Raible Designs

20 years ago today, I bought a VW Bus

On this day, 20 years ago, I bought a 1996 21-Window VW Bus. That morning, I found the listing on eBay and decided to buy it if the University of Denver (my alma mater) won the national college hockey championship.

Hmmm, if I could buy my dream car today and DU wins the National Championship tonight...

Update: Woooo HOOOOO - DU WON!!! I told myself earlier today that if they won, I'd buy the bus. So w/in 2 minutes of the win, I bought it! What a day. ;-)

10 years ago, it was still being restored.

The project is still progressing and it still feels like it'll be done soon. When I bought the bus 10 years ago, I thought I'd drive it a lot sooner. Then again, my expectation was that I'd incrementally improve it through the years and eventually get to something spectacular. Now we're on the cusp of spectacularity.

On March 7, 2018, Hefe was finally finished! I call him Hefe because it's a short version of Hefeweizen. He's from Germany, and his pain scheme looks like a nicely poured beer.

How it started:	How it's going:

I've driven him around 7000 miles since he was completed. It’s been a wonderful adventure! 🥳

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!

Goodbye, DU House. Thanks for all the memories!

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

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

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

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

Happy Birthday, Abbie!

Our oldest child turned 21 today! She's a junior at the University of Colorado in Boulder, living in an apartment with three roommates. Abbie is a joy to be around because she's always smiling and cracking jokes.

We journeyed up to Boulder this weekend to join her for the CU vs Oregon State game. We had a nice family dinner, celebrated the big event at her uncle's tailgate, then watched the game. We tried to take advantage of the time change after the game and do some bar hopping, but Jack couldn't get in anywhere.

Her Mom, Julie, surprised her today by giving her a new car for her birthday. Abbie had no idea and was delighted with her first VW!

Next weekend, we'll celebrate some more in Vegas. Trish and I will be going, along with Abbie, her boyfriend (Joseph), and Joseph's parents.

Happy Birthday, Abbie! We love you to the moon and back!! 🥰

Summer 2023: Colorado, Montana, and Cape Cod

I've been remiss in writing about my month-long summer vacation. Mostly because life moves pretty fast with Jack heading off to college, things getting busy at work, and lots of wonderful weekends along the way. I'm finally looking around and sitting down to write this post at the end of October. Now is better than never!

This year, I took a month off from mid-June to mid-August. How did I take so much time off? Okta has a magnificent unlimited vacation policy.

The adventure started with a birthday golf tournament that Saturday to celebrate my 49th.

We had a nice family dinner at Sushi Den on Sunday.

Happy Birthday, Jack!

Today is a monumental day in the life of Jack Raible. Not only is today his 19th birthday, but it's also his first day of classes at the University of Colorado. He moved in last week and had a week to settle into his new surroundings.

He's been playing hoops for 1-2 hours a day on our basketball court for the last six months. We recently asked him why he was playing so much, and he mentioned he wanted to play on CU's team before he graduates. I love it when someone dreams big! We'll be rooting for your success, Jack!

The whole family traveled to Boulder yesterday afternoon to celebrate his birthday. Today, both kids sent a picture before their first day of classes began.

We're so proud of you, Jack, and hope you have a wonderful college experience. Happy Birthday, buddy! 🥳

Farewell to the 2022-2023 Ski Season

You can tell your Spring is a whirlwind when you don't have time to write your end-of-ski-season post until July!

My ski season started way back in October, on Halloween at A-Basin, to be precise. It ended with an Okta + Gradle Developer Ski Day on April 13th. I'm proud to say I achieved 39 days of skiing, with 15 being alpine skiing and the rest being cross-country skiing. A lot of the cross-country skiing was done in our backyard, on the neighborhood bridal trails. We got lucky this year because it snowed in early January and stuck around until February. That's rare in our neck of the woods.

The highlight of the ski season was celebrating Trish's 50th birthday at A-Basin. We rented a few spots on the beach, invited a bunch of friends, and had a blast.

The onesies were Trish's idea. 😅 You can buy your own from Tipsy Elves.

The Angular Mini-Book 3.0 is now available!

I'm excited to announce that the Angular Mini-Book 3.0 is now available! You can download it in PDF and EPUB formats from InfoQ.

About this book

The Angular Mini-Book is a guide to getting started with Angular. You'll learn how to develop a bare-bones application, test it, and deploy it. Then you'll move on to adding Bootstrap, Angular Material, continuous integration, authentication, and end-to-end testing with Cypress.

Spring Boot is a popular framework for building REST APIs. You'll learn how to integrate Angular with Spring Boot and use security best practices like HTTPS and a content security policy. What about deploying your Angular app to the cloud? Yep, it covers that too!

What's new?

This new edition uses Angular 15 and Spring Boot 3.0. Some other fun facts:

• Tech reviewed by Angular expert Alisa Duncan. She improved many of the code samples, and I'm grateful for her help. You should follow her on Twitter!
• First commit on 3.0 version: Feb 16, 2023
• Files changed since 2.0: 558
• Build date: June 9, 2023

You might say this book is outdated on launch. However, I created a GitHub Action to upgrade all the examples to use Angular 16 and Spring Boot 3.1. This action proves all the code should work if you create apps with the latest Angular and Spring Boot versions. 😊

To send us feedback or issues, e-mail InfoQ at [email protected], email me at [email protected], or hit me up on Twitter @mraible.

The JHipster Mini-Book v7.0 Released!

The JHipster Mini-Book v7.0 is now available as a free download from InfoQ. Get it while it's hot! 🔥 You can read more about this release on the JHipster Mini-Book blog.

The source code for the application developed in the book (21-Points Health) is available on GitHub.

Thanks to the InfoQ publishing team, Jeet Gajjar for tech editing, Maureen Spencer for copy editing, and Ana Ciobotaru for publishing it to production.

And most of all, thank you Asciidoctor for making the publishing process so easy!

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