Thoughts on Java Report August 2017: Finally back on track


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So far, this year had been crazy. But July provided a nice change of pace.

Within the first ~3 months, I wrote and launched the Hibernate Tips book with huge success. As of today, I sold more than 1100 books and e-books. As I’ve learned recently, that are more copies than some traditional publishers expect in the lifetime of a book. Thank you to everyone who got a copy and made this possible!

Shortly after that, I had to migrate Thoughts on Java with all the blog content and courses to a new web hosting company and platform. The company, that built and managed the platform that I used before, announced to change their overall strategy. So, I either had to leave or stay as a customer who no longer fit into the overall strategy. I decided to migrate everything to a new web hosting company. That also required me to change the underlying platform. All of that had to be done within 3 stressful weeks.

And less than a month later, I opened the registration of the Advanced Hibernate Online Training and the Hibernate Performance Tuning Online Training.

So, I was really happy when I recognized that there were no big projects planned for July. I on-boarded the first project coaching client and did a few consulting calls. But besides that, I was able to concentrate on writing more blog posts and publishing videos on YouTube.

And it already to pay off. The website traffic is growing, and yesterday, the YouTube channel exceeded the 1400 subscriber mark. That’s a 40% growth within 2 month.

BTW: If you haven’t already done that, you should subscribe to the channel now. Otherwise, you’re missing out on 2 great videos about JPA and Hibernate every week 😉

Posts & Videos

OK, I said that I, finally, had the time to write more posts and to record more videos. So, let’s take a look at all the posts and videos.

Videos

Here are the 3 Hibernate Tip and 2 Tutorial videos that I published in the last 5 weeks. As always, I tried to cover a mix of beginner and advanced topics.

And I already recorded the videos for the next 2 weeks. So, expect to get a new video every Tuesday and Thursday.

Hibernate Tips

Similar to the Hibernate Tip posts, the Hibernate Tip videos provide you with a quick and easy to implement solution for a common development task. In the last month, I showed you how to map a bidirectional many-to-many association, use Hibernate’s native bootstrapping API and to map a bidirectional many-to-on association.

Tutorials

The tutorial videos are a few minutes longer and most often provide more context than the tip videos. In the last months, I explained how to map an association to a java.util.Map instead of a java.util.List and provided an introduction to JPA’s different FetchTypes.


Posts

In the last few weeks, I wrote 6 tutorials about advanced or new features and 3 Hibernate Tips which covered a mix of advanced and beginner topics.

Tutorials

Last month’s tutorial posts summarized the changes in JPA 2.2, showed you the problems that occur when you use CascadeType.REMOVE, explained a few things you need to know when you use Hibernate with a MySQL database, compared the performance of DTO and entity projections and started a new series about version-based database migration with Liquibase.

Hibernate Tips

And the Hibernate Tips posts show you how you can fetch associations in batches, override mapping definitions so that you can use different databases and bootstrap Hibernate with Spring Boot.

What is planned for August

The main focus of this month is to prepare and cleanup everything before I start traveling to different conference in September and October. So, I will work on all the small tasks on my ToDo list, write blog posts and record videos.

I will also speak at the JUG Paderborn about Hibernate performance tuning and prepare 2 workshops for the Workshop-Tage 2017 in September. In the first workshop, I will speak about multi-tenancy with Hibernate ORM and give a quick introduction to Hibernate Envers and Hibernate Search. The second workshop is all about advanced Hibernate features.