Raible Designs

2023 - A Year in Review

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

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

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

2022 - A Year in Review

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.

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
  • Speaking
  • Community
  • Projects
• Personal
  • Hefe the Bus and Stout the Syncro
• 2023

2021 - A Year in Review

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.

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.

2020 - A Year in Review

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
  • Speaking
  • Community
  • Projects
• Personal
  • Stout the Syncro and Hefe the Bus
• 2021

2019 - A Year in Review

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
  • Speaking
  • Community
  • Projects
• Personal
  • Stout the Syncro and Hefe the Bus
• 2020

2018 - A Year in Review

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
  • Speaking
  • Community
  • Projects
• Personal
• 2019

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.

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.

2016 - A Year in Review

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
  • Speaking
  • Devoxx4Kids
  • Projects
• Personal
  • The Ski Bus (aka Stout)
  • The Porsche Bus (aka Hefe)
• 2017

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!

2015 - A Year in Review

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
  • Speaking
  • Devoxx4Kids
  • Projects
• Personal
  • The Ski Bus
• 2016

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.

2014 - A Year in Review

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.

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

• Professional
  • Speaking
  • Devoxx4Kids
  • Projects
• Personal
• 2015

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.