End of year recap

It’s that time again. Time to reflect on my themes for the year and see how I did on them. This is an annual tradition of mine to see how I am doing in general. I find it is a useful accountability tool for myself to make sure I am not wasting too much time on unimportant things and am spending the time that I would like on personal development.

At the start of the year I posted my Themes for 2015. I decided now is a good time to look at what I was thinking at the start of the year and see how my year turned out. I think it is sort of pointless to set out some ideas of things you want to accomplish if you never stop and assess what you actually did, so this is sort of an accountability post to myself to see how things played out for the year.

I took advantage of the long weekend to go through CodeSchool’s Shaping up with Angular.js free course. I have to say it was very well done. They very quickly get the major themes across in the video and then you apply the stuff in your browser where you can see how it actually affects the page in the preview page. Anyone who has worked on the knockout.js tutorial will recognize this style of learning. Having taken the class on CodeSchool I now feel like I know enough to actually start using Angular so I would definitely recommend the course to anyone wanting to get started with Angular. I remember that first aha moment I had when learning knockout, where it was just sort of mind blowing how much more productive you could be in that framework than just using jQuery. And I had the same sort of thing with Angular, I can see why I would prefer to use Angular over knockout as well as it seems to take the great things that knockout does and take it up to the next level. To get someone who isn’t a super front end person interested in a front end technology is an impressive feat so well done Angular.

We had some workshops over the last couple of days at work on an intro to Angular.js. I have to say I came away from them pretty impressed with the framework. I can see why it is taking the development world by storm.

I think the controllers make it very relate able for anyone coming from the Java world as it is like dealing with Spring or Struts at that point. The way you do URL parameters in your $routeparams is just like doing any sort of rest URL parameters.

I saw this come across the Spring blog this week. They are going to be doing a webinar for JHipster. As I mentioned in a previous post I am very interested in JHipster as it combines 2 things I am interested in learning Spring Boot and Angular. If you are interested in checking it out sign up here.

Also as a completely unrelated side note, why doesn’t projects.spring.io support HTTPS? This is 2015 and all sites should really support secure access.

As my Christmas vacation draws to a close I am starting to think of themes for 2015. Why themes and not goals or resolutions? Well I think resolutions are sort of setting yourself up for failure and goals are very rigid so I am going with more general themes.

• Obviously the first theme I am working towards will be updating this site at least once a week ideally with something technical that I have learned during the week or thoughts on a problem I am solving.
• Next on the agenda I would like to try to read more. I haven’t been reading as many books as I like to during 2014. But at the end of the year I have been picking up the pace a bit so I hope to read at least 2 books a month. My system I have been using is to try to get through 10% of a book a day on my kindle.
• I would like to spend more time doing stuff in Spring Boot this year. I have been reading Greg Turnquist’s Learning Spring Boot and it is a great book which I strongly recommend. He seems to lay out the information right when I want it in the book and has saved me tons of time that I would have spent digging in the docs for answers otherwise.
• Anyone who knows me know that I am not a big front end person, but as a full stack developer I need to know all the layers of the stack, so I think 2015 is the year that I need to learn Angular JS. I learned Knockout JS in 2014 and appreciated how much more productive it was for things than just jQuery and it seems to me that the market is all going Angular and people say it is more productive than knockout so it is time to give it a try.
• I am hoping to do some architectural updates at work. I am ready to get our stack upgraded (I want to be on Spring 4.1 and Java 8 at a minimum and ideally JPA 2.1 as well instead of 2.0). I always prefer to run the latest stuff so I will be working hard to make sure that I can do so. On that note I submitted a Jira for the issue holding me back on Spring 4.1 related to the aspectj-maven-plugin. With any luck I will be on Spring 4.1 at work within the next 2-3 weeks. Java 8 may take a bit longer as it is going to mean a container upgrade.

Anyway that is what I have come up with so far I am sure more things will apply as time goes on, but this is a good start to my year plan. Now to enjoy my final 2 days of vacation before I return to work.