Thoughts on Java Report April 2017

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When I announced that I had quit my day job to work full-time on Thoughts on Java, I got a lot of great feedback and questions about my plans for the site. If you’re interested in these kinds of posts, I’m happy to give you a look behind the scenes and share my monthly goals and progress with you.

A crazy month with a book, a conference and huge traffic increase

So far, March was the busiest month in this year. I had to finish the book and give a new talk and a new workshop at the JavaLand conference. I did my best to stick to the regular publishing schedule. But it’s no surprise that I didn’t have a lot of time to write new posts or record videos.

In the end, I completed the most important tasks. I got good feedback for my conference talk and workshop and I launched the Hibernate Tips book with a special launch discount on April 4th. It even became an Amazon bestseller within the first day.
But I also published a lot less than in a regular month. As you might guess, I’m totally fine with that 🙂 I will pick up the regular publishing schedule next week.

Posts & Videos

Videos

I recorded a few videos in advance which I just had to upload. That helped me a lot to keep the regular schedule at the beginning of the month while I was spending all my time and energy editing the Hibernate Tips book. But I didn’t have enough videos for a whole month, and so I didn’t upload any videos in the second half of March.

Hibernate Tips

I uploaded 2 Hibernate Tips videos in which I showed how to map Optionals and automate the initialization of entity attributes.

Tutorials

As in the previous months, I also published a few tutorial videos which get into more details than the shorter, problem-solution oriented Hibernate Tip videos.

Book Updates

I also recorded 2 short videos in which I talked about the progress on the Hibernate Tips book.

Posts

I only published 5 new posts in the last months. That’s less than half of the usual number of posts. But as I said at the beginning, the book and the preparation for my talk and workshop had the higher priority.

Book Updates

I spend most of March reviewing and editing the book. These tasks are not very interesting and talking about them is even worse. So, it wasn’t a real issue that I only published 2 book updates.

• Book Update Week 7 – Lots of reviews and a title
• Book Update Week 8 – Sending it to the copyeditor

That changed when I launched the book on April 4th at a special launch price and the book became an Amazon bestseller within the first day. Thanks to everyone who bought the book!

I’ll talk about the launch in more details in the next update. And if you haven’t already done so, you can still get the ebook and paperback at the launch price of just $2.99 and $12.99 on www.hibernate-tips.com.

Tutorials

All the ongoing projects had the strongest effect on the tutorial posts. I didn’t have any time to write them and I only published 1 tutorial post in March:

• 5 new features in Hibernate 5 every developer should know

Hibernate Tips

I also published 2 Hibernate Tips from the book as blog posts.

• Hibernate Tips: How to map a bidirectional many-to-many association
• Hibernate Tips: How to use Hibernate’s native bootstrapping API

Traffic numbers

I was really surprised when I looked at the traffic numbers for last months. I expected the traffic to shrink a little bit compared to February because I published such a small number of posts. But it was the complete opposite. The traffic increased by more than 20% in all categories compared to the previous 31 days.

So March compensated for the missing growth of February. Let’s see what happes in April.

What is planned for April

To be honest, I don’t have a lot of plans for this month. The most important goal for April was the launch of the Hibernate Tips book. I already did that, and it has been an Amazon bestseller in the Java category for the last 3 days. Let’s see how long it stays there before a more general Java beginners book retakes the first place.

Besides that, I will focus on the blog and make sure that I bring you new posts and videos on the regular schedule.

And I will also take a few days off to recover from the stressful but very successful first 3 months of this year.