Technical articles and stack decisions from The Guardian
Pinboard: transforming communication across the newsroom (part 3 of 3)
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
Pinboard: transforming communication across the newsroom (part 2 of 3)
Pinboard: transforming communication across the newsroom (part 1 of 3)
The Digital Fellowship is your foot in the door to the future of news
A developer in the Fellowship Scheme, shares his experiences of his first year at the Guardian<br>
Large language models and generative AI: a recent hack day
Developers in the Product and Engineering department came together with colleagues from across the Guardian to explore the potential of LLMs and more
Making Typerighter work harder
How we improved Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker, to provide more value for the Guardian and its readers
Who said what: using machine learning to correctly attribute quotes
<em>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 a machine to understand “who said what?”</em><br>
Standardisation: the merit of consistent patterns
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?
From a zebra to a rotating banner: how we stepped up your ability to Support the Guardian over the last seven years
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
Aurora Serverless – a migration story
On our team we swapped databases 6 times in a year. We’ve landed on Aurora Serverless V2 – was it worth it?
Day in the Life: Jessica Leivers
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.
Product and Engineering away day 2023 – as it happened
All the news and updates from the 2023 Guardian Product and Engineering away day
Roll Over Rollups! The Big Future of Ophan’s Historical Data
How the Guardian’s real time analytics tool pivoted from ElasticSearch Rollups to BigQuery and what we learnt along the way
Hack Day: Food Glorious Food
This month, colleagues across the product and engineering department, as well as other parts of the organisation, came together for another exciting hack day
Galaxies of the Guardian: the formation of an irregular org chart
‘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
Day in the Life: Ana Pradas
Welcome to our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series. Each month we interview a colleague from the product and engineering department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian
Our journey towards the fastest breaking news service
Over 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
Recognising ‘bad actors’ in data leaks with AI
How the Guardian has been working with partners to use AI to help investigative journalists find persons of interest in large data sets
Day in the Life: Raphael Kabo
How we built the Guardian’s Tor Onion service
In 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.
Day in the Life: Abolade Akintunde
Day in the Life: Simone Smith
Day in the Life: Philip McMahon
Product and Engineering away day 2022 – as it happened
All the news and updates from the 2022 Guardian Product and Engineering away day
Day in the Life: Chloe Kirton
What we learned at the International Journalism Festival
In 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.
A Day in the Life: Roberto Tyley
Welcome to the latest post in our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series, in which product and engineering’s digital coordinator, Rasha Ardati, interviews a colleague from the department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian.
Day in the Life: Georgia Ellis
Welcome to our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series. Each month we interview a colleague from the product and engineering department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian.
React islands on theguardian.com
We 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.
The future of work: development tooling and Covid-19
The 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.
A Day in the Life: Gustavo Gava
How we have changed our application and hiring processes
How 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
Turning the tables on accessibility
A lesson on how to present data for all types of audiences
Get to the point! Why we added pinned posts to the Guardian’s live blogs
Live 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 …
A Day in the Life: Mohammad Haque
A Day in the Life
Welcome to the latest post in our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series in which product and engineering’s digital coordinator, Rasha Ardati, interviews a colleague from the department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian.
Guardian Software Engineering Fellowship 2022: apply now
Today 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.
Talking sense: using machine learning to understand quotes
The 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
A retrospective on a decade of innovations
The 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
Pondering Some Scala Performance Questions
The 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
Cop26 Hack Day September 2021
In 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
<strong>Welcome to the latest post in our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series, in which product and engineering’s digital coordinator, Rasha Ardati, interviews a colleague from the department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian.</strong>
<strong>Welcome to the latest post in our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series, in which product and engineering’s digital coordinator, Rasha Ardati, interviews a colleague from the department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian.</strong><br>
How we backfilled the Guardian’s in-house analytics tool to provide greater journalistic insight
The 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.
