We’re keen here at the Guardian to share what we’re working on in the spirit of open journalism – this extends to our digital development department, too. Here we’ve gathered a summary of recent talks and events we’ve spoken at, as well as a few previews of upcoming appearances where our team will be talking about what we’re building for the Guardian’s digital future.
Patrick Hamann, Senior Developer at the Guardian
“Planting the responsive seed - responsive design at the Guardian”: Breaking Borders Conference
25 June 2013 @ Park House, Reading
The Guardian recently released a new mobile site on m.guardian.co.uk, but in fact it is the planting of a seed of a more ambitious project to replace the desktop website with a future-friendly, single domain responsive product. We will learn how we are using mobile-first responsive techniques and client-side technology to set the foundations of that future, what have we learnt along the way and how it will scale.
“CSS and the Critical Path”: Over The Air / Front-end London One Day
27 / 28 September 2013 @ Bletchley / London
The perceived speed of your website relies heavily on the browser being able to paint to your user’s screen. For this they must construct a “render tree” which consists of the DOM and the often forgotten CSSOM.
The critical path which the browser takes to gather this information is the only thing standing between your server and the user’s screen. Using new research and real world examples, Patrick Hamann will cover a range of techniques – from the controversial to bleeding edge – the Guardian is using to make their CSS load as fast as possible, and ultimately keeping it off the critical path.
Stijn Debrouwere, Mozilla OpenNews Fellow at the Guardian
“Cargo cult analytics”: Hacks/Hackers Berlin, Germany
21 August 2013 @ Zeit Online, Germany
News organizations have more data than ever about how people use our apps and our websites, but using that data to create better products is still as hard as ever. We talked about how often analytics get abused, ignored and misinterpreted in the news industry… and how the Guardian is trying to do better.
Jenny Sivapalan, Senior Developer at the Guardian
“Why APIs are essential in web development”: 300 Seconds
11 September 2013 @ Kings Place, London
How APIs are essential to web development, using the Guardian as an example. How we’ve gone from one product (the desktop) to many products (tablets and smartphone apps / responsive site) by developing an API.
• Video of talk available here
Nick Haley, Head of UX at the Guardian
“UX, Agile and the product process”: September ProductTank
19 September 2013 @ BBC Radio Theatre, London
What’s the best way of matching creativity with modern development methodologies? How can creative and engineering cultures get the best out of each other? Tips, tricks and discussion across the UX/engineering divide.
Curated by Nic Newman this month’s ProductTank includes a stellar line-up including:
• Nick Haley, Head of UX at Guardian News Media with practical examples of how his team is becoming more agile and how products are iterated every day with real users
Marton “meza” Meszaros, Test Consultant at the Guardian
“Tarantino of BDD”: BDD Exchange NYC
20 September 2013 @ DUMBO, New York City
Want to learn how to avoid unmaintainable code, brittle tests (and frustration)? Like to understand how to capture conversations with stakeholders without the tools you use interfering with this goal? And learn about a pattern that could enable looser coupling between steps, cleaner step definition code, happiness and much more? Read on! View the podcast here…
Meza will also be giving this talk on Friday 18th October 2013 at London Tester Gathering Workshop, and again at Agile Testing & BDD Exchange at Skillsmatter in London on Friday 22nd November 2013.
Graham Tackley, Director of Architecture at the Guardian
“Democratising attention data at guardian.co.uk”: Aarhus International Software Development Conference
1 October 2013 @ Aarhus, Denmark
guardian.co.uk is one of the world’s most popular news websites, visited by over 80 million unique browsers every month. Yet in the past our journalists and editors found it difficult to get meaningful, timely data on what people were reading. Even the minority granted access to analytics tools struggled to get actionable information.
Over the last year, we’ve built “Ophan”, an in-house real-time analytics system. By working closely with journalists and editors, we’ve focussed on what they can action to provide a better experience for our existing readers and enable more people discover our unique content. By allowing access to all Guardian employees, we’ve empowered many more people internally to contribute to expanding our engagement and reach.
And by being seriously resource constrained - two people, part time - we’ve robustly prioritised, rapidly evolved our cloud-based architecture and necessarily valued simple iterative delivery above all else.
This talk aims to convince you that by ruthlessly eliminating complexity in software, in architecture and in data presentation, even small teams can make a big difference to an organisation.
Matt Andrews, Developer at the Guardian
“Responsive design at the Guardian”: CanvasConf 2013
10 October 2013 @ IET Austin Court, Birmingham
It’s the most talked-about web development technique of the past few years and it’s officially reached the mainstream. Matt will tell us about the process of converting a site consisting of over three million articles, hundreds of components, dozens of templates and two domains into a single responsive webpage.
Cantlin Ashrowan, Product Manager at the Guardian
“Panel: API as the starting block for your development journey”: Appsworld
22 October 2013 @ Earls Court 2, London
- Why develop an API – what’s the business case?
- What benefits are there, uses, challenges?
- APIs as part of your mobile and wider multi-platform strategy
- Internal API’s vs External APIs – assessing different approaches
- Planning, tools, and platform strategy
- Security, scalability and performance
Kerstin Exner, Product Manager at the Guardian
“Designing a test – from hypothesis to result: how mature is your test design approach?”: Conversion Conference
23 October 2013 @ Aldersgate London
- How did we get started with A/B testing for Soulmates? (Not everything was clear up front. Reviewed some data and just started some tests. Learnt as we went along)
- Case study of one “theme” of tests.
- What did we learn?
- Important to have a hypothesis agreed upfront.
- Be really clear about the ONE goal so that there is no debate later.
- Don’t despair if tests are not successful. They give as much insight as successful tests.
Phil Wills, Software Architect at the Guardian
“Akka for the rest of us”: Scala Exchange
2 December 2013 @ Skillsmatter London
Akka is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed and fault tolerant event-driven applications, but it can also be very useful for those of us who more commonly build applications that run happily on a single EC2 micro.
In this talk I aim to convince you that, even if you’re not building a distributed system processing millions of transactions per second, Akka is a toolkit which can help build correct, elegant solutions. I’ll demonstrate patterns from production apps at the Guardian to illustrate this.