Thoughts on Java Report March 2017
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.
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 book requires lots and lots of writing…
February was an extremely busy month. I spend a lot of my time writing and improving the first draft of my book. But on Monday, February 27th, I was finally able to announce the completion of the 1st draft.
Overall, February was a good month. As long as I don’t think about the long and stressful last 3-5 days before I finally completed the 1st draft, I enjoyed the book writing process. And I also found a good rhythm with the Youtube videos. Preparing and recording the videos gets easier and easier.
Posts & Videos
Unfortunately, all the work on the book had an impact on the blog and the Youtube channel. I had to skip one content and one book update post and 2 book update videos.
Videos
I didn’t have the time to promote new videos to the same extent as I did in January and the growth of the channel slowed down. I’m not happy with that development, but it’s something I have to accept for now. The channel is still too small to attract a lot of organic attention for new videos, and I have to promote them on other platforms. I will put more thoughts and energy into that in April after I published the book.
OK, let’s have a look at the videos I uploaded in February. It were 4 short Hibernate tips, 4 tutorial videos, and 2 book updates.
Don’t like videos? Have a look at this month’s posts.
Hibernate Tips
As usual, I uploaded the Hibernate Tips on Tuesday’s. They covered a broad range of different topics, like defining pagination for JPQL queries, the mapping of database columns whose values are generated by database triggers, the definition of table and schema names for mapped entities and selecting POJOs in Criteria queries.
Tutorials
I continued to record and upload videos for popular posts. These were about Hibernate 5’s support for the Date and Time API, different options to initialize lazy associations, Hibernate logging configurations and mapping native query results.
Book Updates
I spend most of my time writing the book and only recorded 2 update videos.
Posts
I published 9 posts, 3 book updates, 3 tutorials and 3 Hibernate Tips, since the last Thoughts on Java Report.
Book Updates
Book Update Week 6 was my favorite because I was finally able to announce the 1st draft of my book. It took a little bit longer than expected but I’m happy with the result. Now I have 2 weeks to improve a book with more than 200 pages and to send it to a copyeditor.
- Book Update Week 3 – Real progress … finally
- Book Update Week 5 – First version is almost done
- Book Update Week 6 – First draft finally done
Tutorials
Until now, I focused on JPA and Hibernate ORM. But there are also some other intersting Hibernate projects. I had a quick look at Hibernate Validator at the beginning of February and a closer look at Hibernate Search at the rest of the month and the beginning March.
- How to automatically validate entities with Hibernate Validator
- Add full-text search to your application with Hibernate Search
- How to implement complex full-text search with Hibernate Search
Hibernate Tips
I also posted 3 new Hibernate Tip posts which will also be part of the book:
- Hibernate Tips: How to call a custom database function in a CriteriaQuery
- Hibernate Tips: How to automatically add Metamodel classes to your project
- Hibernate Tips: How to map a java.util.Date to a database column
Traffic numbers
January was an extremely successful month and I had hoped to continue to grow the traffic by more than 10%. But it seems like, not everyone is as interested in Hibernate Validator and Hibernate Search. Missing one post and beeing less active on social media was probably also not beneficial.
Overall, I’m a little bit disappointed with the traffic in February. But right now, I have to put all my energy into the book. So, let’s wait and see what happens in March.
What is planned for March
I will spend most of the month working on the book and its launch preparations. There are still a lot of things to do. I need to improve the first draft, define a title, find a cover designer and a copy editor.
And I need to prepare the launch. That is something you could help me with. I’m looking for social media shares and honest reviews on Amazon. If you like to help me with that, please join my launch team on Facebook.
And that’s not the only big thing in March. In the last week of month, I will speak at the JavaLand conference. I’m looking forward to giving a talk about Java EE microservices and a 1-day workshop about Hibernate. I hope to see you there.
