How we managed software design on guardian.co.uk, using domain driven design

How the team dealt with the inevitable, and many, changing requirements on the R2 project

We've been thinking about the evolving field of data driven journalism on the web for a while now here at guardian.co.uk. The basic principle is simple and has been around in newspapers for a while. Each time we print an article in our newspaper which features an infographic such as a pie chart, graph or table we are presenting editorial content with data. Our graphics news editor Simon Rogers and his reasearch team will collate information from various sources into spreadsheets which can then be represented graphically alongside the editorial

Business analysis was a key activity on guardian.co.uk's R2 project

The Guardian's first ever Hack Day adhered to a format already proven elsewhere, starting with doughnuts and finishing with beer. In between, as is also traditional, there was a an enormous amount of hacking, fiddling, monkeying, hair pulling, learning, frustration, fun, laughter, pizza, chocolate, coffee and crisps

Data was clearly top of mind at our first Hack Day last week. Hackers uncovered several ways to open up information from The Guardian making it more useful, interesting and, in many cases, more fun.

Hack Day included 8 lightning talks, 15 special guest hackers, 37 demos, 8 judges and 2 big whiteboards disguised as projector screens.

Catch up on what happened at Hack Day. You can watch the highlight reel and read the complete list of hacks which includes several screenshots.

Why guardian.co.uk's article editor is unexpectedly complex

An introduction to a series looking inside our recent renewal of guardian.co.uk

The development team enter into a collaborative coding challenge to turn new ideas into reality

Our friends at Guardian Jobs have just launched the Careers Talk forum, which provides a place for people using our jobs site to share information about certain careers and sectors, as well as get advice from peers and experts about all those nagging job-hunting and career development questions.

When I asked Laura-Jane Filotrani, Content Manager for Guardian Jobs, to describe the thinking behind the Careers Talk area, and specifically what problem it's solving for users of our site, she explained that the boards provide a work-centric place

Laura-Jane went on to explain that she's hoping that the forums won't just provide a platform for lively discussions, but that they'll also offer valuable insight to the Guardian Jobs content team about specific topics readers and jobseekers are interested in. "With direct access to our users and their opinions," she revealed, "we hope to better understand the kind of content they want and need and then then commission tailored multimedia content accordingly."

L-J explained that they're hoping to see a wide variety of issues being discussed within the community area: "Topics which people feel too sensitive to bring up with their peers can be addressed anonymously in the forums - questions about pay and conditions, questions about work-place bullying for example, or general questions about CVs and application forms - what to do if facing redundancy ... I also hope that the areas such as the freelance forum in the media category will allow people to make professional contacts and even pick up and post commissions."

On top of all of this, the Guardian Jobs team have recruited a number of sector-specific experts who'll be on hand to answer specific questions in each forum, as well as giving users direct access to a number of key individuals in each sector in our live Q&As.

Using the Careers Talk forum is simple if you've already registered on the site, and you may notice some differences in how it looks and works, when compared with our regular comment and talkboard sections.
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Today we have launched the latest tributary that runs off from the mighty Comment is free rapids: Cif belief.

And you can read about the thinking behind the site, which encompasses all matters relating to belief and unbelief, here.

When Cif belief was first envisaged, it seemed unlikely that it would kick off in the shadow of a campaign for an atheist bus. However Ariane Sherine's campaign, launched on Comment is free earlier this summer, has captured the imagination of the community and indeed a good deal of its cash – with over £109,000 in donations.

In fact it begs the question – what does Barack Obama have in common with the atheist bus? Continue reading...

Today we've rolled out a major upgrade to our RSS feeds. Our feeds now contain the full content of each article so that you can take guardian.co.uk with you wherever you prefer to get your news

We have published our first article containing geolocation data!

A couple of posters to the previous blog noticed that today's Guardian Daily podcast was late - it didn't appear until an hour after the advertised time of 7.30. One poster added that it's often a few minutes late.

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I was browsing through past blog comments the other day and was struck by a contribution by the delightfully-named MeltonMowbray. In reference to an update from Meg Pickard on various community features MeltonMowbray commented: