More posts by Ben Hall

One of the great things about Intelliware is our culture of continuous learning. There are always new things to learn in the context of our delivery projects, but with the rapid pace of new, interesting, and emerging technology we explicitly step away from our delivery projects to sharpen the saw. We focus our efforts around six Centres of Excellence. Five of them have a narrow technology focus: Mobile, Web UI, Microservices, Data, and DevOps; one of them, the Dev CoE, looks broadly at the topics that don’t fit specifically into one of the other CoEs.

Intelliware’s Centres of Excellence have done some interesting stuff in 2017.

The Dev CoE coordinated hackathons on both Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Mobile development, and organized study groups regarding security, domain driven design, and clean code.

The Microservices CoE investigated and taught some labs regarding Docker and Kubernetes. Earlier in the year, they investigated and promoted the adoption of Spring Cloud/Netflix OSS throughout many of our delivery projects.

The DevOps CoE sponsored joint research with one of our clients looking into several next-generation CI/CD tools that focus on the “Deployment Pipeline” as a central concept. Over two days, combined teams of Intelliware and client developers compared Jenkins, Travis CI, and Concourse CI.

The Mobile CoE ran internal lab sessions on Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality libraries. Later in the year, they looked into Core ML and Tensorflow, using machine learning libraries on mobile devices.

The Data CoE looked at languages and tools including Scala, Spark, Kafka and other parts of the Hadoop ecosystem and techniques such as data science and data visualization with R. Many of our Data CoE members have worked through a variety of online machine learning courses

The Web UI CoE taught a lab regarding Angular Redux. They worked on narrowing the gap between UX and UI design via web components and component libraries. Recently, they’ve been promoting an iterative approach to application development, rapidly prototyping a working application with readily available web components and a Firebase backend. Take a look at their initial prototype at https://github.com/intelliware-coe-web/retro-app.

We’re entering 2018 with good momentum and will continue to research and learn exciting new things.