Monday, 23 September 2024
Cooking up recipe data for the Feast app
Frederick O''BrienAny dish worth its salt needs the finest ingredients. In the case of the new Feast cooking app, we needed a structured recipe archive. This is how we rustled it up
Friday, 6 September 2024
Day in the Life: Alex Guild
Rasha ArdatiWelcome to our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series where we interview a colleague from the product and engineering department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian
Friday, 26 July 2024
Parsing: the merit of strictly typed JSON
Max DuvalDealing with content that keeps changing can lead to bugs on users’ devices that are hard to reproduce. By precisely describing the shape of the content using types and ensuring it matches, exceptions can be avoided and users shown helpful messages when errors occur. This post will illustrate how this can be achieved with standard web technologies.
Monday, 17 June 2024
Hack Day: Summer of Sport Fall of Democracy
Rasha Ardati, Mariot ChauvinRecently, colleagues across the product and engineering department, as well as other parts of the organisation, came together for another exciting hack day
Thursday, 4 April 2024
When security matters: working with Qubes OS at the Guardian
Philip McMahonThe latest version of the whistleblowing platform SecureDrop runs on the Qubes operating system. At the Guardian we used the Salt management engine to set up a Qubes environment where journalists could safely interrogate sensitive documents.
Saturday, 10 February 2024
Pinboard: transforming communication across the newsroom (part 3 of 3)
Tom RichardsPinboard is a discussion and asset sharing tool (or rather tool within other tools) which is gradually transforming how the news room communicate as news stories move through the various phases of the production process
Friday, 9 February 2024
Pinboard: transforming communication across the newsroom (part 2 of 3)
Tom RichardsPinboard is a discussion and asset sharing tool (or rather tool within other tools) which is gradually transforming how the news room communicate as news stories move through the various phases of the production process
Thursday, 8 February 2024
Pinboard: transforming communication across the newsroom (part 1 of 3)
Tom Richards, Ana PradasPinboard is a discussion and asset sharing tool (or rather tool within other tools) which is gradually transforming how the news room communicate as news stories move through the various phases of the production process
Monday, 5 February 2024
The Digital Fellowship is your foot in the door to the future of news
UnknownA developer in the Fellowship Scheme shares his experiences of his first year at the Guardian
Friday, 22 December 2023
Large language models and generative AI: a recent hack day
Rasha ArdatiDevelopers in the Product and Engineering department came together with colleagues from across the Guardian to explore the potential of LLMs and more
Monday, 11 December 2023
Making Typerighter work harder
Rhys MillsHow we improved Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker, to provide more value for the Guardian and its readers
Tuesday, 21 November 2023
Who said what: using machine learning to correctly attribute quotes
Michel Schammel, Alice Morris, Anna Vissens, Paul Nathan, Alicja Polanska, Tara TahseenToday’s blog does not come to you from any developer in product and engineering but from our talented colleagues in data and insight
Tuesday, 24 October 2023
Standardisation: the merit of consistent patterns
Max DuvalComing back from a long holiday? Recently joined the department? Collaborating on a complex, cross-team problem that spans different tech stacks and programming languages? At one point, we’re all going to find ourselves in one of these situations. So how can we ensure that no one feels overwhelmed or unable to make meaningful contributions?
Tuesday, 12 September 2023
From a zebra to a rotating banner: how we stepped up your ability to Support the Guardian over the last seven years
Paul Brown (Head of Engineering)Since you’re here… please find somewhere comfortable to sit and read my story about the journey the Supporter Revenue team has undergone since I joined them as an Engineering Manager back in January 2016
Wednesday, 16 August 2023
Aurora Serverless – a migration story
Philip McMahonOn our team we swapped databases 6 times in a year. We’ve landed on Aurora Serverless V2 – was it worth it?
Tuesday, 25 July 2023
Day in the Life: Jessica Leivers
Rasha ArdatiWelcome to our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series where we interview a colleague from the product and engineering department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian
Wednesday, 7 June 2023
Roll Over Rollups! The Big Future of Ophan’s Historical Data
Sam HessionHow the Guardian’s real time analytics tool pivoted from ElasticSearch Rollups to BigQuery and what we learnt along the way
Wednesday, 31 May 2023
Hack Day: Food Glorious Food
Rasha ArdatiThis month, colleagues across the product and engineering department, as well as other parts of the organisation, came together for another exciting hack day
Friday, 3 February 2023
Galaxies of the Guardian: the formation of an irregular org chart
Frederick O''Brien‘Who does what and where?’ is an age-old question. We in Product & Engineering have tried to answer it with Galaxies, a data visualisation of interconnected people, teams, and streams
Wednesday, 25 January 2023
Day in the Life: Ana Pradas
Megan MurphyWelcome to our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series where we interview a colleague from the product and engineering department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian
Thursday, 15 December 2022
Our journey towards the fastest breaking news service
Francesca Hammond David Lawes, Wai Sing YiuOver the past couple of months the Guardian has made significant improvements to the speed at which push notifications are delivered to our app users. We discuss what process and technological changes were needed by the engineering team to achieve this
Friday, 9 December 2022
Recognising ‘bad actors’ in data leaks with AI
Luis Flores, Michel Schammel, Anna VissensHow the Guardian has been working with partners to use AI to help investigative journalists find persons of interest in large data sets
Tuesday, 29 November 2022
Day in the Life: Raphael Kabo
Megan MurphyWelcome to our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series where we interview a colleague from the product and engineering department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian
Thursday, 6 October 2022
How we built the Guardian’s Tor Onion service
Jon Soul, Ioanna KokkiniIn May, the Guardian launched a version of www.theguardian.com available entirely within the Tor network. Here the engineers who worked on the project explain their process and the challenges they faced
Thursday, 29 September 2022
Day in the Life: Abolade Akintunde
Megan MurphyWelcome to our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series where we interview a colleague from the product and engineering department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian
Friday, 29 July 2022
Day in the Life: Simone Smith
Megan MurphyWelcome to our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series where we interview a colleague from the product and engineering department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian
Wednesday, 29 June 2022
Day in the Life: Philip McMahon
Megan MurphyWelcome to our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series where we interview a colleague from the product and engineering department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian
Wednesday, 25 May 2022
Day in the Life: Chloe Kirton
Megan MurphyWelcome to our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series where we interview a colleague from the product and engineering department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian
Tuesday, 17 May 2022
What we learned at the International Journalism Festival
Sabina Bejasa-Dimmock, Sam Cutler, Samantha Gottlieb, Philip McMahon, Mario Savarese, Joseph SmithIn April, the Guardian’s Investigations and Reporting team were lucky enough to attend the International Journalism Festival in Perugia. Here’s some stuff that we learned.
Monday, 28 March 2022
Day in the Life: Georgia Ellis
Megan MurphyWelcome to our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series where we interview a colleague from the product and engineering department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian
Friday, 25 March 2022
React islands on theguardian.com
Oliver LloydWe first started adding the islands pattern to the Guardian’s website in 2019. It’s now 2022 and the benefits are not what we expected.
Wednesday, 2 March 2022
The future of work: development tooling and Covid-19
Colin KingThe pandemic forced us to take an extraordinary digital leap in work practises, here are some of the styles of working that helped us at the Guardian.
Friday, 25 February 2022
A Day in the Life: Gustavo Gava
Rasha ArdatiWelcome to our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series where we interview a colleague from the product and engineering department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian
Friday, 25 February 2022
How we have changed our application and hiring processes
Juan VaccariHow the pandemic changed the way we interview candidates for roles in our department, and how we have evolved our hybrid model to be more remote friendly
Tuesday, 22 February 2022
Turning the tables on accessibility
Lucy Monie HallA lesson on how to present data for all types of audiences
Tuesday, 1 February 2022
Get to the point! Why we added pinned posts to the Guardian’s live blogs
Joe Cowton, Anna BeddowLive blogs are an integral part of the Guardian’s journalism. As engineers and developers, our role is to find innovative ways of making them more useful. Here’s one thing we tried …
Tuesday, 25 January 2022
A Day in the Life: Mohammad Haque
Rasha ArdatiWelcome to our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series where we interview a colleague from the product and engineering department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian
Monday, 29 November 2021
A Day in the Life: Anna Beddow
Rasha ArdatiWelcome to our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series where we interview a colleague from the product and engineering department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian
Friday, 26 November 2021
Guardian Software Engineering Fellowship 2022: apply now
Yusuf Faraji, George HaberisToday we are launching the new Guardian Software Engineering Fellowship scheme for 2022. Find out how you can apply and help shape the future of digital media.
