Hello! Are you new here? If so, welcome to the Capgemini Engineering blog. It’s written by and for our fellow engineers across the technology industry.
This site has gone from strength to strength since it was created in 2014, and it provides an impressive showcase for the talent, passion and expertise shared among our teams every day. The number of contributors and the range of subjects continues to grow, and this will enhance the value we’re giving back to the wider tech community in 2017.
Speaking of “our contributions”, let’s take a look at our readers’ favourite articles of the past year…
2016’s Most Popular Posts
Is REST Best in a Microservices Architecture?
Craig Williams weighs up the pros and cons of different approaches to using microservices in the implementation of RESTful interfaces. This was by far and away our most popular article of 2016, having been read by 27,217 unique page views (the full hit count was 29,506). Microservices and containers were named as one of Gartner’s top 10 infrastructure-impacting trends of the year, so it’s easy to see why Craig’s insightful post drew so much industry attention.
Writing Custom Fields in Drupal 8
Deji Akali shares the fantastic DrupalCamp slides he presented across the United Kingdom in 2015. This great post can teach you how to take your own Drupal projects to the next level with custom fields in just 13 minutes! Deji starts from the bare basics and uses examples to help you put your new-found knowledge into practice.
Creating a CXF REST Service with Camel Blueprint
Phil Hardwick explains how Apache’s CXF and Camel frameworks are a match made in heaven when it comes to creating scalable and testable Java web services. In little under five minutes you can master the basics, and if Phil’s post has whetted your appetite you can take the next step with this reference example and the helpful resources he’s linked to.
Microservices - A Reality Check(point)
Andrew Harmel-Law shares his thoughts on the new-fangled (as of 2014) microservices trend emerging from in-vogue companies like Netflix and the wider Java community. As the ideology and technology behind it matures and is increasingly adopted across the industry, Andrew’s post continues to offer an honest and thought-provoking insight into what we gain and lose when we “containerise” new applications and web services.
Docker Continuous Delivery Workflows
Cam Parry describes his perfect development workflow for creating, testing and securing applications developed and deployed in Docker containers. In this well-researched piece Cam provides a reference example and also reviews a wide array of useful testing and scanning tools such as Vegeta, Protractor, Clair & Lynis.
Building Private Ethereum Networks with Docker Compose
Graham Taylor guides you through how to create a private blockchain on your own desktop for testing purposes. While testrpc might be your initial “go-to” solution, he explains how to leverage Docker Compose to craft a working setup that’s much closer to what you’d expect to deal with in production environments.
If you like this article you should also take a look at Kubeform: Kubernetes Clusters in any Cloud, where Graham explains how to use a straightforward visual interface to create a cluster of app containers on almost any virtualization platform.
How to do NFR Testing (Non-Functional Testing)
Sanjay Kumar takes you on a deep dive into the weird and wonderful world of integration testing with Apache Camel, Hystrix and MongoDB. He starts by explaining how this differs from testing you might already be familiar with and walks you through how to put this knowledge into practice in your real world development setups. Whether you’re a rookie developer or a seasoned professional, you’re guaranteed to benefit from Sanjay’s expertise.
What to Look For in a Code Review
Malcolm Young describes the anatomy of a good code review and the practicalities around implementing current industry best practice. In particular he details the key things to look out for to ensure your code is secure, scalable, accessible and maintainable over the long term.
Little’s Law and Kanban
John Shaw explains how Little’s Law can be applied to software projects that use Kanban boards to better organise customer demand and workloads. In less than 10 minutes you can discover how to reduce queue times, resolve bottlenecks and boost throughput from your agile development sprints.
Microservices Gotchas
Nick Walter lends you his experience about some of the difficulties he and the teams he’s worked with have encountered while implementing microservice-driven applications in production environments. This post will help you get a handle on the most common pitfalls so you can mitigate them in your own projects.
2016 by Numbers
This site drew over 106,000 hits in 2016, an increase of 35% on the previous year. All 99 blog articles collectively drew at least 78,930 unique page views (with a full hit count of 87,731) between them this year, and 49 of those were created in 2016. According to the most popular tags the team focussed primarily on development (21 posts), agile (8), open source (8) and DevOps (5).
Our posts average approximately 1,210 words of wisdom, with an estimated total across all articles of 108,885. The most in-depth post is Sanjay Kumar’s deep dive into How to do NFR Testing (Non-Functional Testing) with an impressive 3,667 words.
The most prolific contributor of the year was Malcolm Young with 8 new posts. He and the following 7 established regulars produced 25 new posts between them in 2016: Tom Phethean, Andrew Harmel-Law, Alberto Garcia Lamela, Sarah Saunders, Nick Walter, Graham Taylor, Ant Broome.
We’d also like to thank the following 12 new authors who contributed posts for the first time in 2016. They collectively shared their expertise across 18 new articles: Shana Dacres, Phil Hardwick, Mat Perry, Satvinder Hullait, Gayathri Thiyagarajan, Amir Aryanpour, Matt Davidson, Sanjay Kumar, Abhilash Nair, Richard Sheppard, Greg Wolverson & Imran Khan.
After such a successful year we’re looking forward to expanding the number of writers and posts over the course of 2017. We’re also planning to include contributions from other teams across the Capgemini group, as we seek to share our collective experience across an even wider range of subjects. If you have any post suggestions or feedback, leave them in the comments below!
