Thoughts on Java Report January 2017
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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.
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.
Something big happened in December…
… and I’m not talking about my son’s Christmas presents.
After almost 2.5 years, I decided to quit the Java Weekly series. Recent European and German court decisions put me at the risk of being sued for copyright infringements when I link to a page that uses an image in a wrong way or violates a copyright in any other way. I’m not willing to take that risk and decided to quit the Java Weekly series. At least as long as there are no changes to the current case law. I explained all of that in more detail in The end of Java Weekly … for now.
Besides that, December was pretty fine. I prepared most posts a few days in advance, worked on the concept of my Hibernate Tips book and used the holidays to take a few days off. I’m still not a week ahead of my publishing schedule (especially not for posts of this week). I also wanted to get a few more things prepared before I announced the book. Nevertheless, the December was quite OK, and I credit myself a 90% goal achievement. I will work on the remaining 10% in January. But more about that later.
Posts & Videos
Before I tell you about my plans for January, let’s have a quick look at last month’s posts, videos and traffic numbers. Due to the end of the Java Weekly series and the holidays, I published fewer posts than usual.
I also uploaded 3 Hibernate Tip videos to Youtube. The consistency seems to pay off. The number of views and subscribers grows (slowly) and I decided to upload more videos in January. But more about that later. Here are last month’s videos.
Hibernate Envers was the main topic here on the blog. I published 3 tutorials about it and I’m planning to create a free ebook out of them that I will add to the Thoughts on Java Library, soon.
- Hibernate Envers – Getting started
- Hibernate Envers – Query data from your audit log
- Hibernate Envers – Extend the standard revision
As always, I didn’t focus on a specific topic in the Hibernate Tips series and answered a few common questions instead:
- How to map an association to an Optional
- How to automatically set an attribute before persisting it
- How to cascade a persist operation to child entities
Traffic numbers
As expected, December brought less traffic than November but still a lot more than I thought.
I didn’t post any Java Weekly after December 9th, only wrote a review of 2016 in the last week of December and a lot of people worked less during the holidays (myself included). Overall, I expected that the number of page views and sesssions would drop by at least 10%. But that wasn’t the case as you can see in the screenshot.
What is planned for January
I just announced my first book which will be based on the Hibernate Tips series. That will require a lot of work, and I want to publish it on April 4th. Edit: I released the book. You can get it at hibernate-tips.com
In addition to that, I already started to post more videos on my Youtube channel. For the next few weeks, I want to publish 3 videos each week. These will be a weekly update on my progress on the book, a Hibernate Tip video and a longer tutorial video.
The channel is still tiny, and it will be interesting to see how the new schedule affects the growth of it. The last few days looked promising. I will write more about it in February report.
I will also write 2 articles for the German print magazine iX. One about CDI 2.0 and another one about JPA 2.2 (or more likely the recent changes in Hibernate because JPA 2.2 still made no progress).