Thursday, 25 November 2021
Talking sense: using machine learning to understand quotes
Alice Morris, Michel Schammel, Anna VissensThe Guardian’s data scientists have been working with other newsrooms on a global project to think about AI and journalism. Here they explain how they have been teaching a machine to understand what a quote is
Friday, 29 October 2021
A retrospective on a decade of innovations
Simon HildrewThe Guardian’s digital team ran a retrospective over an entire decade to understand how we’ve innovated in the past in order to help us innovate more today
Tuesday, 19 October 2021
Pondering some Scala performance questions
Paul RobertsThe Scala compiler is a fascinating tool which powers a large proportion of the Guardian’s infrastructure. But sometimes the work that it does can seem somewhat mysterious. Guardian Scala developer Paul Roberts explores in detail one aspect of this mystery and looks at how understanding it can help us write code more effectively
Tuesday, 12 October 2021
Cop26 Hack Day September 2021
Rasha ArdatiIn September, in the run up to Cop26, colleagues from across the product and engineering department, as well as other parts of the organisation, came together for another exciting remote hack day focused on the climate crisis
Thursday, 7 October 2021
A Day in the Life: Roberto Tyley
Rasha ArdatiWelcome to our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series where we interview a colleague from the product and engineering department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian
Friday, 23 July 2021
A Day in the Life: Amina Adewusi
Rasha ArdatiWelcome to our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series where we interview a colleague from the product and engineering department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian
Monday, 12 July 2021
How we backfilled the Guardian’s in-house analytics tool to provide greater journalistic insight
Frederick O''BrienThe Guardian’s in-house content analytics tool, Ophan, has expanded from showing two weeks of data to two years. This post looks at one of the key changes that made it possible, from plumbing and CSV files to robust digestive systems
Friday, 25 June 2021
A Day in the Life: Max Duval
Rasha ArdatiWelcome to our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series where we interview a colleague from the product and engineering department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian
Tuesday, 22 June 2021
Old the front page! The story of 1821 Mode
Frederick O''Brien, Ara Cho, Mario Savarese, Samantha GottliebTo celebrate the Guardian’s 200th anniversary we turned the theguardian.com network front into its 19th-century ancestor. Here’s how we transformed the hack into reality using a selection of tools, some styling and creative thinking
Monday, 17 May 2021
Virtual Hack Day April 2021
Rasha ArdatiIn April, colleagues from across product and engineering, as well as other parts of the organisation, came together for another exciting remote hack day
Friday, 14 May 2021
A Day in the Life: Yusuf Faraji
Rasha ArdatiWelcome to our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series where we interview a colleague from the product and engineering department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian
Friday, 16 April 2021
A Day in the Life: Sophie Lambrakis
Rasha ArdatiWelcome to our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series where we interview a colleague from the product and engineering department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian
Wednesday, 17 March 2021
A Day in the Life: Jonathon Herbert
Rasha ArdatiWelcome to our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series where we interview a colleague from the product and engineering department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian
Tuesday, 23 February 2021
How technology unlocked the secretive power of ‘Queen’s consent’
Michael BartonHow Guardian developers used web scraping to investigate the secretive parliamentary procedure
Friday, 12 February 2021
A Day in the Life: Rebecca Thompson
Rasha ArdatiWelcome to our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series where we interview a colleague from the product and engineering department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian
Thursday, 4 February 2021
How technology is powering Covid-19 investigations
Joseph Smith, Michael Barton, Reetta VaahtorantaGuardian journalists and software engineers worked together to hold the UK government to account over its response to the pandemic
Tuesday, 26 January 2021
How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker
Jonathon Herbert, Sam Hession, Thalia Silver, Justin RowlesLots of regular expressions, and a timely demonstration by an editorial colleague, led to a two year side-project that eventually ended up in production
Tuesday, 26 January 2021
Virtual Hack Day November 2020 – Diversity and Inclusion Theme
Rasha ArdatiIn November, colleagues from across product and engineering came together for our first ever remote hack day to encourage teams to think of ways in which we could develop technical solutions and make our news products more accessible and inclusive.
Tuesday, 19 January 2021
How technology is powering election coverage
Michael Barton, Joseph Smith, Reetta VaahtorantaIn the second of three articles, we look at the role of software engineers in analysing online political advertising during the 2019 UK General Election
Wednesday, 13 January 2021
A Day in the Life: Mahesh Makani
Rasha ArdatiWelcome to our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series where we interview a colleague from the product and engineering department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian
Tuesday, 12 January 2021
How technology is powering environmental reporting
Michael Barton, Joseph Smith, Reetta VaahtorantaIn the first of three articles, we look at how Guardian software engineers teamed up with the newsroom to investigate climate lobbying online
Friday, 18 December 2020
Pairing with Coding Black Females
Stephen GellerThe Guardian’s Product and Engineering team’s pairing partnership with Coding Black Females
Friday, 27 November 2020
Guardian Software Engineering Fellowship 2021: apply now
George Haberis, Yusuf FarajiToday we are launching the new Guardian Software Engineering Fellowship scheme for 2021. Find out how you can apply and help shape the future of digital media.
Tuesday, 11 August 2020
Welcome to the dark side: deploying ‘dark mode’ on the Guardian live app
Gwyn LockettDo you like to read the headlines at night? QA/test analyst Gwyn Lockett discusses the introduction of dark mode on the Guardian’s main news app
Friday, 12 June 2020
The Guardian’s experience implementing Sign in with Apple on Android
Amina Adewusi, Jordan TerryHere we outline some of the technical options available to Android developers.
Tuesday, 4 February 2020
Taming data transfer costs with Elasticsearch
Regis KuckaertzHere we outline how an upgrade to open source search and analytics engine, Elasticsearch, led to unexpected cost-savings
Thursday, 26 December 2019
How the Guardian’s engineering team supports the 24 hour news cycle
Mark ButlerManaging the out of hours engineer support rota to meet the demands of a global news operation
Tuesday, 24 December 2019
Championing the reader
Shermaine Waugh, Priscilla Alcalde MeloWorking in User Experience (UX) at the Guardian is a truly amazing experience, but brings a unique set of challenges. Here’s how we try to tackle them
Sunday, 22 December 2019
Async Failure handling in Typescript
Alex WareWe look at a pattern which makes dealing with failures in async functions easier to reason about
Friday, 20 December 2019
Securing and centrally monitoring accounts in Amazon Web Services
Kate WhalenAn introduction to AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS StackSets and how they can support cloud security checks.
Wednesday, 18 December 2019
Shrinking the download size of the Guardian’s Live app on Android
Jordan TerryHow we shrunk the size of the Android app by 30% using the Android app bundle
Sunday, 8 December 2019
Migrating the Guardian website to React
Oliver LloydHow we’re rebuilding the Guardian website using React, a component-based UI framework built by Facebook
Friday, 6 December 2019
Software quality in a world of microservices and continuous deployment
Matthew Walls, Jacob WinchHow the role of quality assurance at the Guardian has adapted to support today’s fast-paced software landscape
Wednesday, 4 December 2019
The Tools Game, building empathy with our journalists
Akash AskoolumLearn how we dogfooded our digital tools as a learning exercise and as a way to gain a deeper understanding of how our journalists use our tooling
Monday, 2 December 2019
Faster PostgreSQL connection recovery
Alex DufournetThis post covers how a database incident affected one of our services and what we did to improve the situation in the future
Friday, 25 October 2019
Has Mary Wollstonecraft's CPU spiked?
Amy Hughes, Roberto TyleyWe need lots of feminists. No seriously, we need lots of feminists, or our Elasticsearch cluster will fall over
Monday, 29 July 2019
Revisiting the rendering tier part 2: migrating AMP
Nicolas LongAn update on our new server-side rendering layer: migrating AMP.
Friday, 10 May 2019
Life in the Guardian's Digital department
Tom Richards, Lauren Emms, Simone SmithThe third in a three-part series on life as a new member of the Guardian’s Digital department.
Friday, 10 May 2019
Structured content: benefits for creating and publishing articles
Sakib SuppleStarting with a content model to create structured content saves publishers money and makes production more efficient
Tuesday, 7 May 2019
First days in the Guardian's Digital department
Simone Smith, Tom Richards, Lauren EmmsThe second in a three-part series on life as a new member of the Guardian’s Digital department
Wednesday, 1 May 2019
Guardian Digital Fellowship 2019: apply now
Mark ButlerToday we are launching the new Guardian Digital Fellowship scheme for 2019. Find out how you can apply and help shape the future of digital media.
