Platformability 2010 Roundup – A Year to Remember

December has certainly been a month of festive cheer here at Caplin. Despite it being one of our busiest months ever, we still managed to get into the swing of the holiday season. With visions of mince pies and mulled wine dancing in our heads, on December 15th we gathered around our Christmas tree for our annual Secret Santa gift exchange (our Nerf artillery has been sufficiently re-stocked) before heading off to the Caplin Christmas party.

As 2010 draws to a close it only seems appropriate to write a post rounding up Platformability’s highlights of the year. It’s been a great year and thanks to all the contributors at Caplin we have what is quickly becoming a very valuable technical resource and very popular blog. We’d also like to take this chance to thank all of our readers, especially those of you who have taken time to comment on our posts.

Platformability 2010 Hall of Fame: The Top Ten (Most Read)

Jonathan Paul – What does software look like?
Martin Tyler – Why we don’t need HTML5 WebSocket
Mike Poston – Silverlight 4 – Is it what banks want?
Adam Shone – Designing a Kanban board – not as simple as you might think
Adam Shone – New Features in Flex 4, Flash Builder 4, Flash Catalyst and Mosaic (part 1)
Emin Tatosian – An agile team-board layout that works or us, for now
Martin Tyler – Comet Servers for a Single-Dealer Platform
Adam Shone – New Features in Flex 4, Flash Builder 4, Flash Catalyst and Mosaic (part 2)
Martin Tyler – Apple releases Safari 5 with HTML5 WebSocket Support
Duncan Brown – Narrative Journey Maps

Honourable mentions should also go to two ladies: Tammy Sharpe for such excellent posts as A Singular State of Mind, and Sarah Lawfull, for (amongst many other great posts) Collaborative Culture = Innovative Thinking.

Last, but definitely not least, thank you to Ian Alderson for his 21 detailed posts to Platformability during 2010. Highlights include Agile Software Development – One Size Doesn’t Fit All, and An Estimate is not a Guarantee.

2010 – Top Facts

20,963 visits, 36, 529 unique page views
Top 3 Visiting Countries: United Kindom (7,706 visits) United States (3,559 visits) and India (1,127 visits)
Top search engine used to access Platformability: Google based search

Top referral sites:

363 visitors referred from Comet Daily
286 visitors from StumbleUpon
277 visitors from Twitter
269 visitors from mattdavey.wordpress.com
169 visitors from LinkedIn
91 visitors from singledealerplatforms.wordpress.com

It was a year of…..WebSocket, UX, 2 Minutes, Tech Talks and all things mobile

While 2010 marked a huge expansion in the range of topics the team at Caplin sought to cover, there were some topics that quickly became part of the furniture and began to appear as regular features.

While we wrote extensively about all things HTML5 based, Martin Tyler’s Why We Don’t Need HTML5 Websocket established itself as one of the most read posts on the blog. Throughout the year Martin published several other posts dedicated to WebSocket, making the category one of Platformability’s most popular. Martin had regular comments on his posts containing excellent feedback – we’re glad that people are finding the posts not only interesting, but also informative and helpful. Check out some of Martin’s other WebSocket based posts:

User Experience in the Spotlight

User Experience (UX) has always been top priority at Caplin and this year our UX team expanded to meet the growing demand for single-dealer platforms with a unique, personalised user experience. For those of you not familiar with UX, take a look at Ian Alderson’s post It’s High Time for Good UX.

The team regularly attended UX events including UX Brighton, and even ran a UX-based workshop at SPA 2010 called Persona Driven Development – Can it Work for you? Take a look at Duncan Brown’s (Head of UX here at Caplin) excellent post SPA 2010 Conference Redux dedicated to the conference and the success of their workshop.

A total of 22 UX based posts were published on Platformability in 2010, showing that UX is a hot topic that we’ll certainly be reading more about as 2011 progresses.

2 Minutes

There are a lot of talented engineers, architects, UX designers and managers here at Caplin, so during 2010 we thought it might be an idea to use Platformability to get to know these people better.

To do this, we ran “2 Minutes” Q&A sessions with a few of the team and were really happy with the results we got. So far, we’ve done 2 minutes with Chief Software Architect Martin Tyler, UX Designer Arthur Smit and Development Manager Steve Morgan. Stay tuned for 2 minutes with Duncan Brown, Head of UX, which will be our first feature in the new year.

Tech Talks

Each week we gather to watch a Google Tech Talk (hosted and run by Jonathan Paul – thanks Jon!) followed by a discussion of the content. The meetings are great food for thought with some really popular follow up blog posts.

Take a look at one of Tammy Sharpe’s most popular posts Know Your Mind, where she reviews David Rock’s Your Brain at Work; strategies for overcoming distraction, regaining focus and working smarter all day long as well as Ian Alderson’s insightful Tech Talk – Behaviour Driven Development – a comment on Dave Astel’s “Beyond Test Driven Development: Behaviour Driven Development.”

All Things Mobile

It seemed like there wasn’t a week in 2010 that went by without at least a few posts dedicated to the rapidly growing world of mobile. From mobile devices themselves to mobile app development, this area is one of our favourite topics and one that Platformability covers widely.

Would anybody want StreamLink for Windows Mobile?
Native vs Web for Mobile
Windows Phone 7 Development
Sencha Touch – mobile web development framework
Optimise for Portable Devices

The list goes on!

2011 and Beyond

2011 is going to be an exciting year for Caplin’s tech blog. We’re currently designing a new look and feel as well as some new functionality that we’ll apply to the blog in early 2011. The newly expanded UX team will be blogging more often, and you can expect to hear more about HTML5, mobile development and more from our team of architects at Caplin. And always, feedback is welcome!

From us to all of our readers, best wishes in 2011.