2020 Year in Review
Tags: news, devjournal, motivation
Published: 2021-01-06 15:11:47

2020 was (dare we say it?) an unprecedented year, but before it's fully in the rearview, we at Salesforce Engineering wanted to take a beat and look back at 10 good things that happened.

10\. With our thousands of employees forced to leave their offices and work remotely, we took the opportunity to develop new practices and guidelines for distributed work. We'll be better able to effectively communicate, create, and collaborate together no matter what the next year(s) hold.  
9\. We published a lot of [blog posts](https://www.engineering.salesforce.com)! Our top three most-read posts covered security ([Easily Identify Malicious Servers on the Internet with JARM](https://engineering.salesforce.com/easily-identify-malicious-servers-on-the-internet-with-jarm-e095edac525a)), automated testing ([Automating Complex End-to-end Tests](https://engineering.salesforce.com/automating-complex-end-to-end-tests-b0a5fc003592)), and an open source tool for Kubernetes ([A Generic Sidecar Injector for Kubernetes](https://engineering.salesforce.com/a-generic-sidecar-injector-for-kubernetes-c05eede1f6bb)).  
8\. We sponsored the first-ever virtual Grace Hopper Celebration put on by Anita Borg and extended internship offers to a slew of folks we’re looking forward to welcoming to the team next summer.  
7\. In a truly strange year, almost 300 employees took to the virtual stage at conferences around the world (er, in their living rooms?) to talk about the great work they’re doing.  
6\. It’s no secret we love open source. We headed to the StackOverflow blog to share [the complexities and rewards of open sourcing corporate software projects](https://stackoverflow.blog/2020/11/17/the-complexities-and-rewards-of-open-sourcing-corporate-software-products/).  
5\. Speaking of open source, we dropped some cool projects this year: [Best](https://github.com/salesforce/best), which allows you to write JavaScript benchmarks in the same way you write unit tests and integrate it into your continuous integration workflow; the [AI Economist](https://einstein.ai/the-ai-economist), which is an open source framework for economic policy design; and [Cloudsplaining](https://github.com/salesforce/cloudsplaining ), an AWS IAM Security Assessment tool that identifies violations of least privilege and generates a risk-prioritized HTML report, among [many others](https://github.com/salesforce).  
4\. We launched the FOSS Fund to donate money every quarter to a project selected by our employees; a sustainable open source ecosystem is essential for our technical future.  
3\. The world got to meet the [Salesforce Kubernetes Platform](https://vmblog.com/archive/2020/10/30/how-salesforce-operates-kubernetes-multitenant-clusters-in-public-cloud-at-scale.aspx#.X-uar-lKjlx), a substrate-agnostic Kubernetes install that handles concerns for the entire runtime stack.  
2\. The Buildpacks project was [promoted to Incubation](https://www.cncf.io/blog/2020/11/18/toc-approves-cloud-native-buildpacks-from-sandbox-to-incubation/) from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation Sandbox.  
1\. We [announced Hyperforce](https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2020/12/02/introducing-salesforce-hyperforce/), a complete re-architecture of Salesforce that uses the scale & agility of the public cloud, representing a massive, multi-year, cross-company engineering effort that we’re so proud of.  

So that’s a wrap on 2020. It was a difficult year, making it all the more worth looking back on what we accomplished together! We're already back at it after taking a short breather around the holidays and hope to bring you more great stuff in 2021.