Friday, 26 April 2019
Applying to the Guardian's Digital department
Lauren Emms, Simone Smith, Tom RichardsThe first in a three-part series on life as a new member of the Guardian’s Digital department
Wednesday, 17 April 2019
Being part of The Guardian's Digital Fellowship
Simone Smith, Vanessa Bower, Francesca HammondThree new developers share their first impressions after joining the Guardian’s Digital Fellowship scheme.
Monday, 8 April 2019
Harness web development skills to create better desktop applications
Sakib SuppleIntegrating best of breed desktop applications from Adobe Creative Suite with web tools can provide a better experience for creative staff
Thursday, 4 April 2019
Revisiting the rendering tier
Alex SandersFrom 62,783 lines of Sass to CSS-in-JS. Introducing the new server rendering layer for theguardian.com
Tuesday, 29 January 2019
Code readability matters
Santiago Villa FernandezReadable code is an important part of software development, Santiago, one of our developers discusses why and some of the things we do at the Guardian to achieve this goal.
Thursday, 24 January 2019
Leaving Scribe
Richard BeddingtonIn 2013 we developed the Scribe text editor component. This formed a key part of our world class journalism toolkit and has been used by many others for their own text editing needs. Five years later, we discuss why it’s time to move on.
Friday, 30 November 2018
Bye bye Mongo, Hello Postgres
Philip McMahon, Maria-Livia Chiorean, Susie Coleman, Akash AskoolumIn April the Guardian switched off the Mongo DB cluster used to store our content after completing a migration to PostgreSQL on Amazon RDS. This post covers why and how
Tuesday, 6 November 2018
Hello computer: introducing the Guardian Voice Lab
Jeremy PennycookBringing the authentic voice of the Guardian to Google Assistant through experimentation and innovation
Monday, 22 October 2018
How the Guardian co-designs with readers to improve our journalism
Priscilla Alcalde MeloWe invited readers to our lab to help us shape our product and make a greater impact
Friday, 28 September 2018
Using Scala string interpolation to protect logged data
John Duffell, Jacob WinchIf you want to debug your code, you need comprehensive logging. But when you want to reuse the logs for alerting, how do you protect data from access by the alerting system?
Friday, 18 May 2018
Why the Guardian is using encrypted EC2 root volumes on AWS
Simon HildrewIn an ongoing effort to adhere to security best practices the Guardian is starting to use encrypted root volumes by default on servers in AWS.
Tuesday, 1 May 2018
Guardian Digital Fellowship 2018: apply now
Mark ButlerFind out how to apply for this year’s scheme and help shape the future of digital media
Tuesday, 1 May 2018
Our Digital Fellows share their experiences of the scheme
Maria-Livia Chiorean, Susie Coleman, Calum Campbell, Jonathan RankinAs we launch our scheme for 2018, four former participants describe how it kickstarted their careers in software development
Monday, 19 March 2018
How to tackle uncertainty with design
Priscilla Alcalde MeloOur journey of collaboration between product, UX, editorial and engineering to find out the jobs our apps are doing for their users, and work out how to improve their experience
Monday, 4 September 2017
How not to break the Guardian website
Thomas BonninA developer explains how we make sure readers do not experience errors while we make changes to the website codebase
Wednesday, 9 August 2017
Development of the live blog at the Guardian
Reetta VaahtorantaThe live blog is one of the Guardian’s signature digital formats. We look at its history and influence on the tools we build
Monday, 26 June 2017
Championing Accessibility at the Guardian
Kate Whalen, Simon Adcock, Shaun DillonWhat is digital accessibility, and how it can be considered part of universal design? How do we inform others of design considerations for a global audience, and common accessibility tools?
Wednesday, 21 June 2017
Lesbians Who Tech: How do we improve diversity?
Susie ColemanHow are other companies trying to improve the diversity of their workforce? And what lessons can we learn from them?
Thursday, 25 May 2017
How we integrated off-platform at the Guardian
Mariot ChauvinDiscover how we adapted our editorial and analytics tools to better understand our audience and the potential of new publishing platforms.
Amazon Apple Digital media Facebook Google Media Newspapers Podcasting Social media WhatsApp X
Monday, 15 May 2017
How our userhelp team became more digitally focused
Mabel MsonthiEmbedding our userhelp team within development helped us gain a much better relationship with our readers.
Monday, 6 March 2017
Empowering our editorial teams to impact page performance
Michael-McNamaraMonitoring and alerting on page weight to enable content producers to have an impact on page performance.
Saturday, 24 December 2016
Scanamo: simpler, safer DynamoDB access for Scala
Phil WillsDynamoDB provides a completely managed key-value store with some querying capabilities, but AWS’s Java client from Scala can be cumbersome and error-prone. The Guardian’s open-source library, Scanamo, provides a simpler alternative that reduces the scope for runtime errors.
Friday, 23 December 2016
Multiple DNS: synchronising Dyn to AWS Route 53
Simon Hildrew, Jenny SivapalanIn a time of frequent DDoS attacks we run through how we increased our DNS resilience by using multiple providers at little extra operational cost.
Thursday, 22 December 2016
Implicits and type classes in Scala
Joseph SmithWhat are implicits? What are type classes? And why do they go so well together? Here are the answers I wish I’d had before diving into the Guardian’s codebase
Wednesday, 21 December 2016
Creating a culture of learning at the Guardian
Charlotte GauthierWe’re creating a product and user experience (UX) toolkit to help our product managers and UX designers build skill and confidence in their roles. Here’s what we’ve learned so far about creating a culture of learning within the Guardian Digital team.
Tuesday, 20 December 2016
Testing in Production: rethinking the conventional deployment pipeline
Jacob WinchHow using a lightweight continuous deployment pipeline, which focuses on production validation instead of a large suite of acceptance tests, allows us to iterate on the Membership and Subscriptions apps at speed.
Monday, 19 December 2016
Introducing the Guardian Digital’s self-organised Diversity & Inclusion group
Sally Goble, Jenny SivapalanThe Guardian Digital team talk about why they started a diversity group, and what they’ve been up to this year
Sunday, 18 December 2016
What we learnt from our mistakes in 2016
Gareth TrufittIn 2016 a few things went wrong when building theGuardian.com. Lets take a look at some of the slip-ups and what we learnt from them so you can avoid our mistakes
Saturday, 17 December 2016
The Assumptions Buffet
Chris Wilk1 day, 4+ concepts, 12+ users, 10x things learnt. The assumptions buffet is great technique for product discovery
Friday, 16 December 2016
Real-world software security lessons
Adam FisherCan common-sense and our real-world intuition show us how to write secure software?
Thursday, 15 December 2016
Levelling up our client side developer experience
Simon AdcockClient side development moves pretty fast. If you stop and look around once in a while, you’re probably missing a bunch of dependencies.
Wednesday, 14 December 2016
Mirrors, lights, sawdust, lasers
Roberto TyleyThis developer had never built anything from wood before, but his bedroom was a bit dark - so he built a full-length sparkly portrait mirror with LED lighting and a laser range finder.
Tuesday, 13 December 2016
What we’ve learnt from Startup Culture
Chris OwenFor all of it’s limitless pivots, funding rounds and in-office football tables, Startup culture can teach established companies a thing or two.
Monday, 12 December 2016
Stepping into a new world: What we have learnt from The Guardian VR
Chris WilkLast month we launched The Guardian VR on Daydream, Google’s VR platform. It was a roller coaster ride and here is what we learned.
Sunday, 11 December 2016
“Show me the money!”
Kenneth LimLessons learned from Tom Cruise-based software development.
Saturday, 10 December 2016
Code Mesh 2016
Dominic Kendrick, Kate WhalenCode Mesh is a conference for non-mainstream programming languages. Here are a bunch of things we have learned, along with our highlights!
Friday, 9 December 2016
Adventures with Echo
Alastair JardineIn September, we released our flash briefing and skill for the Amazon Echo. Since then, we’ve tried to figure out how people are using this device. Here are some of the things we’ve learned.
Thursday, 8 December 2016
Guardian Digital Fellowship 2017
Jenny SivapalanWe are launching the new Guardian Digital Fellowship scheme for 2017. Find out about how you can apply and help shape the future of digital media.
