Earlier this year the Big Bite team were delighted to be part of a new initiative by leading news publisher, News UK – an annual hackathon that aimed to bring innovation to the forefront and inspire technical teams to bring early ideas to fruition.
The Hackathon, otherwise known as ‘Gutenberg Day’, brought together Big Bite’s technical team, the News UK engineering team and WordPress VIP. The day aimed to share knowledge and best practices as well as mentor individual team members who had limited experience around the WordPress block editor – Gutenberg. Introduced in 2018, Gutenberg provides an enhanced editing experience that allows users to create content in a more flexible manner. Originally planned as a plugin to the classic editor, Gutenberg has evolved to the platform’s default content editor.
News UK’s journey with Gutenberg began in 2023 when they collaborated with Big Bite to move to a digital first newsroom. This involved a huge shift not only in technical platforms, but also in skills assessments, recruitment processes and team structure within the News UK Tech division. Working closely alongside the Big Bite team, News UK were able to enhance their recruitment strategy and fully leverage the WordPress platform.
Having recently hosted our first in-house Hackathon in October, we were especially excited about facilitating the event with News UK. To ensure the day not only improved in-house knowledge but also created some tangible results, Senior Engineer, Paul Taylor, assigned the News UK Engineering teams a specific project that closely aligned to enhancement priorities from leading newsroom – The Times, tasking engineers with creating quiz blocks. Hackers were guided through each stage of planning and execution and were given the independence to create and execute. whilst refraining from actively contributing to the project so News UK could really benefit from gaining more practical experience in using the block editor.
Pair programming was valuable during the experience for the team and they both worked incredibly well together as part of this.
Paul Taylor, Senior Engineer at Big Bite
The day was an insightful way to benchmark what can realistically be achieved by the teams in just one day, as well as upskilling News UK’s in-house teams with more experience and knowledge around Gutenberg. The team had some experience with Javascript and React frameworks, which made it much easier to adapt to the way Gutenberg works.
Learn more about our work with News UK and how we transformed digital publishing for one of the UK’s largest publishers in our latest case study, resulting in record-time content creation.
