All Aboard: Bringing Teams Together to Talk Shippin'

Written by: Eden Rohatensky, Ramla Mahmood & Kelsey Scherer

On Thursday, October 9th, 2014, Vox Media held our first product-focused event at our DC headquarters. Entitled All Aboard: A Discussion on Shipping Digital Products, we invited designers, developers, and managers from various DC-based companies to come discuss their teams, process, and how they celebrate.

Enter to compete in our design showdown, Pixel Punch

In two weeks, Vox Media is hosting our very first design showdown at our DC headquarters and you're invited. Here's a quick rundown on the event.

Lessons from The Verge Hack Week 2014

Driely Vieira

Normally, I work quietly at a desk in Vox Media’s DC office where I’ve been interning for the summer. Even though I sit out on Vox.com’s editorial floor, I usually only talk with fellow product people or specific writers and editors I’m collaborating with on a story.

Last week was a change of pace. I was sitting in the middle of The Verge’s newsroom with product team members, reporters, and writers, brainstorming possible storytelling tools in the name of Hack Week. It wasn’t the traditional sleepless, Social Network pounding-shots-while-coding kind of hackathon. Rather, it aimed to bring editorial and product closer together and have Verge reporters and editors "play with new tools and experiment with new storytelling ideas" but do so "out in the open."

The Verge hack week is people

Thomas Ricker

Mingling is hard. In high school the D&D crowd ate with the other nerds, jocks with jocks, and plastics with plastics. Individual expression stifled by the homogeneous personality of the group with few interactions between tables.

Hack week exploded two Vox Media cliques for at least a few days in August, forcing writers from the Verge (and across Vox) and developers and designers from the Product team to engage with each other face-to-face. It was weird and uncomfortable, scary even. But man, was it worth it.

Speeding up and Overriding Ad Server Targeting During Local Development

Dumplings, a tasty wrapper - Charles Haynes

Hi, I’m Brian. I’ve been working on the ads platform team at Vox Media since October 2013. A good portion of my time is spent supporting and developing the systems that help ads get displayed on the page in a way that scales for all of our users on all of their devices. In addition to building our ad platforms, I work with the many talented designers and engineers who make our ads look amazing. We put a lot of effort into building great ads. We believe this effort creates great user experience, which in turn creates a great brand experience. Because of this, there is a lot of iteration and testing that goes into each of our ad products.

Quiz Whiz

Written by KK Rebecca Lai, Nicole Zhu & Adam Baumgartner

Here at Vox media, we are constantly finding new ways to create engaging, shareable content. Our newest authoring tool is a quiz generator that offers thorough explanations of topics in enticing, concise and interactive ways. The tool also automates the process for creating an interactive quiz without involving a developer writing repetitive code.

You Should be the Vox Media 2015 OpenNews Fellow

In June, Knight-Mozilla OpenNews announced we were selected as a host for one of its 2015 fellows. We're proud of this opportunity to support the open source journalism community, along with media organizations that we respect such as NPR, La Nacion, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian and The Center for Investigative Reporting.

How do you scale art-directed longform storytelling?

The "Art Directing Posts Sustainably" session at SRCCON.

Take a peek at the code that powered The Verge 50

Last December, The Verge published The Verge 50, one of our earliest examples of our Editorial Apps system built by VP of Technology Pablo Mercado during last October's VAX hackathon, inspired by the work done by the NPR Visuals team.

Cyber Ninja Summer Camp visits Vox Media

Last week Vox Product hosted nearly 30 impressive young women from a Girls Inc. summer camp. They toured the Vox Media DC office and bombarded a panel of Vox Media employees—including front-end engineers Ally Palanzi and Guillermo Esteves, designer Ramla Mahmood, front-end designer Alisha Ramos, SB Nation social media editor Michael Katz, and Vox engagement editor Allison Rockey—with tough, thoughtful questions about their day-to-day experiences in the fields of technology and media.