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!
Started as a dare, ended as a feature in @springboot 2.0! Animated Banners ?? #SpringOne pic.twitter.com/PqSDSWHMze
— Brian Clozel (@bclozel) December 5, 2017
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.
Great night with @heroku friends @mraible @speakjava @starbuxman @afitnerd @Lspacewalker pic.twitter.com/JUVz0Ak2sH
— Joe Kutner (@codefinger) December 6, 2017
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.
The Rich Web Experience
At the Rich Web Experience, I had two back-to-back talks on Thursday morning. The first was on OAuth and is modeled off my What the Heck is OAuth blog post. I was surprised to have a packed room and appreciated the enthusiastic audience. You can find my slides on Speaker Deck or view them below.
I had an extra half-hour (compared to SpringOne) to deliver my Bootiful React talk, but I still managed to run out of time. The good news is it was largely because of audience interaction and questions. I feel like presentations are a lot more enjoyable when conversations happen during them. I published my slides afterward. The major difference between this deck and the one at SpringOne is I included Kent Dodds' free React courses on egghead.io.
I took a nice stroll along the Clearwater beaches that afternoon. I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders since I was done speaking for the year.
On Friday, I flew back to Denver and spent the afternoon polishing all the READMEs in our developer example apps. We recently discovered that a lot of folks were trying our examples without reading our blog posts. As a developer, I know it's nice to clone a project, configure it, and run it. This should be much easier now. For example, if you look at the README for the okta-spring-boot-2-angular-5-example, you should be able to modify and run without reading its associated blog post.
Devoxx4Kids Denver
The next day, I helped organize a Devoxx4Kids Denver on building Fruit Ninja with Scratch. Melissa McKay was the class instructor and the kids had a blast. The workshop was hosted at Thrive Ballpark and they published a blog post about how Devoxx4Kids is Teaching Kids to Thrive.
#Devoxx4Kids Denver in full swing with @melissajmckay at @ThriveWorkplace. Fruit Ninja with @scratch! pic.twitter.com/ZqruHtVk0u
— Matt Raible (@mraible) December 9, 2017
Team Building and Denver JUG
The following week, I traveled to San Francisco to meet with my team and do some team building activities. I thouroughly enjoyed the stroll to work on Tuesday morning, and bowling that afternoon.
I feel very fortunate to have such a beautiful walk to the @okta SF office. #lifeatokta #embarcadero pic.twitter.com/NBaUmHtiFy
— Matt Raible (@mraible) December 12, 2017
I flew back Wednesday and made it just in time for the Denver JUG Holiday party. We had a pretty good turnout, announced some awards, voted on Venkat's talk in January, and gave out a few prizes. You can read more about the festivities on the Denver JUG blog.
When I drove home that night, I felt like George Bailey rushing home at the end of It's a Wonderful Life! The joy of being home without travel on the horizon is a wonderful feeling.
At the end of that week, I was able to find time to work on the Ionic Module for JHipster and release it.
Home for the Holidays
It's a great feeling to be home for the holidays. It was Trish's birthday weekend last weekend, so we watched her compete in a couple horse shows with Tucker. They sure do look good together, don't they?
Happy Birthday to my lovely wife, @TrishPhoto! She started the day at 5am so she could do one of her favorite things - competing with Tucker. ???? pic.twitter.com/XvLd81VRcz
— Matt Raible (@mraible) December 17, 2017
I'm done traveling for the year and I don't have any overnight travel scheduled until mid-February. My TripIt stats show I traveled quite a bit this year, and I'm looking forward to speaking at more JUGs and less conferences next year.
I spent 141 days on the road, but I'm grateful for getting to attend so many cool conferences in many exotic locations.
If you want to tinker with some code over the break, you can checkout my blog post on how to use Spring Security 5.0 with OIDC or my buddy Nate's Spread Serverless Holiday Cheer with Lambda and API Gateway.
Happy Holidays everyone! 😊