On joining the Guardian, the reaction from many of our friends was an incredulous,
You’re working for a newspaper - as a developer?
However the scope of our stack and products has enabled us to put their concerns, and any anxieties about our technical abilities, to rest.
Reflecting on our time here, it’s unbelievable how quickly we were exposed to different challenges; from Kate’s experience of working with Editorial on design sprints, to Calum and Anne becoming proficient at engineering on our data lake, and Emma working on a messenger chatbot. As part of the fellowship you rotate, so soon we will be jumping back in the deep end with a new team and new challenges.
Being exposed to different challenges forces you to learn fast. We’ve had a taste of everything from solving styling bugs, to the harsh reality of DevOps and working in the cloud with AWS. With this many developers, on fast moving projects, we rapidly became proficient with rebasing and resolving merge conflicts. It means we have the power to break the Guardian website, and with great power… you get the drift. The level of autonomy and responsibility given to us, so quickly, is one of the things we have all loved about our time so far at the Guardian.
You aren’t a real Guardian developer until you have broken production.
None of us has broken anything major… yet. With continuous deployment, and many other developers supporting us, we feel confident to fail.
We’ve acquired this confidence throughout our fellowship because at the Guardian we respect each other, we embrace our differences and accept we all come from various backgrounds and have different levels of experience. As the newest developers, we became accustomed to not knowing some of the tools or technologies that people talk about, since at the time they were being widely used, we didn’t even know what programming was!
For last year’s fellows it’s not just about learning anymore, but also passing our knowledge along to our newer colleagues and wider tech community. This can mean helping someone set up their development environments, publishing a developer blog post as Maria did while building our new API key management system, or helping with our internal Scala school or functional programming club. The fellowship works because we are empowered to learn fast, ask questions and then give back.
The idea that we can contribute is true both in our teams and the wider department; one thing that really stands out is how flat Digital’s hierarchy feels. When Susie shared with the Diversity Group how interesting she had found the documentary ‘CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap’, she was encouraged to arrange a screening at the Guardian. This was an incredibly valuable experience for Susie, and, in a style of working we have become used to, there were people on hand to offer support and advice but she was allowed to take the lead.
Another example is at the end of last quarter, where Jonny presented his team’s work over the quarter to the whole Engineering department despite being most junior member of the team. This was a great opportunity to develop his presentation skills and demonstrates how the Guardian is willing to give fresh faces a chance to speak on big stages.
The opportunity to attend Editorial’s morning conference and contribute highlights the importance of the work we do in the Digital department and how we support our journalistic output every day. Political events this year have reinforced the importance of the Guardian’s voice and make it an exciting time to be working in media. As a fellow, you are encouraged to air your opinion on non-technical aspects of work and to contribute to the collective goal of the company of ensuring the continuity of the Guardian in perpetuity.
If you have a passion for technology, media and working in a collaborative team, the Fellowship Programme could be for you.