Wednesday, 7 December 2016
The Digital Fellows: A New Hope
Emma Milner, Jonathan Rankin, Anne Byrne, Maria-Livia Chiorean, Susie Coleman, Calum Campbell, Kate WhalenIt is a dark time for the free press. Our only hope, the Fellows, strive to master the force, guided by the expert developers of Guardian Digital. As a new cohort approaches, we reflect on what we have learnt on the Fellowship Scheme
Computing Digital Fellowship Scheme Digital media Programming
Tuesday, 6 December 2016
How to publish an Android library: a mysterious conversation
Max SpencerI recently met a rather mysterious Android developer called Nick and helped him to publish his first library on Bintray.
Monday, 5 December 2016
Testing in Production: How we combined tests with monitoring
Jonathan Hare-Winton, Sam CutlerHow the Guardian Digital team supplemented traditional monitoring with production testing to provide a comprehensive alerting system
Sunday, 4 December 2016
Perfect software: the enemy of rapid deployment?
Sally GobleIn traditional and slow moving software delivery teams, the brakes are well and truly applied by endless cycles of painfully slow manual regression test cycles. The logical thing to do when considering moving towards a rapid release cadence is to speed up your regression by automating. Sally Goble, head of quality at the Guardian, argues that this is not right or necessary
Saturday, 3 December 2016
The Guardian coding workshop
Natalia Baltazar, Jon NormanThis past summer 4 developers volunteered from the department to teach Python to 8 students ages 17-26.
Advent developer blog 2016 Computing Education Programming Python Teaching
Friday, 2 December 2016
The art of the design sprint
Andrea JezovitOur small team has taken Google’s formula for creating and testing new ideas in a week, and adapted it to work at the Guardian. Here’s what we’ve learned.
Thursday, 1 December 2016
Guardian Developer Blog Advent
Nic Long, Alex WareThe Guardian development teams look back on 2016
Thursday, 1 December 2016
Discover new compression innovations Brotli and Zstandard
Mariot ChauvinBrotli and Zstandard are two recent lossless compression algorithms. Discover more about them and how The Guardian is using them in production.
Tuesday, 29 November 2016
The Guardian has moved to HTTPS🔒
Mariot Chauvin, Huma IslamDiscover why and how the Guardian has moved to HTTPS, the secure version of the web protocol that helps to protect user privacy
Friday, 11 November 2016
What did you think about our live election results alert?
Guardian US Mobile Innovation LabYour feedback is important to us – take a few minutes to help us shape future new features
Thursday, 20 October 2016
Ada Lovelace Day 2016
Philip McMahon, Iona McKendrickOn 11 October we celebrated Ada Lovelace day with a day of workshops and inspiring talks, attended by 50 school students from years 9 through to sixth form
Friday, 19 August 2016
How we made the RioRun progressive web app
Rich Harris on the Guardian US interactive teamTo coincide with the quadrennial sports event currently taking place in Rio de Janeiro, the Guardian US interactive team experimented with a new form of journalism packaged as a ‘progressive web app’. Here’s what we learned.
Wednesday, 6 July 2016
Pulling back the curtain: building the Guardian's sous chef bot
Alastair Jardine
Saturday, 2 July 2016
Git Merge 2016
Roberto TyleyA belated report back on the Git Merge 2016 conference, held over two days in April.
Friday, 24 June 2016
Coming in from the cold: Routes to becoming a software engineer
Anne Byrne, Calum Campbell, Kate WhalenAs more people consider career switches and opportunities in tech, three of the newest Guardian developers chart their own unorthodox routes into the industry.
Computing Digital Fellowship Scheme Programming Work & careers
Wednesday, 1 June 2016
The web we want hack day
Amy Hughes, Philip McMahonFor our next hack day we are using the Guardian’s commenting platform to share and collaborate on ideas. Please contribute, reply and recommend to help create the web we want.
Thursday, 26 May 2016
Enabling developer migration!
Robert ReesGiven a set of goals an organisation wants to achieve and a finite group of people (say, developers) that can accomplish those goals how do you assign people to objectives that makes the people assign feel happy about what they are working on and enables the organisation to achieve its goals and deliver on its commitments to other sections of the business.
Thursday, 21 April 2016
Quality Assured Cinematics
Tormod MacLeanA series of case studies for learning in development from unlikely sources
Monday, 11 April 2016
The Guardian Digital Fellowship: six months in
Maria-Livia Chiorean, Susie Coleman, Emma Milner, Jonathan RankinSeptember saw the next group of fellows join the Guardian Digital Fellowship Programme. This year’s cohort share their thoughts on the job, the Guardian, logistics and the extras.
Computing Digital Fellowship Scheme Programming Work & careers
Friday, 8 April 2016
Building Bonobo, the Guardian's open source API key management tool
Maria-Livia ChioreanHere’s the story of how we built our own open source API key management tool and of how we made the new starters grow
Monday, 21 March 2016
Data-Driven Quality
Jorge Azevedo, Scott PainterThe Guardian’s QA team has been having an on-going conversation about ways to improve software quality without relying on testing. Heresy? Controversial? Perhaps, but we’ve come to believe that finding and squashing bugs might not be the most efficient strategy.
Tuesday, 9 February 2016
Testing in the right places
Jonathan Hare-WintonAre your automated tests looking in the right places at the right times? Are they even adding value?
Friday, 5 February 2016
It's All About the Team
Luke TaylorIt takes more than the practical application of software engineering to create great products. We take a look at the ethos and values of the Content API team here at the Guardian and the attributes they value within their team.
Thursday, 4 February 2016
Migrating Postgres to RDS without downtime
Nicolas LongOur experience migrating from a self-managed Postgres cluster to RDS, without downtime.
Monday, 25 January 2016
Be agile in being agile
Thomas KaliakosThe following blog post will try to briefly describe how agile is implemented at the Guardian, or at least in the Platforms team, as there is flexibility in how each team uses agile. The intention is to show how this specific shaping of agile methodology has evolved and why it feels that is the right way for tackling the complex problem of handling 977 million page impressions in a month and all these from a developer’s point of view.
Wednesday, 20 January 2016
The Guardian's new pairing exercises
Jenny SivapalanThe Guardian uses pairing exercises as part of the recruitment assessment for developers. We have made some big changes to our pairing exercise. We want to give everyone the best chance of demonstrating their programming skills.
Wednesday, 30 December 2015
How to add a form to a Play application
Chris BirchallA step-by-step explanation of how to create a form in a Scala Play application, including explanations of some of the pitfalls you may encounter along the way
Friday, 11 December 2015
Announcing the Guardian Digital Fellowship
Robert ReesFor the last two years the Guardian’s Digital Development department has recruited a cohort of developers each year to join us. They have been drawn from backgrounds that we would not normally recruit from. For 2016 the programme is getting a revamp and we’re excited to share the details.
Wednesday, 4 November 2015
Building an offline page for theguardian.com
Oliver Joseph AshHow we used service workers to build a custom offline page for theguardian.com.
Monday, 2 November 2015
The software testing identity crisis
Jonathan Hare-WintonOur Quality Assurance team take a look at what it means to really focus on quality, not just testing
Thursday, 27 August 2015
How I went from a tester to a developer role
Gideon GoldbergHaving recently transitioned from a tester to a developer role, I thought I’d share some tips gathered along the way.
Wednesday, 12 August 2015
Open sourcing Grid, the Guardian’s new image management service
Sébastien CeveyThis is the story of how we are building Grid, the Guardian’s new image management system, working very closely with our editorial colleagues and using a modern technology stack. Oh, and it’s all Open Source.
Friday, 31 July 2015
Device wall of awesome: how Lego helped our digital development
Helene Sears, Jonathan Hare-Winton, Piers Jones, Scott Painter, Michael-McNamaraHow we found a way to justify playing with Lego at work.
Monday, 27 July 2015
The User Experience of Creative Sprints
Helene SearsHere’s how the role of UX has shifted from wireframing in isolation to spearheading whole teams to think about great user experience - and why that’s a good thing.
Friday, 17 July 2015
Hack day report: Using Amazon Machine Learning to predict trolling
Chris Birchall, Gideon GoldbergOn hack day we experimented with using Amazon Machine Learning to perform numerical regression analysis, allowing us to predict which articles should be watched closely by moderators for problematic comments.
Tuesday, 30 June 2015
Announcing the Guardian's digital networking event
Robert ReesAnnouncing a networking evening to open up the Guardian’s digital development department to encourage conversations and sharing of ideas
Friday, 29 May 2015
Maintaining an open source project at the Guardian
Robert ReesScribe is the most popular in-house open source project in the Guardian. Recently community developers have been making some major contributions to the project, confirming the value of open-source and the benefit of the Guardian of being open about our work.
