The stage is set

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The hackathon is on its final hours. Teams are polishing (or panically completing) their project ideas. The connection to media/news business is apparent in all ideas. Some ideas are improvements on existing services, some ideas include new ways of interacting with media. They all have one thing in common: the dedicated developers and designers creating them.

It requires a lot from a team to explore, ideate and craft an idea into something fully functional and demo-able. Relatively simple projects that can take months in an organization are boiled down with ease in a 24-hour hackathon. Why so? Is it the complete focus and change-of-context that a hackathon provides for developers? Is it the complexity, rules and processes of an organization that prevents fast-paced projects? Which success factors of a hackathon can be applied to improve the product development cycle in an >80 persons IT department?

I am impressed to see so many versatile and gifted creators working in new domains with never-before-used tools. Opticians doing development. Digital strategists doing wireframing. Back-end developers sketching on paper. All with impressive results. I recall again our late friday night discussion on generalists vs specialists. One thing is for sure: the traditional silos and dedicated roles are forever gone.


A Holistic View on Developer Productivity

What does developer productivity mean, really? Is it churning out more code or less code? Is it to have less bugs in production or shipping code more often? Is it doing a lot of things or just one thing? Let’s think about this for a moment. I believe developer productivity is about getting more things […]


Improving the usability of Aftonbladet Video-clip pages

We have recently started the process of improving the usability of video-clip pages. In order to get an idea of where Aftonbladet stands compared to other world-class online video/news providers, we conducted an online test answered by 110 visitors of Aftonbladet TV. In this test we compared their perception of an Aftonbladet TV video-clip page […]


Schibsted’s 1st iOS Deployment Meet-up

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Hackday: The Future of Storytelling is social, engaging and rewarding

We gathered students, journalists, developers and designers to get together and conceptualize something new for the news industry. This was our first organized hack event – The Future of Storytelling Hack. The hack was a team-based, news-media-focused prototyping and experimentation event within storytelling over two days at Kungsbrohuset, Schibsted and Aftonbladets headquarter in Stockholm. A good story used to […]