Life as an Open Source Developer

It's been a little over a month since I started my new gig at Stormpath. I gotta say, life is great as an open-source developer! Yes, I did start working for them as a consultant in April, so it's not a huge change for me. However, I only recently realized I haven't written a single line of proprietary code the entire time. My GitHub contributions look pretty good this year. They're nothing like @mojavelinux's or @dsyer's, but I'll get there. ;)

It's also been a bit more stress than I'm used to. I think this comes from a couple things, including turning my hobby into my job and the fact that I've set a lot of high expectations for myself. As a developer evangelist, I get to create my own job. That means that I can speak at the conferences I want to, write the code I want to, create the blog posts I want to, and everything else in between.

At the end of September, I finished updating the JHipster Mini-Book for JHipster 3.x. It's gone through tech editing and it's being copyedited right now. I hope to release it within a week.

In early October, I said I'd commit to writing one blog post per week, develop a JHipster module for Stormpath, and help get their Angular 2 support good enough for an alpha release. I'm happy to report that I've been able to accomplish most of these things, and I hope to show off our Angular 2 support soon.

I then channeled my efforts into integrating Stormpath's Java SDK with their AngularJS directives. You can read about how I did that in the article Get Started With AngularJS, Spring Boot, and Stormpath. Unlike my previous AngularJS tutorial, this one connects to a backend and shows how to communicate with Spring Boot cross-domain.

If you like to read code more than words, you can look at the example project's commits on GitHub.

1. Create an AngularJS UI with search and edit features.
2. Create a Spring Boot app with Stormpath.
3. Develop an API to CRUD people with Spring Data REST.
4. Integrate AngularJS and Spring Boot apps.
5. Integrate Stormpath into AngularJS for login, registration, and forgot password.

Last week, I released a JHipster module that integrates Stormpath. This exercise was good because I was able to identify some gaps in Stormpath's SDKs and fix them. Getting something to work made me feel good; having the ability to improve the developer experience was even better! Of course, I blogged about what I learned.

This week, I edited and code-reviewed some posts from Karl Penzhorn on React With Spring Boot and using WebPack With React. I also got to bang my head against the wall writing Angular 2 tests. If you're writing a module for Angular 2, generator-angular2-module provides a nice starting point.

Last, but certainly not least, I'll be speaking at a few events about microservices, JHipster, Angular 2, and Stormpath in the near feature:

• Rocky Mountain Software Symposium, November 19.
• The Rich Web Experience, December 9.
• A joint talk at Denver JUG with the infamous Josh Long, December 14.

If you have any questions about developer evangelism, the technologies I mentioned in this post, or Stormpath, please let me know. Otherwise, I hope to see you on the road soon!