Friday, 1 May 2015
Designing in the dark: How we created the Guardian App for Apple Watch
Helene SearsHow do you design a great experience for a product that does not exist?
Tuesday, 28 April 2015
Extra! Extra! Rethinking the Guardian Breaking News Experience
Mario AndradeRethinking how breaking news stories should be covered on the Guardians’ new responsive site meant taking an in-depth look at what makes these types of stories so unique and the value they bring to our readers.
Wednesday, 8 April 2015
Clever Compilers
Hugo GibsonCompilers are getting more and more sophisticated. Maybe one day they’ll be able to write their own code.
Monday, 30 March 2015
The best way to learn tech is to teach it
Robert ReesYou may think you understand a topic but its not until you are having to explain it to someone who doesn’t understand your made up terminology and rules of thumb that you realise what you really know and what you just pretend to understand.
Thursday, 26 March 2015
Upgrading Elasticsearch: Content API’s dual stack strategy
Luke Taylor, Chris BirchallEvaluation and explanation of process used to upgrade Elasticsearch with Route53 and a dual stack strategy on the Content API team at the Guardian.
Cloud computing Computing Content API Elasticsearch Internet Programming
Friday, 6 March 2015
Android Subtle Prompt library
Jesús GumielHow to create a Guardian style subtle prompt to highlight your new features
Thursday, 19 February 2015
Fullstack 2014 - conference report
Robert ReesThe Fullstack conference saw Douglas Crockford giving an overview of ES6 and his views on how to use the new features to write better JavaScript and Jamund Ferguson made abstract syntax trees exciting.
Tuesday, 10 February 2015
What to listen to next? jq to the rescue!
Rupert BatesSearch the Guardian for five star music reviews directly from your command-line
Monday, 9 February 2015
"Do what you want": building great products through anarchy
Alastair JardineHow can you build better products that involve everyone on the team? The Workflow team tried developer anarchy and found it a great way to build software
Friday, 6 February 2015
All the news that fits to print
Chris J. ClarkeNews consumption from the perspective of time
Friday, 6 February 2015
How we reimagined search for the Guardian app in one day
Helene SearsNeil Gaiman once said “Google can bring you back 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.” Here’s how we went about trying to become the librarian.
Tuesday, 3 February 2015
Prout: is your pull request out?
Roberto TyleyHow do you know your pull request is on production?
Tuesday, 27 January 2015
Five months in software development at the Guardian - what we’ve learned
Alessandro Ludovici, Josh Holder, Philip McMahonThree of the Guardian’s graduates reflect on what they have learnt so far
Tuesday, 20 January 2015
How does the Guardian recruit developers?
Robert ReesRecruiting people is a hard process: you need to be fair to both the candidate and the organisation. As part of making it easier for candidates who apply to be a developer at the Guardian we want to be open about our recruitment process
Tuesday, 13 January 2015
Hour(s) of Code – inspiring the next generation
Huma IslamWe ran an Hour of Code session for our Guardian colleagues – here’s what we learned (and how you can help)
Monday, 5 January 2015
Delivering Continuous Delivery, continuously
Phil Wills, Simon HildrewThis extract from the Build Quality In anthology of DevOps and Continuous Delivery experience reports explains how the Guardian adopted Continuous Delivery.
Monday, 29 December 2014
What is the Guardian's tech stack?
Robert ReesThe Guardian does not have a fixed tech stack, instead we allow our teams to choose the technology that solves their problems. That leads to a lot of variety in the software we use
Thursday, 11 December 2014
Functional Android
Rupert BatesAndroid’s support for functional programming is usually limited, but in this blogpost the Guardian shares techniques to bring the benefits of functional code to Java
Wednesday, 10 December 2014
Taming timeouts with a Promise
Paul RobertsSome notes from the Guardian’s software development team on experimenting with different ways of handling timeouts in JavaScript
Friday, 28 November 2014
Developing in the open
Robert ReesIn the Digital Development department we try to be as open and transparent about our development as we can be. That means developing in public repositories where anyone can see our work. What does it feel like to work this way and why do we think it matters?
Monday, 10 November 2014
On the ambitious but bumpy road to AngularJS 2.0
Sébastien CeveyGuardian senior developer Séb Cevey summarises and shares his views on Rob Eisenberg’s thorough overview and rationale of the design of the upcoming 2.0 version of the popular web application framework.
Friday, 31 October 2014
MozFest 2014: creative chaos – in the best possible way
Matt AndrewsA review of the annual festival of technology, the web, your rights online and journalism
Tuesday, 21 October 2014
Immutable data structures in Python
Robert ReesPython uses mutable datastructures by default but as we move to an immutable world, what options do we have for handling data differently?
Tuesday, 30 September 2014
#dareconf 2014 review: people skills for digital workers
Matt AndrewsThe Guardian’s digital development team’s thoughts on an event that’s not your usual technical conference
Monday, 29 September 2014
Pitfalls and prizes of ensuring quality mobile apps
Jonathan Hare-WintonBringing quality to the new Guardian mobile app went far beyond traditional QA practices
Tuesday, 16 September 2014
Shipping from GitHub to Maven Central and S3, using Travis-CI
John DuffellIf you use GitHub and SBT and want to ship your artifacts to Maven Central, you want it to be simple to set up and manage. We’ve compiled some instructions on how our SBT plugin can help
Tuesday, 9 September 2014
Eyewitness is moving from a stand-alone app to being integrated into our main offering
Tom GrinstedWe’re discontinuing the standalone Eyewitness app this week, but our Eyewitness photos are now integrated into our new apps for tablet, so you can continue to enjoy our fantastic photojournalism
Tuesday, 9 September 2014
Parsing JSON with Scheme
Hugo GibsonParsing JSON with Scheme can be much simpler and more efficient than parsing with more commonly-used scripting languages.
Thursday, 28 August 2014
What does it mean to be a senior developer?
Robert ReesSoftware development tends to use language in a funny way; for example legacy software is not something that is lovingly passed from one generation to next but more commonly a term of abuse. Similarly a senior developer is rarely one able to claim a free TV license.
Tuesday, 5 August 2014
Case study: Guardian Soulmates redesign
Kerstin ExnerHow the Guardian’s dating website was redesigned with a new responsive layout
Tuesday, 22 July 2014
Introducing the new Guardian Developers Site
Oliver Joseph AshWhy and how we built a home for our developers.
Friday, 18 July 2014
Hacking Journalism at the MIT Media Lab
Robert Berry, Sébastien CeveyField notes from the Hacking Journalism hackathon hosted by the MIT Media Lab, a weekend full of innovative ideas around the future of journalism
Thursday, 17 July 2014
Introducing the Content API v2
Cantlin AshrowanThe Guardian are making some changes to the Content API, the principle service of the Open Platform. Here’s everything you need to know.
Friday, 11 July 2014
Navigating the Guardian
Chris MulhollandOf any element on a website, the navigation has the most jobs to do.It has to tell you where you are and where you can go next. Further, it’s inherent presence on every page means it has to enhance the brand, both in visual identity and in the content it displays.
Tuesday, 24 June 2014
Creating Glassware for the Guardian
Lindsey Dew, Robert ReesThe Guardian developers discuss their experience of developing Glassware for the launch of the Google Glass UK Explorer programme. How difficult is it to develop a new application for a device on the bleeding edge?
Thursday, 19 June 2014
A Tale Of Two Users
Mario Andrade, Penny AllenBuilding a new mobile app for the Guardian was a journey of discovery on balancing the needs of both our editorial team and our readers.
Monday, 9 June 2014
Experience the best of the Guardian World Cup coverage with our new mobile app
Marc JonesHow to make the most of the football features in the new Guardian mobile app during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil
Apps Mobile phones Tablet computers World Cup World Cup 2014
Wednesday, 4 June 2014
Engineering the iOS Guardian news app 3.0
Petr KrojzlLast week we released a new generation of the free Guardian news app for phones and this time around for tablets as well, a culmination of almost a year of engineering. And it’s a beauty, much loved by hundreds of thousands of users worldwide just in the first few days. We’re absolutely thrilled by all the positive feedback
Thursday, 29 May 2014
Improving the beta commenting experience
Alastair Jardine, Wendy OrrOur focus returns to the commenting experience on beta. Take a look at what we’re doing and provide us with your feedback
Wednesday, 28 May 2014
Changing the Guardian's pairing test
Robert Rees, Developer ManagerPairing interviews are an invaluable way of assessing candidates and we are constantly trying to refine and improve the process
Wednesday, 28 May 2014
Exciting changes for the Guardian app are just around the corner
Tom GrinstedThe culmination of over a year’s worth of work, a brand new app experience is launching this week, and we wanted to give you a sneak peek
Tuesday, 13 May 2014
Improving Sass code quality on theguardian.com
Kaelig Deloumeau-PrigentAutomating code quality control is an old trick that we've been using with JavaScript for a long time. Here is how we apply the same rigorous process to Sass code (the CSS pre-processor we use) in our workflow.
