Adeline Cook / Work / NZ Herald & The Listener
NZ Herald & The Listener.
Backend platform work on the NZ Herald and Listener websites — services, the paywall, wire-feed publishing and the database underneath both.
December 2012 – June 2015 · APN Digital / NZME · Senior Web Developer
The work
Backend and platform work.
Adeline's work on The Listener and NZ Herald websites was mostly backend, with very little front-facing code: PHP services, some front-end JavaScript — including one of the first carousels on the site — automated newsfeed publishing from Reuters, and a heavy contribution to the design of the paywall.
Wire feed
Automatic newsfeed publishing.
An automated pipeline pulled wire copy from Reuters straight into publishing, instead of routing every story through manual entry.
Detail
The database and the caching layer.
At least half the role was database work, across MongoDB and MySQL, over a relational schema of 300+ tables that served every part of the site — almost every schema change had to be weighed against what else it touched. She also handled large data migrations. NZ Herald was the primary platform; The Listener and Woman's Weekly are included here for completeness, but the bulk of the work was on NZ Herald / NZME.
Pages were served through Varnish with edge-side includes, so a page could stay dynamic-feeling — bylines, related links, ad slots — without a full regeneration on every request. Traffic volume was a constant constraint on how that caching and the database schema were designed.