Thoughts on Java Report May 2017
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Why I publish the Thoughts on Java Report
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 successful book launch and then back to normal blogging
April started with a bang. I launched the book on April 4th, and you made it an Amazon bestseller within the first day. That was amazing and a lot more than I expected. Thank you!
The weeks before and the week after the book launch were extremely busy and stressful. So it was good that everything slowed down a little bit afterward. I took a few days off and visited family over the Easter weekend.
The rest of the month was just regular blogging and you might have noticed that I’m back on a normal schedule for the blog and Youtube channel. I even had some time to think about the upcoming months and how I can improve your experience here on the site. But more about that later …
Posts & Videos
All the stress about the book launch affected the posting schedule at the beginning of the month. But for the last few weeks, I’m back on track bringing you new posts and videos on 4 days a week.
Videos
The growth of the Youtube channel had slowed down in the previous month. But that improved as soon as I got back to a regular upload schedule.
Let’s take a look at the videos. And if you’ve any suggestions to improve the videos or topics I should talk about; please tell me about it at the end of this post.
Hibernate Tips
I uploaded 3 Hibernate Tips videos in which I showed how to cascade a persist operation to child entities, use query comments with hibernate to identify a query in your logs and how to call a Stored Procedure.
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.
Posts
The book launch took a lot of time and effort at the beginning of April. So I had to slow down on the regular writing and publishing of detailed tutorial posts. That changed 2 weeks ago, and I’m happy to be back on the regular schedule.
Book Updates
As I wrote at the beginning, the book launched on April 4th. So I only announced the book and didn’t write any other progress updates.
Tutorials
In April’s tutorial posts, I tried to dispell the common misconception that you can’t use the features of your database with Hibernate and answered a question about XML and annotation mappings.
- 8 Ways to use the features of your database with Hibernate
- Mapping Definitions in JPA and Hibernate – Annotations, XML or both?
Hibernate Tips
I also published 4 Hibernate Tips in April. The first 2 were from the Hibernate Tips book. The others ones were new and so will be the tips you will read in the following months.
- Hibernate Tips: How to call a standard function in a JPQL query
- Hibernate Tips: How to map a bidirectional many-to-one association
- Hibernate Tips: How to validate that an entity attribute value is within a defined range
- Hibernate Tips: How to filter entities from a mapped association?
Traffic numbers
After an incredible March with more than 20% growth in users and page views, the numbers dropped a little bit in April. That might be related to the Easter vacation in a lot of countries, the unregular posting schedule in the previous weeks or a change in the google algorithm. I don’t worry about it at the moment. So far, 2017 brought solid growth and I’m happy with that.
What is planned for May
As I wrote at the beginning, I want to focus on improving your experience as a reader of the blog and as a subscriber to my email list. But I can’t do that on my own. I need your feedback for that.
Edit: I’ve closed the survey. Thanks to everyone who shared their feedback.
