Thoughts on Java Report November/December 2016
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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.
What happened in October and November
October and the first half of November were very stressful. The main goal for October was to create the new Advanced Hibernate Online Training and to prepare its launch. When I wrote the last Thoughts on Java Report at the beginning of October, I was pretty optimistic about it. Sure, the schedule was tough, but it wasn’t too crazy. That changed when, due to personal reasons, I got almost no work done for 1.5 weeks.
After that, the schedule was completely messed up. For the next few weeks, I focussed on the creation of the Advanced Hibernate Online Training, and I was able to complete it in time. But I had to drop a few other things for it, like posting new content here on the blog and youtube. That’s also the reason why I didn’t publish a new report in November. But more about that later.
Besides that, the last two month went really well. For the first time, I launched the Hibernate Performance Tuning Online Training and the Advanced Hibernate Online Training at the same time. Despite the lack of time, that went pretty fine. Almost twice as many students as in the previous launches signed up this time and are now learning about advanced Hibernate features and performance tuning.
Posts & Videos
As I said in the beginning, I had to drop a few posts to finish the course preparation. The main reasons for that were, of course, the time pressure to finish the course but also the lack of preparation for future content posts. That’s something I definitely want to improve on in the next few weeks.
In general, I stuck to the publishing schedule as good as possible. In most weeks, I published a new Java Weekly on Monday, a Hibernate Tip video on Tuesday, a long-form tutorial on Wednesday and a Hibernate Tip post on Thursday.
You can find all Java Weekly posts and videos here.
I also uploaded these 5 new Hibernate Tip videos to the Thoughts on Java youtube channel:
And here is a complete list of all long-form tutorials I published in October and November. The posts 6 Hibernate features that I’m missing in JPA and How to implement a soft delete with Hibernate were especially popular.
- How to persist creation and update timestamps with Hibernate
- 6 Hibernate features that I’m missing in JPA
- 5 Reasons to Use JPA / Hibernate
- How to implement a soft delete with Hibernate
- Should you create or generate your table model?
In October and November, I published the following 5 Hibernate Tip posts:
- Hibernate Tips: Map generated values
- Hibernate Tips: How to define schema and table names
- Hibernate Tips: How to map native query results to a POJO
- Hibernate Tips: How to create a database setup script based on entity mappings
- Hibernate Tips: How to select a POJO with a Criteria Query
Traffic numbers
October brought the most traffic Thoughts on Java ever had. The number of sessions and page views grew by more than 9%. This is a great development and motivates me to follow the current posting schedule.
The lack of new posts at the beginning of November had, of course, a negative impact on the traffic. The number of sessions and page views dropped a few percent compared to October, but they were still higher than in September. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the current traffic numbers.
What is planned for December
Christmas is comming and December will be a short month. I don’t want to work during the holidays and there are, of course, also all the typical Christmas preparations. But that doesn’t prevent me from defining 3 main goals for December:
- Support the students of the Advanced Hibernate Online Training and the Hibernate Performance Tuning Online Training.
- Prepare the long-form tutorial, the Hibernate Tip post, and the Hibernate Tip video at least 1 week in advance. Right now, I write the posts 1-2 days before I publish them. That creates a lot of pressure if anything unexpected happens.
- Start to write the Hibernate Tips ebook. That’s on my list for quite a while now. I already created an outline of the book but there are still a few things to do before I can start writing it.