NPR’s digital media devs do some cool things. They’re the team behind the NPR One app, for example. However, it’s been hard to know exactly what they’re working on and how — until now.
The team announced last week that they’re starting a blog with the explicit goal of sharing more. More of how they do it, more launch announcements, more behind-the-scenes personality.
As full-stack developer Nara Kasbergen writes in her intro post: “there’s one thing I’ve found during my time at NPR that’s been missing: our incredibly smart developers are not sharing what we’re doing and how we do it with the rest of the tech industry. … This seems oddly counter to our role as a public media organization.”
But all that changes now, with npr.codes.
Hosted on Medium, Kasbergen says the blog will focus on:

  • Product launch announcements with more of a tech focus
  • A weekly profile on a different member of the team
  • Takeaways from tech conferences and events we attend
  • A “how-we-did-that” series, where we step through how we tackled a specific technical challenge
  • Deep-dives into specific tools and technologies we’ve been spending a lot of time with lately, such as Redis, React/Redux, and Angular 2

Kasbergen goes on to admit that the whole thing is an experiment — success is far from certain. But, she says, she hopes the blog will continue. “I believe strongly that we have a lot to share with the world, and I’m hoping to foster a culture within our team where that becomes more of a habit and less of an exception,” she writes.
We do, too. And also, we kind of love the blog’s logo:
https://twitter.com/joshosbrn/status/734796532294295552