Friday, 11 April 2014
How the Guardian uses GitHub to audit GitHub
Roberto TyleyHow the Guardian wrote gu:who : a tool to help manage GitHub organisation membership
Wednesday, 9 April 2014
New mix of stories on mobile homepage
Chris MulhollandWe’re organising our stories differently on our homepage with our readers in mind, rather than simply presenting the latest from each section of the website
Friday, 4 April 2014
Shortening the goalposts
Chris J. ClarkeMinimal continuous deployment on Guardian Football
Wednesday, 2 April 2014
HackForLiving: A weekend of calm collective thinking with AgeUK
James GorrieWe worked with AgeUK and Coventry Univercity's HDTI to look at the role technology and digital services might play for our younger older generation. <i>Read more about the findings over at the sustainability blog.</i>
Wednesday, 2 April 2014
Coming of a new age - the younger older generation
James GorrieAgeUK hosted a hack event focused on the "excite and delight" factor of a younger older generation's lives, but is technology the way to do that? Read more about the actual event at our developer blog.
Tuesday, 25 March 2014
Monitoring, alerting and starting from scratch
Jenny SivapalanAn introduction to the tools and services which monitor the Guardian's Content API and alert when performance is threatened
Thursday, 20 March 2014
Inside the Guardian’s CMS: meet Scribe, an extensible rich text editor
Oliver Joseph AshThe team behind the Guardian’s digital content management system talk about how and why they built and open sourced Scribe.
Tuesday, 18 March 2014
Robustium - improving robustness in automation testing
Neal MadlaniOne of the Guardian’s QA testing team talks about making your automated tests more robust
Monday, 17 March 2014
Articles don't write themselves... or do they?
Will FranklinHow one developer took on the challenge of automating journalism with an article-generating robot
Tuesday, 25 February 2014
Introducing wraith-donk
Gideon GoldbergWe’ve taken the BBC’s responsive screenshot comparison tool Wraith and put a donk on it!
Tuesday, 18 February 2014
How the Guardian successfully moved domain to www.theguardian.com
Matthew O''BrienSix months on from the domain move to www.theguardian.com the Guardian is still experiencing record traffic. Matthew O’Brien, the software architect behind the domain move, explains how it was achieved with minimal effect on traffic
Saturday, 15 February 2014
London DevOps meetup held at the Guardian
Simon HugginsAn inspiring get-together at the Guardian for London DevOps where members of the community swapped ideas about various development and operations techniques for building better software.
Friday, 14 February 2014
Encrypting sensitive data in Puppet
Simon HildrewMoving to DevOps ideally means sharing configuration management data with developers, without losing control of production passwords and private SSL keys. Intelligently encrypting sensitive data with hiera-eyaml makes it possible to share almost everything without the obfuscation slowing you down.
Friday, 7 February 2014
QA testing for the Guardian's Content API
Troy HarrisOne of the Guardian's software testers shares his experience helping build a product with no user-facing front-end and the tools that helped him do it
Wednesday, 16 October 2013
The Guardian's digital development team speaks
Guardian Digital Development teamA collection of roundups and previews of conference talks and panel discussions by members of the Guardian's digital development team, covering a variety of topics about building our digital products.
Thursday, 3 October 2013
Teachers and students at PyconUK
Nicholas TollerveyA look at a UK programming conference with an "education track" aiming to inspire young students to learn about computing
Thursday, 12 September 2013
Moving mountains: managing a systems hardware refresh
Stephen GranHow the Guardian migrated its digital operations platform and upgraded it in the process without any downtime or server meltdowns
Thursday, 15 August 2013
Young Rewired State 2013: mentoring the tech stars of tomorrow
Jenny Sivapalan, Alastair Jardine, Will Franklin, Matt AndrewsSome of the Guardian's digital development team describe a day mentoring young coders for the annual Festival of Code by Young Rewired State
Wednesday, 3 July 2013
The Plucky Contender: on failing hard, fast and briefly
Cantlin AshrowanSome lessons learned by the Guardian's software team on building (and fixing) digital systems quickly and confidently
Tuesday, 18 June 2013
The Guardian development flow
Phil WillsBy moving towards a GitHub flow with continuous integration, the Guardian's software team describe how they've streamlined development and testing
Friday, 7 June 2013
10 things we learned during the making of Firestorm
Jonathan RichardsWhat comes out of a 3-month-long project involving journalists, designers, and developers across two countries, spanning five editorial desks? Well, lots of lessons. Here's our top 10.
Friday, 26 April 2013
How the Guardian built a solid, scalable foundation for digital-first journalism
Graham TackleyGraham Tackley, the Guardian's Head of Architecture, shares how our software team use technology like Scala, Akka and Play Framework to power our web presence
Tuesday, 23 April 2013
State of the Browser 2013: conference writeup
Sébastien CeveyOne of the Guardian's software development team shares his thoughts on the recent web conference event
Thursday, 11 April 2013
The Guardian attends Hack the Government 2013 with Rewired State
Lindsey Dew, Max Harlow, Jenny SivapalanSome of the Guardian’s software development team attend the annual event exploring government data and creative uses of technology
Wednesday, 27 March 2013
The Trials, Tribulations and Triumph of PyCon 2013
Nicholas Tollervey'Dongle-gate' dominated the news coming from PyCon. However, there was much to celebrate from last week's conference. One intrepid Guardian developer was there and this is his write-up
Tuesday, 12 March 2013
A day at the Raspberry Jamboree: microcomputing and hardware hacking
Nicholas TollerveyA Guardian developer takes a look at the microcomputer that's taking the world by storm
Friday, 1 March 2013
Notes from Edge Conference 2013
Patrick HamannA Guardian developer's notes and highlights from this month's Edge Conference, a web technology event in London
Wednesday, 27 February 2013
Introducing Google+ sign-in
Adam FisherOur digital development team talk through the integration with Google+ to allow easy sign-in to the Guardian
Friday, 1 February 2013
Sending better emails
Alastair JardineSome notes on prototyping the Guardian's editorial emails and what we learned about their design and user experience
Friday, 18 January 2013
Tools of the trade: the browser-based tools the Guardian's digital team uses for coding
Guardian Digital Development teamAfter an internal email discussion about useful tools, we've collected a roundup of the best free online resources for helping with web development, as used by the Guardian's team.
Tuesday, 11 December 2012
Fragmented world: what two years of traffic data teaches you about mobile
Jonathan Richards, Anthony Sullivan, Mark McCormickSome of the grand themes of the past two years – the rise and rise of Apple, the decline of Nokia and RIM, and device fragmentation – were laid bare as we began the task of rebuilding our mobile site
Monday, 10 December 2012
How the Guardian Soulmates development team took a lesson from rugby league
Gwyn LockettGwyn Lockett describes the Guardian Soulmates team's development process – and how a bit of the Scrum framework was enhanced by "capping" conversations
Thursday, 6 December 2012
Real-time QA: staying confident with code
Andy HumeIn a world of continuous deployment, how do we stay confident that code running in production is still reliably delivering the news to our readers? Andy Hume, our frontend architect, explains how we monitor user experience and detect failures in real-time.
Friday, 9 November 2012
The Guardian and the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews fellowship
Annabel Church, Nicola HughesWhat is the OpenNews fellowship? Who is our current fellow and what's happening next year?