Welcome to the latest post in our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series, in which product and engineering’s digital coordinator, Rasha Ardati, interviews a colleague from the department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian
The story of 1821 Mode
To 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
Old the front page! The story of 1821 Mode
Virtual Hack Day April 2021
<strong>In April, colleagues from across product and engineering, as well as other parts of the organisation, came together for another exciting remote hack day. </strong>
A day in the life
Product and engineering’s digital coordinator, Rasha Ardati, interviews a colleague from the department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian
How technology unlocked the secretive power of ‘Queen’s consent’
How Guardian developers used web scraping to investigate the secretive parliamentary procedure
<strong>Welcome to the latest post in our ‘Day in the Life’ blog series, in which product and engineering’s digital coordinator, Rasha Ardati, interviews a colleague from the department to reflect on their career and experiences at the Guardian</strong>
How technology is powering Covid-19 investigations
In the final instalment, we look at how Guardian journalists and software engineers worked together to hold the UK government to account over its response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Virtual Hack Day November 2020 – Diversity and Inclusion Theme
In 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.
How we made Typerighter, the Guardian’s style guide checker
Lots of regular expressions, and a timely demonstration by an editorial colleague, led to a two year side-project that eventually ended up in production
How technology is powering election coverage
In the second of three articles, we look at the role of software engineers in analysing online political advertising during the 2019 UK General Election
Welcome to our new “Day in the Life” feature in which Rasha Ardati sits down with one of our Product and Engineering colleagues to reflect on their career and experience at the Guardian to date.
How technology is powering environmental reporting
In the first of three articles, we look at how Guardian software engineers teamed up with the newsroom to investigate climate lobbying online
Pairing with Coding Black Females
Our pairing partnership with Coding Black Females
Guardian Software Engineering Fellowship 2021: apply now
Today 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.
Welcome to the dark side: deploying ‘dark mode’ on the Guardian live app
Do 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
The Guardian’s experience implementing Sign in with Apple on Android
Here we outline the technical details of how to implement Apple’s new feature, for Android developers.
Taming data transfer costs with Elasticsearch
Here we outline how an upgrade to open source search and analytics engine, Elasticsearch, led to unexpected cost-savings
Guardian Digital Hack Day - January 2020
Welcome to our first hackday of 2020! We’ll be liveblogging the next two days of hacks, successes, mistakes and near misses
How the Guardian’s engineering team supports the 24 hour news cycle
Managing the out of hours engineer support rota to meet the demands of a global news operation
Championing the reader
Working 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
Async Failure handling in Typescript
We look at a pattern which makes dealing with failures in async functions easier to reason about
Securing and centrally monitoring accounts in Amazon Web Services
An introduction to AWS Trusted Advisor, AWS StackSets and how they can support cloud security checks
Shrinking the download size of the Guardian’s Live app on Android
How we shrunk the size of the Android app by 30% using the Android app bundle
Migrating the Guardian website to React
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Software quality in a world of microservices and continuous deployment
How the role of quality assurance at the Guardian has adapted to support today’s fast-paced software landscape
The Tools Game, building empathy with our journalists
Learn how we dogfooded our digital tools as a learning exercise and as a way to gain a better understanding of how our journalists use our tooling
Faster PostgreSQL connection recovery
This post covers how a database incident affected one of our services and what we did to improve the situation in the future
Has Mary Wollstonecraft's CPU spiked?
For seriously technical reasons, we needed several thousand feminists - seriously technical reasons, and simply making a small improvement to inclusivity on our team
Revisiting the rendering tier part 2: migrating AMP
An update on our new server-side rendering layer: migrating AMP.
Life in the Guardian's Digital department
The third in a three-part series on life as a new member of the Guardian’s Digital department.
Structured content: benefits for creating and publishing articles
Starting with a content model to create structured content saves publishers money and makes production more efficient
First days in the Guardian's Digital department
The second in a three-part series on life as a new member of the Guardian’s Digital department
Guardian Digital Fellowship 2019: apply now
Today 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.
Applying to the Guardian's Digital department
The first in a three-part series on life as a new member of the Guardian’s Digital department
Being part of The Guardian's Digital Fellowship
Three new developers share their first impressions after joining the Guardian’s Digital Fellowship scheme.
Harness web development skills to create better desktop applications
Integrating best of breed desktop applications with web tools can provide a better experience for creative staff
