Thoughts on Java 2016 – A year in review …
Take your skills to the next level!
The Persistence Hub is the place to be for every Java developer. It gives you access to all my premium video courses, monthly Java Persistence News, monthly coding problems, and regular expert sessions.
2016 is coming to an end, and it’s the perfect time to take a moment to look back at the last 12 months. I would normally call it an interesting and eventful year, but that would be a huge understatement. Thoughts on Java and myself have grown as never before. For most of the time, it was a hell of a ride that I still can’t completely believe.
In January, Thoughts on Java was a small but established blog with 111 posts about JPA and Hibernate and the popular Java Weekly series. For me, it was also becoming a small side-business but most people would’ve probably still called it a hobby. I was working my day job, writing on a more or less consistent schedule and I had just announced my first online course about Hibernate performance tuning.
12 months later, this has changed drastically. I published 107 posts, started the Hibernate Tips series and had to quit the popular Java Weekly series, launched a free member library, created 2 online courses, started a youtube channel and quit my day job.
That was a lot more than I expected to do when I made my plans for 2016. 🙂
Let’s have a look at the major milestones and 10 most popular posts of 2016 and the plans for 2017.
Major milestones 2016
As I said, 2016 was eventful and brought quite a few changes to Thoughts on Java and my career. So, let’s bring all these events in a chronological order:
- March 7-9th: I attended JavaLand 2016 and gave 1.5 talks
- April 1st: 1st launch of the Hibernate Performance Tuning Online Training
- June 3rd: 1st Hibernate Tip post
- July 23rd: 2nd launch of the Hibernate Performance Tuning Online Training
- July 27th: I announced that I quit my day job and will work full-time on Thoughts on Java. I also shared my plans for an advanced Hibernate training and an ebook. I got so much great feedback on this post that I decided to share my journey and plans for Thoughts on Java on a regular basis.
- September 2nd: The last day of my day job. I was happy, excited and sad at the same time.
- September 2nd: I published the first, monthly Thoughts on Java Report to talk about the development of Thoughts on Java and my plans for the following weeks.
- September 14th: I started to work on the new Advanced Hibernate Online Training with the goal to finish it within 2 months.
- September 23rd: The Thoughts on Java Member library opened its virtual doors to offer free ebooks, cheat sheets and video training.
- September 26th: I opened the signup for a closed beta group for the new Advanced Hibernate Online Training. This was one of the best decisions I’ve made in a while. I had a very tight schedule which made it difficult but the feedback was extremely valuable.
- October 3rd: I published the 1st Hibernate Tip video on youtube and started to grow the channel.
- November 12th: 3rd launch of the Hibernate Performance Tuning Online Training and 1st launch of the Advanced Hibernate Online Training
- December 9th: I had to cancel the Java Weekly series due to recent changes in German case-law.
The 10 most popular posts of 2016
As I said at the beginning, I published 107 posts on Thoughts on Java in 2016. If you have a few hours to spare, you can find them in the archive.
If you don’t have the time to read all of them right now 😉 you might want to start with some of the most popular posts instead. I had a look at the traffic numbers, comments, and social media shares to find the 10 most popular posts of 2016:
- Should you use JPA for your next project?
- How to use Java 8’s Optional with Hibernate
- Hibernate 5: How to persist LocalDateTime & Co with Hibernate
- Hibernate Best Practices
- How to use PostgreSQL’s JSONB data type with Hibernate
- How to implement a soft delete with Hibernate
- How to generate primary keys with JPA and Hibernate
- How to fetch multiple entities by id with Hibernate 5
- Complete Guide: Inheritance strategies with JPA and Hibernate
- Native Queries – How to call native SQL queries with JPA
Plans for 2017
After talking about all the achievements of 2016, you’re probably wondering what’s in the queue for 2017. So far, I made detailed plans for the 1st and 2nd quarter and wrote down a few ideas and a rough schedule for the 2nd half of the year.
The 4 main topics for the first quarter of 2017 are:
- improve several smaller things here on the site and introduce a new series to replace the Java Weekly,
- host regular webinars,
- write and publish a book with Hibernate Tips (ebook and paperback) and
- give a talk and workshop at JavaLand.
The Hibernate Tips book will obviously be my main task for the first quarter. I’m talking about it for quite a while now, and I already put a lot of work into planning and outlining it. Now it’s finally time to write it. I will share more details about the book and the writing process in the next few weeks.
Edit: I released the book. You can get it at hibernate-tips.com
The classroom training will most likely be the most challenging task in the second quarter. Right now, I’m talking with a few potential partner companies who could host the training.
Another important task will be the follow-up of the book launch. I don’t know exactly what that will be. But the last months taught me that launches are very work-intensive and that there are always some things that I need to clean up afterward. So better plan some time for it …
OK, that was the last post for 2016.
Thank you for reading and supporting me and Thoughts on Java in 2016. I hope you enjoy my blog posts and keep reading them in 2017.
See you next year 😉
