Normally I only post about technical things on this site, but today I am going to talk about some friends. When I first started out at the University of Minnesota I lived in Territorial Hall. Down the hall from my lived a couple of people I became Friends with Jason and Jill. We became friends along with many others in a large group and it made for some amazing memories of my college years.
It has been a crazy couple of months. Since I last posted I made a trip out to San Francisco to meet the rest of the team I work with (and had a great time). If you live in Texas there is no better time to visit San Francisco then at the end of July. It was a welcome break from the heat. I had a great time and realized when I was out there that I hadn’t been out there since 2005, so I was over due for a trip. I had forgotten how much I love that city it is a really fun place to hang out (though not a place I would really want to live).
The big news is our new Spring Boot micro service went into production! It has been running in production for just over a week and we have had 0 issues with it, everything just works! It ended up being two crazy sprints to get it done, but we shipped it this week with no production issues after it went live. My first big project at the new company couldn’t have gone any better. The team really pulled together to get it done which makes it even more rewarding.
I hit a bug in Idea 2016.1.2 that I wanted to share in case anyone else is hitting the same issue. I was trying to stand up a new Spring Boot project last week and when I what try to launch the app through the IDE the embedded tomcat server would throw an exception. org.springframework.context.ApplicationContextException: Unable to start embedded container; nested exception is org.springframework.context.ApplicationContextException: Unable to start EmbeddedWebApplicationContext due to missing EmbeddedServletContainerFactory bean. at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.onRefresh(EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.java:133) ~[spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.context.support.AbstractApplicationContext.refresh(AbstractApplicationContext.java:532) ~[spring-context-4.2.6.RELEASE.jar:4.2.6.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.refresh(EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.java:118) ~[spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.refresh(SpringApplication.java:766) [spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.createAndRefreshContext(SpringApplication.java:361) [spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.run(SpringApplication.java:307) [spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.run(SpringApplication.java:1191) [spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication.run(SpringApplication.java:1180) [spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at com.chooseenergy.auth.AuthApplication.main(AuthApplication.java:14) [classes/:na]Caused by: org.springframework.context.ApplicationContextException: Unable to start EmbeddedWebApplicationContext due to missing EmbeddedServletContainerFactory bean. at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.getEmbeddedServletContainerFactory(EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.java:185) ~[spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.createEmbeddedServletContainer(EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.java:158) ~[spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] at org.springframework.boot.context.embedded.EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.onRefresh(EmbeddedWebApplicationContext.java:130) ~[spring-boot-1.3.5.RELEASE.jar:1.3.5.RELEASE] ... 8 common frames omitted
I need to apologize for the lack of posts for the month of May. It has been a hectic month or so. In April several interesting opportunities were presented to me and I decided to make a change and go back to working for a startup company. It is no secret to anyone that I really enjoy startup work, but it is always hard to make a change like this, as I was very fond of the people I worked with, and had an amazing boss and loved the project I worked on. One of the things I love about working for smaller companies is that you have this amazing opportunity to have a huge impact. You can make the difference between no revenue coming in and the company prospering down the line. When you find yourself part of a 13,000 employee organization that brings in say 3 Billion a year no matter how great your efforts you can never really move the needle and for me shipping something that really impacts the company is immensely rewarding.
On Thursday afternoon I attended a free Internet of Things Coding Workshop put on by AT&T and Texas Instruments at AT&T’s M2M/CD Foundry in Plano, TX. While this type of programming isn’t really relevant to what I do in my day job I am interested in the topic so I asked by boss if it was okay if I attend and he was fine with it. The hosts were kind enough to provide us with a free lunch and I think there were about 50 attendees. This was the 3rd session they had done and it sounds like the others were even busier. They had a 4th session that evening on the topic as well.
I have sort of taken for granted how easy all the updates are for a Wordpress site. If there is a security update Wordpress just goes up and updates itself without me doing anything and the plugin community is so active there are frequent updates to all of the plugins I used. Because it always just works I don’t really hesitate to run any of the updates when I see them on the site.
I have been working on this project to make our app run in any Java Container. Currently we run in JBoss, but ideally I would like the app to work in JBoss or Tomcat, or TomEE or Wildfly. One of the challenges in making this change is to remove JBoss specific dependencies from our app and pull those libs into the webapp as part of our project. We did the first piece of this a couple of years ago when we stopped using JBoss’ version of Hibernate and pulled a newer version into our app. We have since upgraded JBoss versions so this is somewhat moot since the bundled version and our version are the same, but it is one less thing that I will have to deal with as part of this project.
Recently I ported my domain hosting from Godaddy to Google Domains. My main reason for doing so was to save money. Domain names on Godaddy cost $3 more per year, plus they charge you for privacy on whois searches whereas Google includes that for free. It was a fairly easy process to transfer my domain names in, but configuring the DNS was a little bit weird as their zone file editing interface was different that godaddy’s. However I thought I had it all good and working so I was happy with my setup.
Recently I read this article about health benefits of doing a 72 hour fast. I thought the idea sounded very interesting. A few years back I tried the Primal Diet (a less restrictive paleo diet) and had great results with it. I think I did that for an entire lent, and continued it past there. I ended up losing 40 pounds and it was the easiest weight loss I have ever done. At some point though I sort of moved away from primal as my favorite food in the world is Mexican Cuisine and after that Italian, so it is hard to enjoy my favorite foods with that as a lifestyle. That being said I do eat many fewer carbs now than I did previous to that. I have also experimented with Bullet Proof Coffee, but the version with coconut oil and butter, not the medium chain triglycerides. When I tried that out I didn’t notice as much of a benefit like I did with Primal. Though I could see the Bullet Proof think combining with Primal very well.