At the start of the year I posted my Themes for 2015. I decided now is a good time to look at what I was thinking at the start of the year and see how my year turned out. I think it is sort of pointless to set out some ideas of things you want to accomplish if you never stop and assess what you actually did, so this is sort of an accountability post to myself to see how things played out for the year.

• On the first idea of working on weekly updates. I didn’t accomplish that. On the other hand if we look at it from a post count standpoint I did average that, so I would call that a pretty successful year for my blog even if there were points that I went a whole month without putting some thoughts down.
• The next theme was to do more reading. Overall I was pretty successful with this. I didn’t always meet the 10% of my kindle book a day, but I did actually read more books than the previous year. I would call that a success, I hope to keep the momentum going, but with another baby on the way this year, I will probably read fewer books this year. I find that when I am overtired I can’t read as it just puts me to sleep so depending on how soon my little one is sleeping will depend upon how much reading I end up doing.
• The next thing on my list was spending more time doing stuff in Spring Boot. I did a little bit of work on the side playing with the framework. I am convinced that this is the only way to do development with Spring going forward, but migrating a very large legacy app in that direction is easier said that done. On the positive side though our organization did roll out a new microservice in spring boot this year, so we are beginning to bring it into production. The real key will be migrating the bulk of our code to the framework.
• The next idea I had was to try to learn Angular and get more serious with that. I can say that did not come to pass. I did take Code School’s shaping up with Angular.js course, and I just recently noticed they have added the next level to the free plan. I may end up messing with that over the coming year, but I am not sure. I am sort of watching to see if I think people start moving over to Angular 2 or if the change in compatibility is going to hurt the popularity of the framework. Also I am hearing more buzz about react.js so that is always an option to look at as well. Either way 2015 was not a year of doing front end stuff for me.
• For my architectural updates 2015 was a huge success. It started off slow with having issues aspectj-maven-plugin. I was forced to fork the project temporarily on github as the maintainer showed now interest in rolling a patch that someone contributed to solve the problem. Then codehaus shut down. After they moved the project into github one of the other maintainers rolled the fix in when I pointed out it was in the old Jira. So I was happy to be able to abandon my fork of the project and get back on the mainline branch. Then I ended up ripping the whole Hibernate Metamodel Generator out of the project anyway which probably wouldn’t have necessitated needing the aspectj plugin update, but that happened later in the year after we needed that upgrade. After getting the aspectj plugin situation resolved I was able to get us upgraded to Spring 4.1. Even better than that we closed the year running the 4.2 branch. So that was beyond what I was hoping to get done. JBoss finally released EAP 6.4 in April which is what I had been waiting on in order for us to upgrade to Java 8. We were able to get the container upgrade into production this fall. Then a few weeks later we switched our VM to Java 8 with that JBoss and ran successfully with that. Finally near the end of my work year in December I was able to switch our compiles to Java 8. So we are now at a point where we can use all the new lambdas and streams and I look forward to playing around with it in January.

All in all I was very happy with my year. I will spend some time in the near future to figure out my plan for 2016, I have some big ideas at work I want to deal with and I even have a few ideas for home projects to mess around with too. So here is to a great year that just ended and an even better one going forward.

Update

I was thinking I should probably have noted anything big that actually happened that I didn’t predict.

• I got to learn a bunch more Cassandra since I reworked our whole Cassandra Data layer as part of a big project to hide some of the complexity of what we are doing from the rest of the developers.
• I took a team lead position so I now lead a group of 3 developers. I didn’t expect that at the start of last year, but it has actually been a great thing.
• I started mentoring 2 other developers under a mentorship program at work. This started towards the end of the year, but I think it is going to be a great program. I think it will be a valuable part of onboarding new hires in the future when we hire people right out of university.