Evermade Technology Radar 2018

Welcome to Evermade tech radar - inspired by Zalando. This is intended to help our developers to improve their skills and pick up the right tools for projects. Tech radar is referring to our future plan - not necessarily the existing stack.

Tools, technologies and concepts are divided into four categories:

• Adopt
  Technologies we should use and get familiar with.
• Trial
  Widely used mature technologies we will most likely adopt to our workflow at some point.
• Assess
  Something we see could be a part of our stack in the future but might still be too experimental or business needs are still unclear.
• Hold
  Technologies we should avoid. We might have used these in the past but we are not going to use in the future.

Methodologies / concepts

Adopt

• Analytics
  Analytics is more than just throwing in a GTM script to . Settings goals and following them should start before we've even started to write code. Better analytics understanding is one of our core company goals.
• Continuous integration & deployment
  Just git push and magic happens. Too fun to be ignored.
• Service design
  Some might wonder what is this doing on tech radar? Service design means "taking a service and making it meet the user's and customer's needs". Doesn't like something developers can ignore. We are creating services for humans. Everyone in our company should understand the meaning of the work we are doing.
• Architecture design
  Serverless? MVC? Separation of concerns? Understanding software architecture design and patterns helps us make better decisions.

Trial

• Automatic testing and test driven development
  Really helps improve the quality and saves time in long run. Testing requires a mindset change and adaptation of new tools.
• Scrum & project management
  We aim to be self-driven, and understanding how to run agile projects helps.
• REST API design
  Almost every project involves some kind of API integration. Sometimes we use APIs and sometimes we design them. It's worth understanding what it takes to design a good API.

Assess

• AI
  Ahhh, the hottest buzzword out there. Let's keep calm and follow the situation. In the future AI will definitely be integral part of... everything. So we can't ignore it. Let's keep our eyes open.
• AR / VR
  These were peaking on a hype curve a few years ago. There are some clear use cases in some projects so let's keep our eyes on this every now and then.

Hold

• N/A

Frameworks and platforms

Adopt

• WordPress
  Our number one CMS. But forget hacking with shitty plugins and readymade templates. We take WordPress more seriously.
• React
  Already widely used in our projects. Must know.
• Redux + other libraries
  Redux is a standard state manager these days. It is worth learning even if it comes with some unnecessary boilerplating. Also other related libraries like Redux Saga, Redux Thunk, ImmutableJS and Reselect.

Trial

• Contentful
  Powerful content as a service -platform. Offers tools for creating content models and adding content. Works nicely with headless tools.
• Shopify
  Powerful, scalable and customizable webshop SaaS-platform with powerful API and integration options. Has proven its value.

Assess

• Express.js
  If we boild Node.js backends, it's recommended to use Express.js. Mature, supported and capable.
• Headless technologies
  Headless tools like Gatsby.js offers a reliable and fast way to compile sites. Definitely worth investigating.
• Laravel
  The best PHP framework out there. If we do backend with PHP instead of Node.js, we use Laravel.

Hold

• CraftCMS
  Great CMS and might do some things better than WordPress, but overall let's try to keep our stack aligned and focus on only a few platforms. Worth experimenting with, and worth following how it evolves.
• Vue
  Vue is a great, easy to learn and powerful library. However, to keep our stack unified, let's focus on React.
• Angular
  Great framework but let's focus on React.
• HubSpot
  From developer's point of view HubSpot is quite far from what we would like to do.

Infrastructure and tools

Adopt

• Docker
  Docker is an integral part of our tooling and everyone should have at least basic understanding how Docker works and what's the motivation for using it.
• NPM / Yarn
  For today's frontend developer this should be quite obvious.
• Webpack
  Module bundler for JavaScript used in almost every project.
• Composer
  PHP dependency manager.
• Bitbucket Pipelines
  Continuous delivery tool used in our projects.
• NGINX
  Our primary web server and almost everyone needs to open config files every now and then.
• SSL
  At first glance it might be weird to see SSL on this list, but understanding how certificates work and how they can be configured is definitely beneficial for all of us.

Trial

• End-to-end testing
  Learning end-to-end testing tools like Mocha/Chai/Puppeteer or Cypress is definitely worth learning.
• Netlify
  Netlify offers powerful tools for building and hosting web services. Definitely worth having a look at.
• Amazon AWS infrastructure
  Amazon AWS offers zillions of different tools. Tools like EC2, Fargate, S3, CloudFront, API Gateway, Lambda and RDS are worth considering.
• Server-level caches
  Server-level caches like Redis, Varnish and FastCGI Cache offer better performance than language level caches (like WordPress cache plugins). Consider using in projects.

Assess

• Terraform
  Great tool for orchestrating infrastructure. Understanding best practices is important for successful use.
• Swagger
  Swagger is a great tool for planning, documenting and testing REST APIs. Recommended for any API project.

Hold

• Bower
  Deprecated package manager. Do not touch.
• Flightplan
  Flightplan is a tool to run sequences of shell commands against remote hosts. We have been using this for deployment but it will be replaced by CI.
• CircleCI
  We experimented with various CI tools and ended up using Bitbucket Pipelines. To keep our stack more consistent let's not use CircleCI anymore.
• Apache
  We have switched to NGINX. Apache should be used only if there's good reason to do so.
• Ansible
  Ansible is a great tool for orchestrating server infrastructure and we have used it extensively. However we are using Ansible mostly for provisioning servers but not for keeping their stack up to date. For only initializing servers it's overkill and will be replaced by init scripts.
• Gulp
  Although Gulp is still widely used in our projects it's more or less replaced by Webpack in later builds. Use carefully.

Languages, language tools & transpilers

Adopt

• JavaScript (>= ECMAScript 2015)
  Just do it.
• PHP (>= 7.2)
  WordPress is powered by PHP so it's good to understand the underlying language.
• SASS
  Powerful extension to CSS widely used in our projects.

Trial

• Node.js
  Server side JavaScript. Node.js is natural backend choise for us, because it's widely adopted and we have experience on it.
• TypeScript
  TypeScript is is a strict syntactical superset of JavaScript which brings in static typing. Definitely worth learning and experimenting with.

Assess

• Shell scripting
  Shell scripts are swiss army knives for all developers.

Hold

We have had internal discussions about all of these languages and some people has experience with these. However we do not see these to be suitable for Evermade. Learning curve would be too steep and educating the whole team is not worth it. Let's focus on JavaScript/Node.js and PHP.

• Python
• Go
• Elixir