Virtual Hack Day November 2020 – Diversity and Inclusion Theme

Late last year we held our second and final hack day of 2020. It was with a sense of excitement that colleagues across the Product and Engineering department were able to take time out of their every day responsibilities to let loose their creative brain power and innovate together.

In the first ever remote hack day, our focus was on diversity and accessibility, teams were encouraged to consider important issues around disability, race, gender or age in their designs.

We produced 26 hacks over the two-day event. These included measuring diversity representation in articles, building audio versions of our interactives, developing new tools to audit the accessibility of our site and creating an individually controlled tool for readers with visual impairments to change the colours and font sizes of Guardian articles.

Here is a selection of our best concepts/designs from the day:

Best overall hack: lo-fi guardian

In 2019 we looked at whether we could make a lo-fi version of the Guardian, with a focus on delivering content to the widest possible audience. Even accessing a simple text article can use a lot of data which can be prohibitive in areas where this is expensive.

This hack revisited the original lo-fi concept, and tried to built it on our new rendering layer.

Best conceptual hack: audio graphs

Our interactives are wonderfully informative but they rely on visual perception. This hack represented the visual data in our interactives in an audio format making them accessible to people who are blind or partly sighted.

Most entertaining hack: code ac-adam-y

We are only ever as diverse as the people we can hire and keep and instructional videos could help with both of these at once. It increases the diversity of our hiring pipeline by helping to give candidates the skills required for our interview process. The videos can also be a resource for existing colleagues and especially to support those among us that aren’t from programming-heavy backgrounds.

Technically failing with style: blog roll

The last was a tricky category to vote in, as no hack quite technically failed; a rather amazing feat in itself. The voting public had to get quite picky with the details.

Social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and even LinkedIn have introduced ‘story reels’ as a way of presenting bite-size content that is available for a 24-hour period. The idea of this hack was to introduce these reels on our live blogs, turning key updates into short story reels which could help us provide short, curated experiences for users that may feel overwhelmed by long liveblogs.

We eagerly look forward to the next one, hopefully all together again for the occasion, as we love to be.

Finally, a word from our captain and chief product officer, Caspar Llewellyn Smith:

The Guardian ran its first hack day for software developers and colleagues across the organisation in 2008 and ever since they’ve been a constant source of amazing, innovative ideas. We have the best, most brilliant team of engineers and it’s great to be to provide the space for them to express themselves creatively, and you can feel their passion for the Guardian’s mission in everything they’ve done – perhaps particularly this year, when the suggested focus this year was diversity and inclusion.

Where can I find open positions?

Apply for one of our open positions here.

What can I expect from the interview process?

We aim to be as fair and transparent as possible in our hiring process. Similar to other organisations, there is a CV screening, phone interview, coding exercise and a face to face interview. Read more about what to expect and apply now here.