2021 Best of the Best Blog Posts

We ranked the top Capital One Tech blog posts of 2021 – here’s what we learned

Loved it or hated it, 2021 was quite the year. At Capital One Tech we’re proud of the work we published and the amazing technologists we collaborated with in 2021. As we look back on the year that was, we know some of our content may have gotten lost in the social media shuffle. It’s okay, we’re all busy. So we created a cheat sheet profiling some of our best pieces from 2021. Enjoy!

Most Viewed Article of 2021

My Guide to CRUSHING the AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam by Maddy Pet

Keeping our skills fresh is an eternally evergreen topic. Especially so in the era of cloud computing, when understanding the ins and outs of AWS is increasingly important to a wider swath of tech roles. In this article, Capital One Principal Engineer Maddy Pet shares how she studied for -- and passed -- the AWS Cloud Practitioner Exam.

Want to read more of Maddy’s work? Check out her article on Starting Out with AWS & DevOps - 10 Tips From an Expert.

Most Recommended Article of 2021

How to Avoid Coupling in Microservices Design by Mariam Rajabi

How can we avoid distributed monoliths and build microservices that are truly loosely coupled? In this article, Capital One Senior Software Engineer Mariam Rajabi covers how to minimize implementation coupling, temporal coupling, and deployment coupling in your microservices design.

Two systems are loosely coupled if changes to the design, implementation, or behavior in one won’t cause changes in another. When it comes to microservices, coupling can happen if a change to one microservice enforces an almost immediate change to all other microservices that collaborate with it directly or indirectly.-Mariam Rajabi

Most Shared on Social in 2021

Ah, So That’s What’s in My Wallet by Sahana Arya and Alana Alfeche

We love when our work resonates with our readers and they hit that social share button on our content. Our most shared article of 2021 was an explainer on the EMV chip inside your credit card.

Like many others at Capital One, we know what needs to be done to support credit card initiatives, but we were curious about how physical credit cards actually work! Our curiosity propelled us to dig deeper and learn more about this technology. We were fascinated by what we learned about physical credit card technology and figured other software engineers would be interested in learning the same.-Sahana Arya and Alana Alfeche

Shared almost 300 times on Twitter and LinkedIn, it seems that many of you were equally curious about this credit card chip technology!

Most Articles in a Series

Madhuri "MJ" Jakkaraju is on a roll!

MJ wrote not one, not two, not three, but FIVE articles on how women in tech can approach their career advancement!

You can read parts 1-3 here:

And keep on eye out for parts 4 and 5 later this month:

Most Clicks From Google Search

10 Microservices Best Practices for the Optimal Architecture Design by Sandeep Jandhyala

As far as we know, there’s no engineering problem Google can’t find an answer for… and if not, try AskJeeves.

In 2021 it turns out a lot of you had questions about the best practices for your microservices architecture. This deep dive by Director, Software Engineering Sandeep Jandhyala lays out ten ways to build microservices that are loosely coupled, distributed, and optimized. 10/10 recommend!

Want to read more of Sandeep’s work? Check out the following articles:

Most Successful Pieces by Topic Category

To see the most viewed pieces in each of our content pillars — everything from AI and ML to Cloud to Open Source — check out the links below.

Congrats again to all of our 2021 writers!

...And a special shout out and thank you to all of YOU, our loyal readers. We can’t wait to show you what we’re writing in 2022.

Stay tuned for more from Capital One Tech!

 


Capital One Tech

Stories and ideas on development from the people who build it at Capital One.

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