I recall us doing this a couple of times when I was at Etsy (2012-2015). I think we did it with Github as well.
The thing to keep in mind is that accepting non team members and getting them meaningful work to do was already part of Etsy's culture. New engineers would bootcamp with a team for a couple of weeks when they joined. So the culture was already set up for this - managers and team members knew what to expect from a teammate who may not be a domain expert.
I think the way to start a program like this is to start with an internal bootcamping type program and learn and make mistakes through that.
What kinds of problems would you face in creating a news app? Surely content delivery is the same as that through the web page and for displaying the content you just use some cross-platform UI library?
(From somebody on the outside with absolutely no idea.)
There's a little bit more to our news app than content delivery, even though content delivery is indeed the crux of the problem. Regarding the content itself, it's a more complex than a wall of text, so we need support for each type of content. Our content is also served differently for the website and for the mobile app as we've got an API in there, though both the website and the mobile api are communicating with what we call the content API.
Both the Guardian and the BBC have separate iOS and Android teams, I'm part of the server side team. We touched about how to organise the teams, how to handle request from editorial, how to test and release the app etc.
In the lingo, a "news app" is typically some sort of interactive presentation of one particular story, and depending on the story may allow the user to filter or visualize something from a database, it might change the information based on where you live and it can include interactive maps or charts or calculators or even mini games to illustrate a particular concept. So these are one-off projects made to deadline, not a generic mobile app for reading the news.
That wasn't part of these exchanges, but yes we produce the tools for that in house.
The Grid is a good example of what's been produced in house, and it's actually open source (and I think being used by the BBC?) https://github.com/guardian/grid
Huh, interesting idea... I guess such a thing could be quite interesting for some short form updates (i.e. live from a conference). You'd probably want that to go through some kind of editor right? I just assumed it would be a news-reader/viewer.
We do indeed have what essentially is a text-editor with Guardian specific features developed in house.
It's used for all of our content, but specifically what you're referring to are liveblogs, where a journalist can write short content and append it to the existing article.
Cross company is awesome but even better would be cross team within the same company. No single thing could do more to break us v. them thinking and silos than this imo
We have an infra rotation program, where application and service programmers can spend a quarter or two working under product infrastructure on whatever their infra passion is. It’s great to see somebody’s passion for a big change boil for a year or two, and then they rotate in and are given the authority to make that change.
That being said, I’d love to see people rotate between application and service teams. Some applications and services are years ahead of others in terms of their maturity and scaling problems/solutions, so there’s a lot of tacit knowledge to be spread. We have a monorepo so self-starters can read code and commit messages, but a formal program would really help accelerate and democratize the knowledge spreading.
Yeah my former company would have benefit a ton from something like this. I guess it takes a culture to make this a thing. Instead we just built abstractions around the “other” team’s product so that we didn’t have to deal with their bugs or tech debt.
The thing to keep in mind is that accepting non team members and getting them meaningful work to do was already part of Etsy's culture. New engineers would bootcamp with a team for a couple of weeks when they joined. So the culture was already set up for this - managers and team members knew what to expect from a teammate who may not be a domain expert.
I think the way to start a program like this is to start with an internal bootcamping type program and learn and make mistakes through that.