Summary
Developed a Spotify component for the New York Times article to allow reporters to reference songs, albums, and playlists in their articles. This project involved working across the NYT stack from changing the article data schema (Scala), to adding the component to Scoop (the New York Times CMS) and their three consumer-facing platforms (AMP, mobile, and web) with React.
Challenges
Some big challenges I faced in developing this component was troubleshooting across a large stack. Most of the projects I’ve worked on have been self-contained, or in startups where I could just walk to the person who created it to understand how it works. This project wasn’t a difficult at its core but the sheer amount of codebases that it involved required a much more methodical manner of coding, and debugging than I had done before. Working with my co-intern, I engaged in a deep-dive of the tech stack prior to even coding, and that helped tremendously in accelerating our deployment of the project.
Lessons Learned
- Don’t jump straight into a project. Create some guiding questions, and investigate to find possible blockers.
- A project is never the size you initially imagine.
- AMP’s extremely important to the media world.
