While 2017 was mostly an inactive year for me, that doesn’t mean that we didn’t have any visitors! So let’s review what happened last year.
Visitors
The amount of visitors is similar to last year. While we gained a bit more visitors, we got less pageviews overall, but that makes sense, since we didn’t really write new articles, and thus didn’t really get much traffic through social networks either:
| 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Visitors | 63.000 | 247.000 | 280.000 | 288.000 |
| Page views | 102.000 | 361.000 | 365.000 | 344.000 |
War of the browsers
Just like last year, the war of the browsers isn’t a war anymore. Google Chrome rose another 4%, and now 82% of the visitors use Chrome:
| 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Chrome | 71% | 74,5% | 78% | 82% |
| Mozilla Firefox | 19% | 16,5% | 14% | 11% |
| Safari | 5,5% | 5% | 5% | 4% |
| Internet Explorer | 2,5% | 2% | 1,8% | 1,4% |
| Opera | 0,8% | 0,7% | 0,8% | 0,6% |
| Edge | - | 0,1% | 0,4% | 0,5% |
The only other browser in the top 6 browsers that’s not declining is Edge, which makes sense, since it should eventually replace Internet Explorer.
Mobile experience
In the top 10 of mobile devices, the number 1 and 2 are still the same, being the iPhone and iPad. The other numbers changed a bit, with the new top 10 being:
- iPhone
- iPad
- Moto G4
- Nexus 5
- Galaxy S7
- Galaxy S7 Edge
- OnePlus 3T
- Xiaomi Redmi Note 3
- Nexus 5X
- Xiaomi Redmi 3S
So, if we compare this to last year, we can see that Xiaomi and Motorola are newcomers in the top 10, with Xiaomi having two devices in the top 10 this year and Motorola’s Moto G4 going immediately to the third place. Google’s Nexus is doing less great, last year it had 4 devices in the top 10 (4, 5, 7 and 10), and this year only the 5 remains, and the 5X moves into the top 10 as well. This makes sense, since Google stopped the Nexus flagship and introduced their Pixel smartphones. These new Pixel devices aren’t doing too great though, since Google Pixel and Pixel XL are barely in the top 50.
What operating system do we use
While Microsoft still doesn’t dominate the web browser or mobile device market, their Windows operating system is still the most used operating system to visit this site. With 62% they even gained another 6% in comparison to last year. 20% of the users used macOS and 30% used a Linux distro.
Tutorials
Last year, we didn’t write as many articles as the year before, but we still managed to cover most of Spring cloud except Zuul (we still have an article ready about Zuul), we covered most aspects of Spring Security recently and we started an introduction about Spring Boot 2 and Spring 5.
Looking ahead
This year, we want to expand further on the microservice series (Spring cloud, …) and some other technologies such as:
- Sending mails with Spring and JavaMail (rewrite of an old, Dutch article)
- Talking asynchronously with Kafka (replacement of what we would have written last year with MQLight)
- Writing your own Spring boot starter
- Monitoring with Spring boot and Prometheus
- Setting up Spring boot admin
- Working with Spring batch
- Working with Solr
We also want to invest more time in frontend technologies like:
- Writing progressive webapps
- Writing applications with Vue
- Testing with Jest
- Testing with TAPE
And additionally, we may want to invest time to check these technologies:
- GraphQL
- Machine learning
Changes to the website
In 2017, we didn’t change the website, but recently, the homepage got simplified a bit, and should be a lot easier to navigate now.
And that’s about it now, best wishes for 2018!