afternoon and flew to Brussels, Belgium. My flight landed in Brussels at 9 am and Josh and my (three hour) talk was at 1:30 pm. I made it in time, but it was one of the first times we didn’t have a lot of time to prepare face-to-face beforehand. I learned that getting t-shirts printed in the US to save $500 is a good idea, but having to take two suitcases to carry them all is a bad idea.

We did our usual talk and I used Okta's new Angular SDK instead of the Sign-In Widget to showcase authentication. Even though the crucial step I needed was contained in my notes, I failed. One simple line to add an HttpInterceptor and I missed it!

I think I followed up well with a tweet that showed how to fix it. But who knows how many people use Twitter. One things for sure, people tweet more at Devoxx Belgium than any other conference I’ve ever been too! In fact, the #Devoxx hashtag got hijacked by some porn sites and their tweets started showing up on the Twitter wall. 

I tweeted about what I forgot to do after our talk.

Josh and my talk was published on YouTube the very next day, which is awesome.

Life as an Open Source Developer, One Year Later

It's been a little over a year since I wrote about life as an open source developer. I'm happy to say I still haven't written a single line of proprietary code. Of course, things have changed a lot in the last year. I thought going full-time would bring stability to my career. Instead, six months into it we joined forces with Okta.

The transition was rough at first. At Stormpath, we had full-featured SDKs and a great relationship with developers that used our service. We were able to port many of our SDKs to work with Okta, but we discovered that Okta didn't have a great relationship with developers. In fact, their developer blog hadn't been updated in over a year when we arrived.

On the upside, Okta's API supported standards like SAML, OAuth, and OpenID Connect. Open standards made it possible to use other frameworks and not have to rely on our own. I was pumped to find that Spring Security made it easy to integrate with SAML and OAuth. In fact, I was able to leverage these standards to add OIDC support to JHipster.

Okta's new developer console and open pricing are just a couple examples of improved happenings since we arrived. The Okta Spring Boot Starter and JavaScript libraries for Node.js, Angular, and React are also pretty awesome.

I'm happy to say my contributions on GitHub almost doubled in the last year!

As far as stress is concerned, that hasn't changed much. I've learned that the stress I feel from work is still causing me to have high blood pressure. When I measure it in the mornings, or at night, it's fine. When I measure it during the day, it's elevated. I believe my high blood pressure is caused by doing too much. Sure, it's great to be productive and accomplish a lot for my company, but it's killing me.

Therein lies the rub. I get to create my job. All I'm asked to do is write a blog post per week and speak at a conference (or meetup) once a month. Yet I'm doing way more than that. Since this time last year, I've delivered 33 presentations, in 13 different cities. I keep a page on this blog updated with all my presentations.

Next year, I still plan to speak a lot, but I plan on toning things down a bit. I'll be concentrating on US cities, with large Java user groups, and I'll be limiting my travel overseas.

Outside of my health concerns, I'm still loving my job. The fact that I get paid to speak at great conferences, write example applications, and discover new ways to do things is awesome. It's also pretty sweet that I was able to update the JHipster Mini-Book and upgrade 21-Points Health during work hours. The fact that I got featured on the main Okta blog was pretty cool too.

The good news is my overseas travel isn't done this year. Today, I leave for Devoxx Belgium, one of my favorite conferences. It'll be my first time in Antwerp without Trish. However, I'm speaking with friends Josh Long and Deepu Sasidharan, so it's sure to be a good time. Traveling to Devoxx Morocco should be fun too. I've never been to Casablanca before.

In December, you can catch me at SpringOne and The Rich Web Experience. Next year, I'll be speaking at Denver Microservices meetup, Utah JUG, Seattle JUG, and JazzCon. I plan to do a JUG tour in the northeast US too.

You might've noticed I don't write a lot of technical content here anymore. That's because I'm doing most of my writing on developer.okta.com/blog. I'm still writing for InfoQ as well. I really enjoyed attending the JavaOne keynotes and writing up what I saw.

• Oracle Announced Plans to Open Source All Features of Their JDK and Address Shortcomings in Java EE
• JavaOne Keynote: Oracle Talks Blockchain, Bots and Serverless
• JavaOne Keynote: IBM on OpenJ9 and Open Liberty; Java Community in The Matrix

I'll leave you with this, a project I'm working on actively and plan to finish before Devoxx Morocco.

Viva la Open Source!

Devoxx Poland: A Huge Conference in a Beautiful City

It's been a little over six years since I first ventured to Kraków, Poland. I have fond memories of that trip, mostly because Trish was with me and we explored lots of sites. Last month, I visited Kraków for GeeCON, but only stayed for one night.

Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting a third time for my first Devoxx Poland. I was excited to travel internationally again with my favorite travel shirt on. This caused a funny conversation with TSA just before my departure.

