Storylines

In mid-2019, I was brought on as a founding member of a small experimental team called Storylines, which was tasked with working closely alongside the newsroom to develop modules and tools to help readers navigate and understand the news, including the now-ubiquitous storyline menu.

The team was the first in recent NYTimes history to apply the flexibility of newsroom engineering tooling to the product engineering space, which allowed us to quickly and iteratively launch and test new editorial capabilities and reader-facing features. The team was also innovative in that it launched one of the first TypeScript microservices at the company, a service used as an upstream of the primary GraphQL content-delivery service that performs dynamic rule-based mapping between top level asset types (such as articles) and contextual data (such as menus or brief guides).

I later led the scaling of these successful prototypes and bringing them to the core publishing platform, conceptualizing and architecting the data format and building the serialization and publishing portions of the custom content management system, now in daily use by storyline editors.

Though acting as an engineer, I was also lucky to be able to contribute new product ideas and concepts that made their way to production. Most notably, I first conceptualized the live updates block to promote live coverage across the site, which continues to play a central role in the storylines suite (though in slightly different visual form).