Happy New Year 2022

Happy New Year! I want to take a few minutes and reflect on the year that was 2021 and look ahead to 2022.

I started a new job this year at Briebug Software as an Enterprise Architect. We are a consultancy and I spent this year working for a single client who happens to be a Fortune 50 company. The size of the company and the volume at which the applications run presented all sorts of new challenges for me. I got to work on a bunch of really cool projects running Spring Boot & Spring Cloud. Towards the end of the year, I was promoted to Principal Architect and can’t say enough good things about Briebug!

SpringOne

This year I was lucky to be selected as one of the speakers at SpringOne. I have attended a few Spring Conferences before and it is easily one of my favorites so this was a big deal and an honor for me. My Presentation was on Full Stack Java Development with Spring Boot and Vue. I thought I did a really good job of preparing for this talk but nothing really prepares you for Zoom dropping off in the middle of your presentation. Thankfully I was alerted that it happened and I was able to log back in and finish the talk. I got some really good feedback on my talk and appreciate anyone who joined us live or watched the replay.

Spring One

Creating Content

I love creating content and thankfully I was able to get back to it this year. Here are a few of my favorite pieces of content that I worked on this year.

Blog

YouTube

2022

Now that I have 2 small kids at home I’m hesitant to put specific goals out in the world because I honestly don’t know If I can complete them. With that said here are some aspirations.

Move my website over to Nuxt 3

danvega.dev

I’m really happy with my current website. Every time I post a new article I head over to the site to make sure it looks ok and I remember just how proud I am of it. The current version of my website is written in a framework called Gridsome, which is a static site generator for VueJS. I have been really happy with Gridsome but there are a few limitations that are stopping me from doing some of the things I want to do. That and the project hasn’t been moving forward that much over the last couple of years.

Enter Nuxt 3 which just went into beta and brings a whole bunch of exciting features. There are too many to mention here but these are my favorites so far

Vue 3 Support
TypeScript Support
Vite - My favorite build tool
Nitro - Nuxt 3 Server
FAST!

Nuxt 3 is still in beta and while I love what they are doing there are still some things missing that are going to prevent me from moving over right now. The biggest one of all is static site generation which is coming soon 🤞🏻 Lucky for me I am in no rush to move over which gives me a great opportunity to spend some time learning Nuxt 3.

Content

content creator

I was happy to be back at turning out content last year but after looking at my total numbers I know I can do better. I’m setting some lofty goals in this department but I think they are doable.

Blog: 1 post per month for a total of 12 posts
YouTube: 1 video per week for a total of 52 videos
Live Streaming: 2x a month for a total of 24 live streams
Courses: 2 New Courses

As you can see YouTube is where I want to focus this year. I’m really proud that I have been able to grow my channel to almost 14k subscribers and I have done so without being consistent. I looked back at my stats and I only published 11 videos in 2021. That is less than 1 per month and I know I can do better than that.

You might be thinking that moving from 11 to 52 videos in a year is a lofty goal and I would completely agree. I think the one thing I have on my side is that I can create YouTube shorts much quicker than normal tutorials. Are you a fan of consuming shorts on YouTube? If so can you let me know what types of videos you want to see or some of your favorite creators that are creating shorts?

Conferences

I’m really hoping that we return to somewhat of a normal conference season where we are all hanging out in person. I would love to speak at 4+ conferences this year and to do that I need to submit to a bunch of conferences. I need to get better and finding the conferences I want to speak at writing good abstracts. I keep all of my call for papers in a Github repo if you’re interested in reading them. If you know of any good places to find lists of upcoming conferences I would love to hear about them.

I’m really happy that I got back to producing my newsletter on a weekly basis. I would like to continue that in 2022. I’m constantly looking at making small tweaks to my format and that is something I will continue to do. If you’re a subscriber and have a suggestions please send them my way. If you’re not a subscriber, what are you waiting for.

Java Champions

Java Champions are leaders in the Java community who are experts at what they do. I happen to know a few Java Champions and I look up to them and aspire to be like them. I feel like I do a lot for the Java community but I could be doing so much more. I am going to figure out more ways to contribute to the community who has given me so much so that one day I might join this list.

Charity

Toys for Shots

Due to the pandemic the non profit organization I run has been unable to throw our big event, Toys for Shots. This is something I hope we can back to this year. With that I would like to move our website over to Nuxt 3. I also want to build in some stripe integration so that we can take donations online which is one feature we are lacking. CLE Cares, is the name of our non-profit and we need to get a site setup for that. A lot of work to do here but it’s something I enjoy working on so I look forward to it.

Conclusion

I know it sounds silly but I look forward to the new year after the long holiday season. I’m excited for what this year will bring. I’m looking forward to doing more of what I love to do, learning and creating content. Thank you to all of you who continue to support me and I hope you have a happy and healthy 2022.