The Economist

A new foundation for Economist.com

During my employment at The Economist in 2010–2011, I worked on the migration of Economist.com from ColdFusion and Oracle to a Drupal 6 / Pressflow platform with MySQL. The project brought the publication’s website onto a different technical foundation while addressing the demands of digital publishing.

My contribution as an employee

I was a Senior Software Engineer in a Scrum team working across two continents. I contributed to the migration and the platform’s development, with performance, scalability, and technical-debt management forming part of the team’s day-to-day engineering work.

This project predates Artetecha Ltd. It is included here as part of my personal engineering experience, with delivery credited to The Economist’s team.

Publishing and platform engineering

The work required attention to both the needs of a publication and the behaviour of the software supporting it. It helped shape how I approach content platforms today: understand the publishing workflow, consider performance early, and make room for continued development.

This account concerns the platform I worked on in 2010–2011. The present-day Economist website has evolved since that period.