Friday, 2 November 2012
Functional Programming Principles in Scala: the final push
Lindsey Dew, Adam FisherThe Guardian's software developers chart their progress on Martin Odersky's Scala course, now in its sixth week and getting tougher
Thursday, 18 October 2012
Responsive design at the Guardian: an introduction
Matt AndrewsAn overview of what responsive design is and how we're planning to make use of it at the Guardian
Friday, 5 October 2012
Functional Programming Principles in Scala: three weeks in
Lindsey Dew, Adam FisherTwo of the Guardian's software developers update us on their experience of the latest stage of the programming course
Thursday, 4 October 2012
Winning the metrics battle
Simon Hildrew, Nick SatterlyThe Guardian's lead Infrastructure Developer runs through the team's use of metrics and monitoring for guardian.co.uk
Tuesday, 2 October 2012
Facebook's London Hack 2012: hacking Guardian commenting
Lindsey Dew, James GorrieTwo of our developers visit Facebook's new London offices for a marathon hack day
Wednesday, 26 September 2012
Our new video pages – an inside look at some of the design details
Alastair JardineAlastair Jardine, one of the Guardian's user experience architects, talks through our newly-designed video pages
Friday, 21 September 2012
Functional Programming Principles in Scala: First Impressions
Adam Fisher, Lindsey DewTwo of the Guardian's software developers take a look at the new programming language course offered by Scala creator, Martin Odersky
Thursday, 6 September 2012
Five features of Japanese news sites
Ivan CodesidoA brief look at the top three Japanese newspaper websites to see the current state of affairs and do a quick comparison with the Guardian website.<br /><br /><em>NB: if you open the Japanese pages in Google Chrome it will prompt you to have them translated into English. Hover over the images below to see the full image slide down.</em>
Tuesday, 28 August 2012
HTML5 and native apps: the hybrid approach
Andy HumeAndy Hume, the Guardian's front-end architect, on why we're betting on HTML5 (but building native apps, too)
Thursday, 23 August 2012
Software development: What I know now that I wish I'd known before
Max Harlow, Lindsey DewAfter recently starting as graduate developers at the Guardian, Max Harlow and Lindsey Dew explain what they have discovered
Wednesday, 15 August 2012
Reimagining the timeline: behind our Second Screen web app
Jonathan RichardsPulling together the vast mass of Olympics-related updates - blog posts, tweets, pictures, results, and more - in a single app for tablet created a bunch of design challenges. Here we explain how we went about solving them, and what we learned along the way
Friday, 10 August 2012
Testing, testing: the Guardian attends a QA community meet-up
Gwyn LockettGwyn Lockett and Michael McNamara from the Guardian's Quality Assurance (QA) team enjoy "an evening of testing hedonism" at a meet-up event in London
Wednesday, 18 July 2012
Discovery Week Diary: Day Two
Matt AndrewsAfter two full days of work, here's what our teams have created so far during Discovery Week, an experimental and learning process to look at the next phase of the Guardian's digital future.
Monday, 16 July 2012
Discovery Week Diary: Day One
Matt AndrewsA roundup of how the first day of our week-long experimental collaboration project went
Friday, 20 April 2012
Introducing the Miso Project
Alex Graul• More about the project from the Datablog
Tuesday, 3 April 2012
Design and usability changes to the Guardian iPad edition
Andy Brockie, Martin RedingtonOne of the Guardian's senior digital designers and lead iOS developer explain what's different in iPad edition version 1.0.3, and the thinking behind the changes
Friday, 23 March 2012
Computer, meet your maker
Jonathan RichardsOne of the themes at the inaugural Resonate festival in Belgrade was how to make reintroduce a human element to processes - including design - which increasingly rely on computation
Wednesday, 21 March 2012
Developing the Google TV app in Beta
Dan CattWe've launched the Guardian on Google TV as an app in beta, HTML5, prototypes and video playback
Friday, 16 March 2012
The confusing language around programming languages
Max Harlow, Lindsey DewThe language of technology is all around us - but writing about programming for a non-technical audience isn't without potential problems. Max Harlow and Lindsey Dew explain
Thursday, 16 February 2012
Calling passionate software developers
Lisa van GelderThe Guardian is expanding its development team. We have vacancies for software developers, and people to lead and manage them
Friday, 3 February 2012
Guardian Hack Day: The presentations
Martin Belam, Jonathan Richards, Joanna GearyFollow us as we find out what the Guardian developers have built in their two-day hack day
Tuesday, 31 January 2012
Help hack day developers make the Guardian's cycling coverage better
Peter WalkerIt's the Guardian's regular 'hack day' this week, and some cycling-mad digital developers want to pick your brains
Thursday, 15 December 2011
December's "Carnival of journalism" round-up
Martin BelamThis month the Guardian Developer blog hosted the "Carnival of journalism", asking what journalists and programmers might exchange as presents during the festive season
Thursday, 8 December 2011
Behind the rumours: how we built our Twitter riots interactive
Alastair Dant, Jonathan RichardsAn interdisciplinary team of academics and some advanced web technologies were behind one of our most ambitious visualisations yet
Wednesday, 7 December 2011
Music Hack Day London 2011: a developer's view
Matt AndrewsThe latest Hack Day featured hundreds of developers coming together to make something music related
Wednesday, 30 November 2011
Guardian launches music reviews app for Spotify
Piers JonesYou can use the app to discover new music, listen to the latest albums and then share what you find with your friends
Wednesday, 30 November 2011
Guardian Spotify app: FAQ
Piers JonesFrequently asked questions about the Guardian's Spotify app
Tuesday, 15 November 2011
Business:designed
Matt Andrews, Mariana SantosHow Edinburgh students were challenged to think about the news domain in new ways
Friday, 11 November 2011
Live blogging research
Anna WaltersMSc student Anna Walters describes her research project into usage of the Guardian's live blogs
Wednesday, 2 November 2011
Guardian Eyewitness iPad app updated
Martin RedingtonUpgrade to our Eyewitness app for iPad improves the interface and speeds up photo downloading
Friday, 16 September 2011
Guardian Android app now lets you save to SD card - an explainer
Rupert BatesWe've listened to your requests and added 'move to SD' functionality – useful for devices with limited memory
Friday, 2 September 2011
UX drop-in and EuroIA Predux events at the Guardian
Martin BelamThis week we have hosted two User Experience and Information Architecture themed events in the Guardian's offices
Tuesday, 2 August 2011
Introducing the Guardian's new music album pages
Lisa van GelderThe launch of our album pages, which pull in linked data from around the internet, allow users to create their own reviews
Wednesday, 27 July 2011
Agit – a Git client for Android
Roberto TyleyRoberto Tyley describes the process of writing Agit, a new kind of Android app for developers
Monday, 11 July 2011
Developer drop-ins continue through the summer
Michael Brunton-SpallCome and hear our guest speakers at our dedicated drop-in sessions at the Guardian offices through July and August
Wednesday, 6 July 2011
From 'Social by design' to 'Social workers of technology' - UPA 2011
Martin BelamUsability Professionals' Association conference told that 'social' needs to be at the heart of a company's digital offerings
Monday, 4 July 2011
Notes on Release 115
Robert PhillipsButtons, bento boxes and the World Bank ... an overview of the most recent changes to guardian.co.uk
Thursday, 23 June 2011
Developing the new artist pages
Robbie CluttonThe Guardian music site's new artist pages make it so much easier for you to say thank you for the music
Tuesday, 21 June 2011
Hactivate: A participant's perspective
Martyn InglisMartyn Inglis on his weekend trying to change the world in 24 hours
Monday, 13 June 2011
Notes on Releases 113 & 114
Gideon GoldbergGideon Goldberg provides an overview of the most recent changes to guardian.co.uk
Friday, 3 June 2011
Drop-ins: Phase II
Adam McGreggor, Emma MulqueenyA final report of the first month of drop-ins, along with what's happening next
Wednesday, 1 June 2011
(H)activate 2011: come and join us
Emma MulqueenyCome help us change the world and we will give you fame, fortune and experiences money just can't buy
Tuesday, 31 May 2011
Knight-Mozilla News Innovation Jam
Martin BelamAt the weekend, the Guardian hosted a Knight-Mozilla News Innovation Jam meet-up, bringing together designers, web developers and journalists to think about the future of digital news
Tuesday, 24 May 2011
So long, IE6, it's the end of testing times
Sally GobleSally Goble on the balancing act of testing our website in different browers
Wednesday, 18 May 2011
Developer drop-ins: half time report
Adam McGreggorAdam McGreggor gives a (slightly past) half-time report on the developer drop-ins
Monday, 16 May 2011
Knight-Mozilla News Innovation Jam
Martin BelamJoin us at the Guardian's Kings Place HQ for a day in which we 'hack the future of journalism online'
