Any 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 You may have heard the Guardian has a new cooking app called Feast. With thousands of searchable recipes, cook mode, and lots of other lovely features, it’s been well…
Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/info/developer-blog · 20 posts · history since 2023 · active
23 Sept 2024
6 Sept 2024
Welcome 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 How did you begin your product management journey? After university, I wasn’t entirely sure what career path to pursue. So I decided to join an exciting startup that allowed me…
26 Jul 2024
Dealing 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. The programming language…
17 Jun 2024
Recently, colleagues across the product and engineering department, as well as other parts of the organisation, came together for another exciting hack day For our first hack day of 2024 we kicked off with a grand theme around all the major events of the world, including sport and upcoming elections around the world. Hackers played around with the idea of…
4 Apr 2024
The 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. This post was updated on 9th April 2024 following feedback from the Securedrop Workstation/Qubes community If you’ve ever scrolled through the Guardian homepage, you…
10 Feb 2024
Pinboard 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 This is part three of three (part one and part two). Continue reading...
9 Feb 2024
Pinboard 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 This is part two of three (part one and part three). Continue reading...
8 Feb 2024
Pinboard 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 This is part one of three (part two and part three). Who works on a story? How many people does it take to put a…
5 Feb 2024
A developer in the Fellowship Scheme shares his experiences of his first year at the Guardian I clearly remember my early days in the Guardian’s Digital Fellowship as a mixture of excitement and being totally overwhelmed. I had joined the editorial tools team, which builds all our digital tools for our journalists. At morning stand-up people were mentioning more acronyms…
22 Dec 2023
Developers in the Product and Engineering department came together with colleagues from across the Guardian to explore the potential of LLMs and more The discussion of large language models (LLMs) and generative artificial intelligence was everywhere in 2023 – not least in the Guardian’s Product and Engineering department. Hack days are a staple part of the software development culture, so…
11 Dec 2023
How we improved Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker, to provide more value for the Guardian and its readers Minimising typos is important to a newspaper. Publishing messy prose might undermine trust in our overall quality control – why trust our political reporting if we can’t spell Thérèse Coffey’s name? We want to provide accurate information, and typos can mutate…
21 Nov 2023
Today’s blog does not come to you from any developer in product and engineering but from our talented colleagues in data and insight Here, the Guardian’s data scientists share how they have teamed up with PhD students from University College London to train a machine learning model to accurately attribute quotes. Below the two teams explain how they’ve been teaching…
24 Oct 2023
Coming 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? Short answer: by enabling everyone to…
12 Sept 2023
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 Our readers’ support is vital to the Guardian’s future, and the Supporter Revenue engineering team is responsible for developing digital experiences that engage our valued supporters.…
16 Aug 2023
On our team we swapped databases 6 times in a year. We’ve landed on Aurora Serverless V2 – was it worth it? Since our migration from Mongo to Postgres in 2018, at the Guardian the search for the perfect database hasn’t stopped. In the last year on the Investigations and Reporting team we’ve spent a lot of time trying out…
25 Jul 2023
Welcome 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 Did you always have an interest in software development from a young age? I definitely had an interest in computers but I didn’t know what software development was. I remember…
19 Jun 2023
All the news and updates from the 2023 Guardian Product and Engineering away day The second session of the unconference time has come to a close. There will now be some time for feedback on the topics. Who will step up to share their thoughts? It’s nearly time on session two. I’m hearing there will be a brief summary of…
7 Jun 2023
How the Guardian’s real time analytics tool pivoted from ElasticSearch Rollups to BigQuery and what we learnt along the way Ophan is the Guardian’s in-house developed real time analytics tool which allows us to see how our content is performing in real-time, providing our Editorial teams with the insights they need to curate and promote our journalism. Its intuitive ways…
31 May 2023
This month, colleagues across the product and engineering department, as well as other parts of the organisation, came together for another exciting hack day For our first hack day of 2023 we kicked off with a delicious theme around ‘Food’, with a side of the usual ‘free-for-all’ of course. Hackers were invited to think about all things edible, whether as…
3 Feb 2023
‘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 We all feel a little lost at times. Who am I? What is my purpose? Who’s the best person to speak to about setting up my AWS credentials? Anyone who…