I arrived in Krakow on a beautiful day and took an Ubër to my hotel next to the venue. I took a stroll along the Vistula River to enjoy the sunshine.

Speaking Adventures at J-Spring, Devoxx UK, GeeCON, and Spring I/O

As a Developer Advocate at Okta, I'm expected to travel up to 25% per month to speak at conferences and meetups. This May was more like 50%! I had opportunities to contribute to a number of cool conferences in exotic cities that I was eager to accept.

My adventure began on Monday, May 8 when I flew to Amsterdam to speak at the J-Spring conference. It was the first time the NLJUG hosted this conference in several years. I marveled at the venue and especially liked the outdoor area it offered during breaks. The walk from/to the train station was pretty nice too.

I spoke about Microservices for the Masses with Spring Boot, JHipster, and JWT. Feedback I received mentioned it was a bit too fast and I crammed too much into the 50-minute time slot. I do tend to mention everything I know about topics when I speak, so I apologize for trying to cram too much in.

Farewell to the 2016-17 Ski Season

The 2016-17 Ski Season was a fun one for the Raible Family. Abbie and Jack are good enough that they can zoom down the mountain without looking back. Their preferred runs are now blacks and they're no longer intimidated by moguls. We spent most of the season skiing at Mary Jane and Winter Park, but also had some trips to Crested Butte, Steamboat, and Montana.

Angular and Cloud Native PWAs at Devoxx France

Devoxx France is one of my favorite conferences. As you might know from my post about Jfokus, I thrive on a sense of community and the memories created by conferences. Last week in Paris, I experienced a passionate community and created several memories, with many good people and friends.

I had two speaking events at the conference:

• The Ultimate Getting Started with Angular Workshop
• Building Cloud Native PWAs with Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and Angular - Part Deux

For the workshop, I intro'd Angular, had the class create an Angular application, then talked about testing Angular. In additional, I showed them a number of demos:

• Integrate Angular Material
• Integrate Bootstrap 4
• Deploy to Cloud Foundry
• Deploy to Heroku
• Continuous Integration with Jenkins
• Authentication with OpenID Connect and Okta

Update: Videos of Josh and my Cloud Native PWAs talks have been published to YouTube. Hope you enjoy!

Let the Okta and Devoxx Journeys Begin!

It's been almost a month since Stormpath joined forces with Okta. My first day at Okta was on February 27, and I was only briefly in the San Francisco headquarters. I had to fly out at noon on my second day, so I hunkered down in the Okta Pub and cranked out a presentation for a talk with Micah Silverman at the Kansas City Spring User Group.

That's right, Okta has a pub in their SF HQ. When I first heard about this, I knew it'd be a good fit for me!

Now properly fortified, I finished the presentation and headed for the airport, where I rejoiced in my clothing choices for the day.

The whirlwind of ramping up at Okta hasn't died down yet. Last week, I figured out how to authenticate with Okta's API using Spring Boot and SAML. I also got an OAuth 2.0 example working. Then I moved onto Angular and got an example working with OpenID Connect (OIDC), Okta's Sign-In Widget, and the Okta Auth SDK. I was especially pumped when I got an Angular client working with OIDC and a Spring Boot + Spring Security backend. This week, I wrote up my findings as tutorials and recorded a couple screencasts to accompany them. These will likely show up as blogs posts on Okta Developer Blog over the next few weeks.

While the first couple of weeks at Okta has been exciting, I'm more excited about the upcoming Devoxx conferences I'll be speaking at.

Next week, Devoxx US will be happening for the first time! As a member of the program committee, I promise you this is going to be a great show! We had an incredible number of high quality submissions and it shows in the agenda. I'm especially looking forward to Janelle Klein's What is Identity? keynote. I'll be doing talks on JHipster, Asciidoctor, and how NOT to restore a VW Bus.

Speaking of the bus, Hefe sure looks good, doesn't he?

After returning from Devoxx US, Trish and I are taking Abbie and Jack on the spring break trip of a lifetime. I've never been to Big Sky, so we're heading there for a week of skiing, frolicking, and playing in the snow. I might even go phoneless for the week to fully embrace the serenity that Montana provides.

I'm off to Devoxx France the following week. I'm really looking forward to this conference because my talks are all about Angular. I'll be doing a hands-on lab on getting started with Angular, as well as developing a PWA with Josh Long.

To make things even better while I'm on the road, I'm getting some work done on both VWs. We're getting Stout the Syncro painted and having a stereo installed in Hefe. With any luck, Stout 5.0 and Hefe 3.0 will be released in April, just in time for the car show season.

So yeah, life is pretty darn good right now. Let me know if you'll be in Tahoe, San Jose, Big Sky, or Paris when I'm there. I'd love to chat about authentication, open source technologies, VWs, or good beer.