As a news organisation, we are constantly conceptualising how we will consume and produce news in the future. We have been rapidly growing the digital team here at the Guardian since our digital-first movement began many years ago, to help us turn these ideas into real experiences.
But – I hear you ask – who exactly are the ladies and gentlemen in this team behind this digital movement? What projects do they work on besides the external facing products? We’re lucky to host many developers who are prolific in the developer community, yet it has never been easy to discover information about the team collectively. If you’re good with Google, all of this information wouldn’t be a stretch to find. But developers are lazy, and furthermore, you have to be a Google ninja if you wanted to find information on our developer vacancies amongst all the other roles we advertise.
We also wanted a way to represent our work values. Working as a developer at the Guardian is not like working at any ordinary news organisation. We spend our energy on the right things, shipping code and then rapidly iterating on it, with minimal levels of bureaucracy. We do much of our coding in the open (see our GitHub projects). We have an open platform, too, so third-parties can easily integrate our content into their services. All of these things are not typical for an organisation of our size, which is why we believe we are different.
Today we have released our new Developers Site, which provides a home for all of this information. As an example of practicing what we preach, this site is hosted on GitHub, so any developer who wants to change the site can do so by raising a pull request. Following a code review, the changes can be merged and then pushed live in an instant, because we serve the static site through GitHub Pages. Of course, all the code is open source for you or anyone else to read, or even contribute to.
If you’re interested in joining us as a developer, you can take a look at what positions we currently have available on our new Developers Site.