Advent developer blog 2016
The Guardian development teams look back on 2016, with one blog post for every day of advent
Scanamo: simpler, safer DynamoDB access for Scala
DynamoDB provides a completely managed key-value store with some querying capabilities, but AWS’s Java client from Scala can be cumbersome and error-prone. The Guardian’s open-source library, Scanamo, provides a simpler alternative that reduces the scope for runtime errors.
Multiple DNS: synchronising Dyn to AWS Route 53
In a time of frequent DDoS attacks we run through how we increased our DNS resilience by using multiple providers at little extra operational cost.
Implicits and type classes in Scala
What are implicits? What are type classes? And why do they go so well together? Here are the answers I wish I’d had before diving into the Guardian’s codebase
Creating a culture of learning at the Guardian
We’re creating a product and user experience (UX) toolkit to help our product managers and UX designers build skill and confidence in their roles. Here’s what we’ve learned so far about creating a culture of learning within the Guardian Digital team.
Testing in Production: rethinking the conventional deployment pipeline
How using a lightweight continuous deployment pipeline, which focuses on production validation instead of a large suite of acceptance tests, allows us to iterate on the Membership and Subscriptions apps at speed.
Introducing the Guardian Digital’s self-organised Diversity & Inclusion group
The Guardian Digital team talk about why they started a diversity group, and what they’ve been up to this year
What we learnt from our mistakes in 2016
In 2016 a few things went wrong when building theGuardian.com. Lets take a look at some of the slip-ups and what we learnt from them so you can avoid our mistakes
The Assumptions Buffet
1 day, 4+ concepts, 12+ users, 10x things learnt. The assumptions buffet is great technique for product discovery
Real-world software security lessons
Can common-sense and our real-world intuition show us how to write secure software?
Levelling up our client side developer experience
Client side development moves pretty fast. If you stop and look around once in a while, you’re probably missing a bunch of dependencies.
What we’ve learnt from Startup Culture
For all of it’s talk of limitless pivots, funding rounds and football tables, Startup culture can teach established companies a thing or two.
Stepping into a new world: What we have learnt from The Guardian VR
Last month we launched The Guardian VR on Daydream, Google’s VR platform. It was a roller coaster ride and here is what we learned.
“Show me the money!”
Lessons learned from Tom Cruise-based software development.
Code Mesh 2016
Code Mesh is a conference for non-mainstream programming languages. Here are a bunch of things we have learned, along with out highlights!
Adventures with Echo
In September, we released our flash briefing and skill for the Amazon Echo. Since then, we’ve tried to figure out how people are using this device. Here are some of the things we’ve learned.
Guardian Digital Fellowship 2017
We are launching the new Guardian Digital Fellowship scheme for 2017. Find out about how you can apply and help shape the future of digital media.
Testing in Production: How we combined tests with monitoring
How the Guardian Digital team supplemented traditional monitoring with production testing to provide a comprehensive alerting system
Perfect software: the enemy of rapid deployment?
In traditional and slow moving software delivery teams, the brakes are well and truly applied by endless cycles of painfully slow manual regression test cycles. The logical thing to do when considering moving towards a rapid release cadence is to speed up your regression by automating. Sally Goble, head of quality at the Guardian, argues that this is not right or necessary
The Guardian coding workshop
This past summer 4 developers volunteered from the department to teach Python to 10 students ages 17-26.
The art of the design sprint
Our small team has taken Google’s formula for creating and testing new ideas in a week, and adapted it to work at the Guardian.
About 22 results for Advent developer blog 2016