How The Telegraph Engineering is building a bridge from uni to work
Personal Experience
After studying Computer Science at university, I started my career in software. I expected to enter the industry and hit the ground running from the start. However, soon discovered that the university curriculum did not quite cover the real-world software techniques used by practitioners at the time. It was time to re-learn and then to be able to relate the course material with the infrastructure, applications, tools and coding standards in practice. The challenge was to connect the theories to relevant industry use cases, for example, why do we use certain Java libraries, what is the purpose of web services, how do we practically make applications fault tolerant etc.
In the past few years, a number of academic institutions have started to fill this gap. One of the successful examples of this partnership is set squared, a business incubator, providing collaboration between 5 leading universities in South West England and turning ideas in businesses. Another example is MICRA, a similar outfit in midlands. It is a significant positive change in the right direction but mainly centered around innovation and startups ideas. Universities are seeking software practitioners and leaders to come and share their experiences with students. It needs time and effort to arrange and a gap still remains.
According to Higher Education Leavers Stats, approximately 75% of the computer science students started work after graduating in 2017, that’s nearly 34,000 graduates completing computer science, engineering, and technology courses.
Still a gap
Whilst things have progressed since 2005, there is still a gap between academics and real-world practices. Computer Science and Engineering academies need to be in constant communication with experienced engineering practitioners. It is an opportunity for established companies to demonstrate the tech stack, organisational culture, values and the information about their businesses.
Introducing The Telegraph Engineering to the University of Exeter
As part of a best-in-class engineering team and as someone who is fortunate to work at a World-renowned news brand, we were lucky to have the chance to share our technology stack with an external audience. I took the opportunity to present our Web and Content Management tech stack to second-year computer science graduates at the University of Exeter.
Here is what I presented
Telegraph Media has been on the vanguard of mixed media news companies, launching the first newspaper group website in 1994 and continuing today with desktop and mobile websites and mobile apps that gather customer information and personalise experiences based on each reader’s behavior and preferences.
A bird’s-eye view of areas in the business where we are using various platforms and tools.
Since I manage the Web Platform I went into detailing Content Management System tech stack
website is the backbone of our digital propositions
Telegraph.co.uk Tech Stack
We publish our contents using Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). It is built on 4 primary Java API sets. We have customised the software using the platform in order to meet the business requirements. The following slide shows the architecture and our customisation. The references at the end of this blog has more detail on understanding Java API preferences in AEM.
Our Back-end team builds and enhances AEM java functions:
Front-end undertakes client-facing development using HTML, CSS and JavaScript for our flagship website, where users interact with the features that we develop. Here is the slide showing that front-end stack:
Testing automation also requires its own unique set of skills and tools as presented in the slide below:
Non-functional requirements help us to test how a system should behave and what limits there are on the functionality that we have developed:
Finally the integration, testing and deployments are performed using Jenkins. I previously wrote a blog to explain how this all comes together:
What’s Next?
The blog shows the use cases, platforms, tools and frameworks. We are planning to do similar talks elsewhere. In the autumn we will be at the University of Warwick’s Computer Science fair. In discussion with King’s College London for similar talks. If you are interested in this and would like to know more about our engineering practices, principles and culture, please leave a comment or contact me here.
If you are experienced with some of the technologies that I have talked about above, please browse our stack overflow page for the latest opportunities
Our career framework allows engineers to develop and progress either within engineering, management, process & delivery, or a combination of all three:
- Engineering — Entry Level, Mid Level, Senior and Principal
- Management — Engineering manager, Head of Engineering
- Process & Delivery — Scrum Master, Business Analyst, Delivery Manager
Hope you enjoyed the reading.
Mehdi Ali is the Head of Development and Technology at The Telegraph. Follow him on Medium MEHDI Ali and Twitter @mesum98
References
Midlandsinnovation.org.uk. (2019). About us . [online] Available at: http://www.midlandsinnovation.org.uk/about-us/about-us.aspx [Accessed 16 Mar. 2019].
SETsquared. (2019). About SETsquared — SETsquared. [online] Available at: https://www.setsquared.co.uk/about-us/ [Accessed 16 Mar. 2019].
Hesa.ac.uk. (2018). Higher Education Leavers Statistics: UK, 2016/17 — Outcomes by subject studied | HESA. [online] Available at: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/news/28-06-2018/sfr250-higher-education-leaver-statistics-subjects [Accessed 16 Mar. 2019].
Medium. (2017). Fantastic AEM Configurations and How to Code Them. [online] Available at: https://medium.com/adobetech/fantastic-aem-configurations-and-how-to-code-them-edb5663e983f [Accessed 16 Mar. 2019].
Helpx.adobe.com. (2019). Understanding Java API preference in AEM. [online] Available at: https://helpx.adobe.com/experience-manager/kt/platform-repository/using/java-apis-article-understand.html [Accessed 16 Mar. 2019].
