Our engineering team blog has continued to grow this year, with 25 authors writing more than 40,000 words in articles across a range of topics. We’ve welcomed 17 first-time authors to the fold, with colleagues from other countries joining the UK engineering community in contributing. We’ve also expanded into different technologies, with members of our Microsoft practice starting to get involved alongside our open source teams.

We’ve had over 115,000 views of our articles (an increase of nearly 10% on last year), with this piece on REST and microservices by Craig Williams showing an enduring popularity. With the continued hype surrounding Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies, it’s hardly surprising that Graham Taylor’s article on building private Ethereum networks has also been one of our most widely-read pieces.

Of this year’s new articles, the most popular has been Ant Broome’s piece sharing our grade ladder - another example of our commitment to open source, not just in terms of the software that we build, but also in the way we build it.

This year’s longest article, and the second most read of our newly published articles, was James Relph’s 3,020 words on creating a portable Kubernetes cluster.

At the other end of the scale, Tosin Ogunrinde was the soul of brevity, needing only 140 words to announce his open source library for building CQL statements in Apache Cassandra.

Some of this year’s articles have been focused on particular technical topics, such as Sophie Field writing about multi-stage builds in Docker. Meanwhile, others have discussed more general areas, such as team culture, the psychology of learning new skills in a fast-moving technology landscape, an efficient debugging mindset, and even how to avoid becoming Buridan’s donkey.

Some of our writers have been looking forward, with our Applied Innovation Exchange helping to focus our minds on the future, while others have discussed working with legacy systems.

We’ve also been active in the wider software engineering communities, either presenting at a range of events, attending conferences like ffconf, Lead Dev, and QCon, or sponsoring events such as Devoxx and DrupalCamp London.

Some of our articles have been from the point of view of experienced team members, such as Sarah Saunders on learning React as an experienced Java developer, while others have been written by members of our junior talent programmes. Graduates, apprentices, and even summer interns have contributed to the blog, with Leon Hassan writing about his first SAP UI5 application, Henry White writing about exploring Meteor, and Nagaraj Govindaraj and Rushil Soni discussing how they used VoiceOps to manage cloud infrastructure in AWS.

Sadly, this year we said goodbye to Andrew Harmel-Law, who had been one of the main driving forces in getting this blog up and running, and has left the company to pursue new challenges. He will be missed, but we’ll try to carry on following the example he set. One of the last contributions he made at Capgemini was one that I think will continue to shape the way we work in years to come - he was one of the main authors of our collective response to the “anti-diversity manifesto” controversy. The wider company is also committed to active inclusion, and this sentiment is echoed forcefully by our team in a way that might make more sense to software engineers.

Since the blog started in September 2014, more than 50 members of our team have written over 150 articles. What will 2018 bring? I wouldn’t like to risk making predictions in terms of technology trends, but I’m certain that the Capgemini engineering team will continue to share our opinions and thoughts on what we learn in the months to come.

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