Friday, 13 May 2011
Notes on Release 112
Gwyn LockettGwyn Lockett provides an overview of the most recent changes to guardian.co.uk
Tuesday, 10 May 2011
The experience of a developer drop-in
Michael Brunton-SpallMichael Brunton-Spall explains what happened during the first week of developer drop-ins and why you might want to sign up for the rest of the events
Thursday, 5 May 2011
Notes on Release 111
David ShawDavid Shaw provides an overview of the most recent changes to guardian.co.uk
Tuesday, 26 April 2011
Developer drop-in events
Adam McGreggorAdam McGreggor updates readers on the developer drop-in events schedule
Monday, 18 April 2011
Scala at guardian.co.uk
Graham TackleyGraham Tackley gives an overview of why we're using the Scala programming language
Wednesday, 13 April 2011
Cennydd Bowles predicts a rocky road ahead for UX at the Denver IA Summit
Martin BelamThree main themes emerged at the recent IA Summit in Denver: measuring the value of our work, getting our work done faster, and learning from other related disciplines. However, it was Cennydd Bowles' closing plenary that made the longest lasting impression - predicting troubled times ahead for the IA and UX fields
Monday, 11 April 2011
Introducing developer drop-ins
Emma MulqueenyEmma Mulqueeny introduces a month of developer drop-ins
Friday, 8 April 2011
Notes on Release 110
Robert PhillipsRobert Phillips provides an overview of some of the most recent changes to guardian.co.uk
Tuesday, 5 April 2011
National Hack the Government Day 2011
Emma MulqueenyEmma Mulqueeny, of Rewired State and the Guardian, on the latest government hack day, hosted at the Guardian's offices
Thursday, 31 March 2011
Hacks and Hackers: ScraperWiki day
Martyn InglisMartyn Inglis reports from a journalism-and-tech event in Glasgow
Thursday, 24 March 2011
Notes on Release 109
Martyn Inglis, Gideon GoldbergMartyn Inglis and Gideon Goldberg provide an overview of the most recent changes to guardian.co.uk
Tuesday, 15 March 2011
Getting noticed in the iTunes App Store
Michael MayMichael May on data made available to app developers from Apple
Monday, 14 March 2011
The SXSW Tumblr tracker
Dan CattWe've sent roving reporters off to SXSW armed only with a handful of mobile devices, a random selection of power cables, some laptops for emergencies and a handful of Tumblr blogs. This is how we're pulling some of it together on our Tumblr Tracker
Friday, 11 March 2011
SXSW 2011: How we made our interactive band tracker
Alastair Dant, Lisa van Gelder, Matt AndrewsA hack weekend here, a site scrape there and pretty soon we had this wonderful new tool for tracking artists at the SXSW festival • Check out our SXSW 2011 band tracker
Culture Guardian Hacks SXSW Justin Bieber Last.fm Music SXSW
Friday, 11 March 2011
Notes on Release 108
Robert PhillipsRobert Phillips provides an overview of the most recent changes to guardian.co.uk
Wednesday, 9 March 2011
Questions in search of an answer
Martin Belam'What is Twitter?', 'When will 2012 university league tables be available?' and 'Who is the highest paid footballer in the world 2011?' are just some of the questions guardian.co.uk users have asked us in the past month when using our site search.
Friday, 4 March 2011
Notes on Release 107
Martin HearnMartin Hearn provides an overview of the most recent changes to guardian.co.uk
Thursday, 3 March 2011
Why we built our automated SXSW listings pages - Part two
Lisa van GelderHow the Guardian's automated music listings pages for the SXSW festival came about
Tuesday, 1 March 2011
Why we built our automated SXSW listings pages
Lisa van GelderHow the Guardian's automated music listings pages for the SXSW festival came about
Friday, 25 February 2011
Things I wish I'd known before the Guardian Hacks SXSW event
Robbie CluttonA mere half-hour delay can feel catastrophic in the context of a single weekend, so what can be done to smooth the process?
Friday, 18 February 2011
Notes on Release 106
David ShawDavid Shaw provides an overview of the most recent changes to guardian.co.uk
Thursday, 17 February 2011
How we created our SXSW music listings pages
Martin BelamThis week as part of the Guardian Hacks SXSW project we have launched a guide to the bands playing at this year's SXSW festival in Austin
Thursday, 17 February 2011
Technology bursary 'opened my eyes'
Frances BuchananFrances Buchanan shares her experience of winning the Scott Trust Technology Bursary last year and encourages others to apply
Monday, 14 February 2011
Balancing front-end performance with tracking
Grant Klopper, Kwame LukeGrant Klopper and Kwame Luke on a recent small performance improvement
Wednesday, 2 February 2011
Tags are magic! - Part 4
Martin Belam, Peter MartinIn the last of a series of posts based on a presentation given at last year's Online Information conference in London, the Guardian's tag manager Peter Martin and information architect Martin Belam look at how our tags are used to link to the external world, improve search and navigation, and to place components on our pages
Friday, 28 January 2011
Notes for Release 105
Gwyn LockettGwyn Lockett summarises some of the features in the latest release of our content management and delivery system
Wednesday, 26 January 2011
Tags are magic! - Part 3
Martin Belam, Peter MartinIn part three of this series of posts based on a presentation given at last year's Online Information conference in London, the Guardian's tag manager Peter Martin and information architect Martin Belam look at how we keep our tags useful for the audience, and in line with house style
Wednesday, 19 January 2011
Tags are magic! - Part 2
Martin Belam, Peter MartinIn part two of this series of posts based on a presentation given at last year's Online Information conference in London, the Guardian's tag manager Peter Martin and information architect Martin Belam look at the use of folders to build a taxonomy from the tags applied to content
Monday, 17 January 2011
Notes on Release 104
Gideon GoldbergThe last drops of ice have melted away following our Christmas code freeze and we are sufficiently recovered from the festivities to bring you the latest round of updates and fixes to the site
Wednesday, 12 January 2011
Tags are magic! - Part 1
Martin Belam, Peter MartinLast year at the Online Information conference in London, the Guardian's tag manager Peter Martin and information architect Martin Belam gave a presentation called Mapping the Guardian's Tags to the Web of Data. In a series of posts for the Developer Blog, they outline why Tags Are Magic
Wednesday, 5 January 2011
Talking about The Guardian and 'Linked Open Data' at news:rewired
Martin Belam
Thursday, 23 December 2010
Microapps and the Art of Widget Maintenance
Dan CattThe rather strange practice of killing your own servers by pointing Guardian traffic at them, and how not to let that happen ... otherwise known as what I learnt about caching in a very short space of time
Wednesday, 22 December 2010
The big freeze: notes on Release 103
Sally GobleOur annual code freeze makes us change the the way we think about what will go into our pre Christmas release, updating our core content management and delivery system. Here are some of the pre code freeze changes we've made
Thursday, 16 December 2010
Switching to Google-hosted jQuery
Matt AndrewsA brief summary of guardian.co.uk's recent changes to its Javascript framework
Tuesday, 14 December 2010
Exploiting open and linked data at Online Information 2010
Martin BelamGuardian Information Architect Martin Belam spent a couple of days at the Online Information 2010 conference in London, watching sessions on Exploiting open and linked data
Monday, 13 December 2010
New 'British soldiers killed in Afghanistan' interactive with Javascript
Steve Uprichard, Martin HearnWe've built a new interactive detailing the the British soldiers who have lost their lives in Afghanistan
Thursday, 9 December 2010
Six things I've learned about web development working at the Guardian
Matt AndrewsClient-side developer Matt Andrews on some of the things he wishes he'd known before
Wednesday, 8 December 2010
The everlasting permalink
Roberto TyleyDoing our bit for web-archaeology – as we migrate to a new commenting platform, what happens to the broken links?
Friday, 3 December 2010
Notes on Release 102
Martin HearnEvery two weeks, we release an update to our core content management and delivery system – here are some of the latest changes we've made
Thursday, 2 December 2010
Welcome to Guardian Developer Blog
Mike BrackenThe Guardian's new blog will cover some of the work we get up to on the technology side of guardian.co.uk
Tuesday, 2 November 2010
From Publisher to Platform: 14 ways to get benefits from social media
Mike Bracken, Nik Silver
Friday, 10 September 2010
Notes from dConstruct 2010
Ivan CodesidoSome of the Guardian development team attended this dConstruct 2010 – from which two themes emerged ...
Friday, 30 April 2010
Calculating the swing, marginality and targets for constituencies
Matthew O''Brien
Wednesday, 21 April 2010
How we built the UK national carbon calculator
Mairead O''ConnorOur national carbon calculator attempts to model where the UK's carbon emissions come from. Find out more about how we developed this product and explore the data behind it • Test the national carbon calculator
Carbon footprints Climate crisis Environment Greenhouse gas emissions
