# BBC Building the best BBC products, platforms and services for audiences in the UK and around the world - Medium This is one page of public article previews, not the complete archive. Follow Next page to continue. Summaries are not the original full articles. ## Lessons on Tech Leadership: Autonomy, Collective Decision-Making, and Shared Goals DevFeed: [Lessons on Tech Leadership: Autonomy, Collective Decision-Making, and Shared Goals]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Polly McEldowney Published: 2024-02-21T12:15:40Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [BBC]() Topics: [Tech Lead](), [engineering-culture](), [Software Engineering]() Tags: [decision-making](), [leadership](), [management](), [management-and-leadership](), [software-engineering](), [team](), [tech-lead](), [tech-leadership](), [technology]() ### AI overview A BBC Sounds Software Engineering Team Lead reflects on tech leadership, arguing that leaders should support autonomy instead of micromanaging, involve the team in decisions, and build shared goals collaboratively. ### Source excerpt I have now been a Software Engineering Team Lead on the BBC Sounds mobile apps team for 4 years. So what have I learned from this once-daunting, now-familiar role? Leadership does not mean telling people what to do.Mother Goose is holding back here and letting the baby gosling stride confidently ahead Before working at the BBC, I thought a tech lead's job was to think of some work to do and command others to do it. It was quite a damaging misconception, because it stopped me considering moving up from a software engineer into management. I don't like telling people what to do. This is because I also don't like being told what to do. As the youngest of four siblings, I have perhaps been overexposed to being bossed around. If someone ever talks to me in the imperative, I have an immediate, instinctive visceral response which vastly reduces the likelihood of my compliance with the request. I suspect I am not unique in this. So I never wanted to be That Guy, who makes other people feel like that. But the excellent news is -- it turns out you don't need to be! The great thing is, grown up people are entirely capable of managing their own workloads. Assigning people specific tasks can often feel like micromanagement to them. If it is clear what tasks need to be done, people will prioritise the tasks into their own work streams and pick them up when they have capacity to do so. Collective decision making is good Another thing I used to think leaders had to do, was go and make up bold, dazzling strategies all by themselves and then tell everyone about their vision. Dictatorially make a swathe of tickets and dump them onto the board, whilst loudly trumpeting about their own self-worth in some public channel. In real life this will get you a lot of side-eye of course. I vastly prefer the approach of talking through what needs to be done with the team and making sure everyone understands why it is important. We can work together to outline the high level goals and then discuss ## BBC establishes a Delivery Profession for agile delivery practitioners DevFeed: [BBC establishes a Delivery Profession for agile delivery practitioners]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Sara Bowley Published: 2022-10-14T13:18:49Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [BBC]() Topics: [Agile](), [Self-organizing Team]() Tags: [agile](), [agile-delivery](), [bbc](), [community](), [delivery-management](), [job](), [leadership](), [product-development](), [team]() ### AI overview The BBC has created a dedicated Delivery Profession for agile delivery practitioners, including a career path framework, new roles and job descriptions. The article also describes its delivery-management vision and recruitment of Delivery Managers. ### Source excerpt At the start of the year I took up a job as Head of Delivery for BBC Product Group as part of a new cross discipline leadership team led by our CPO Storm Fagan. It's my job to help the BBC get the most out of modern digital agile ways of working. Bringing more product thinking to how we work by focussing on outcomes and putting user needs at the heart of what we do. Much of my role is helping teams collaborate effectively together at scale. Product Group is over 100 teams and we work with many more teams in editorial, marketing and across the BBC. We are responsible for products like iPlayer, Sounds, Bitesize, BBC News and Sport. We've got huge ambitions at the BBC to deliver more value to users through our digital products and services by taking a more user led iterative approach to what we do. Creating our Delivery Profession Over the last few months one of my priorities as Head of Delivery has been to create and build a new Delivery Profession at the BBC for agile delivery practitioners. I'm thrilled that this work is now complete and we have a dedicated Delivery Profession with a new career path framework, new roles and new job descriptions at the BBC. When designing what we needed I was keen we also introduced an individual contributor track so that people could develop their careers here by deepening their skill and practice as well as through the traditional line management route. We are building a thriving Community of Practice who meet weekly to network, share and learn together. More on that to come! Our Vision We recently wrote down our vision for Delivery Management at the BBC and we think this encapsulates pretty well who we are and what we're here to to do: "We inspire ourselves and our teams to raise the standard of agile collaborative delivery at the BBC.We help make teams more effective and maximise their impact so we deliver value for users often, iteratively and repeatedly.We focus on outcomes and making it happen."We're looking for Delivery Manag ## UK Bank Holidays with Pandas on Jupyter DevFeed: [UK Bank Holidays with Pandas on Jupyter]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Simone Spaccarotella Published: 2022-09-21T17:22:24Z Content type: tutorial Language: en Sources: [BBC]() Topics: [pandas](), [Jupyter Notebook](), [JSON](), [Python](), [Data Science](), [data]() Tags: [coding](), [data-science](), [json](), [jupyter-notebook](), [kaggle](), [pandas](), [python]() ### AI overview A hands-on tutorial about using Pandas in a Jupyter Notebook to retrieve UK bank holiday data in JSON format and prepare it for analysis in a DataFrame. The article also describes the author's self-study practice in Python, data science, and machine learning. ### Source excerpt How I learned to manipulate JSON data with Pandas on a Jupyter Notebook and deconstruct it to a DataFrame ready for queries.Image by author created from Jupiter photo by NASA and Pandas photo by Pascal Müller on UnsplashA bit of context first I started a self-study path to learn the theoretical fundamentals of Data Science and Machine Learning. I have also been playing with Python ever since, with coding exercises during the "Friday 10% time" here at the BBC and on my own time when I have some to spare. I created this playground repository to refresh my Pythonic knowledge that was buried deep inside the funny head of mine. This repo is a mix of material and exercises to keep my Python coding skills sharp. GitHub - simonespa/python-playground: A playground repo for Python I also created a specific playground focused on Data Science and Machine learning. In this playground I practice with libraries such as NumPy, Pandas, Scikit-Learn, TensorFlow (et. all) with a Jupyter Notebook. It also contains notes and summaries of what I learn in forms of README or notebooks. GitHub - simonespa/machine-learning-playground: A playground to practice machine learning, data modelling and visualisation Nothing fancy or ground-breaking, just a couple of playground repos for me to practice and learn at my own pace. The 10% time at the BBC This happens every other Friday and it is about learning. Engineers use this time to learn new technologies and/or languages, discover new approaches and techniques. We can organise the day as we want. It could be a self-paced learning session (reading, watching tutorials, etc.), a day of study for an apprenticeship or a university degree etc., an actual hands-on prototyping session to work on a long-running personal project, or a group collaboration with other like-minded people. There is no limitation to how we plan our day, as long as we keep in mind the end goal. In simple terms, satisfy our own curiosity and creativity by strengthening our technic ## Optimising BBC Online's Code Splitting Strategy DevFeed: [Optimising BBC Online's Code Splitting Strategy]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Matt Williams Published: 2022-05-30T15:21:09Z Content type: article Language: en Sources: [BBC]() Topics: [JavaScript](), [Code](), [Website](), [modern web development]() Tags: [code](), [code-splitting](), [frameworks](), [javascript](), [performance](), [react](), [webpack](), [website]() ### AI overview This article explains BBC Online's code-splitting strategy for a large JavaScript website. It describes how splitting code into separate files can support parallel downloads and limit page-specific code to the pages that need it, while noting that excessive fragmentation can cause problems. The article says BBC Online's Presentation Layer had outgrown its existing strategy and introduces its use of shared core bundles. ### Source excerpt Photo by Sen on Unsplash Modern JavaScript websites are the result of complex code bases, and the code base which powers BBC Online is no exception. There are many dependencies and frameworks that we rely upon in order to provide the functionality that our end-users expect, as well as code written in-house to cater to the needs of our website and its users; being able to click a button to follow a topic, search for content and play videos all require JavaScript code to be run by the browser. For a website as large and with as many seemingly disparate needs as the BBC's various pages, the amount of code required can grow exponentially. The code needed to render a news article - with images, social media embeds, videos and onward journeys - has only small elements of commonality with the code required to power complex sports data tables - with team badges, functionality to hide or show columns based on the screen width of the user's device, display a team's form, or provide live in-page updates for events that are happening live. As such, it has long been the practice of the JavaScript community to implement code splitting. Rather than providing all of our JavaScript and dependencies into a single large file to be downloaded by the user, we can split our code into separate files. This can provide advantages on two fronts; downloading multiple smaller files can be more efficient when devices can start those downloads in parallel (though going too far and downloading too many small files can cause problems itself!), and the way that we choose to split our files can mean that some only need to be downloaded on certain pages. It is this second benefit which can be most powerful; if you have a large piece of code on your site that is only needed for a single page, then forcing users to download that code on every page is wasteful, and can cause problems for users who might have limits on the amount of data they can download on their network. We have been using code splitti ## BBC Online -- A year with serverless DevFeed: [BBC Online -- A year with serverless]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Johnathan Ishmael Published: 2022-03-30T07:43:48Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [BBC]() Topics: [Serverless](), [Development](), [Caching](), [React Native]() Tags: [aws](), [aws-lambda](), [caching](), [cloud](), [edge](), [engineering](), [platform](), [render](), [serverless]() ### AI overview The BBC reflects on a year of moving its online products from older technology platforms to the shared WebCore serverless platform. About 30% of the migration is complete, and the article reports no operational incidents caused by the underlying technology during the period. It also describes work to support personalised pages, including a BBC homepage that renders and reaches audiences in around 500ms while invoking about 30 functions. ### Source excerpt BBC Online -- A year with serverlessIts been a little over a year since I published my last two blog posts, in which I outlined the process we went through to choose the technology for BBC online and the steps we took to optimise serverless for our use. Recently my colleague Graeme has published a blog post on the organisational challenges we've faced in delivering this project.The BBC's Office in MediaCity, Salford -- one of many bases that the BBC's Software Engineering teams are located. In this post I reflect on our progress so far, and some of the interesting challenges we are facing while building the BBC's critical digital services. If you're a technology builder, interested in the biggest of challenges, we're always looking for people like you to join our adventure. Throughout the last twelve months our engineering teams have been reimagining and innovating on our products. In doing so they have moved from our older technology platforms on to our new shared serverless platform called 'WebCore'. We're about 30% of our way through moving to this new platform. Despite this, the benefits of using a serverless platform are starting to show. Pages on WebCore (left), pages under development (middle) and pages we're going to start development on (right). Block size represents number of page views across a typical month. During this time we've not had any operational incidents (lack of audience service, or inability to update our pages) caused by the underlying technology. This isn't by luck, serverless has handled many of the performance and operational challenges for us, letting us focus on other parts of our platform resulting in a higher quality platform that is more dependable WebCore highlights for February 2022. Using serverless takes away the need to spend time engineering the fundamentals of your platform, instead allowing you to focus on the value you deliver to your customers. So what have we been doing with that time? Personalisation / Relevancy The BBC ach ## How the BBC Reorganized for Its WebCore Website Initiative DevFeed: [How the BBC Reorganized for Its WebCore Website Initiative]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Graeme Lindsay Published: 2022-03-07T11:18:47Z Content type: article Language: en Sources: [BBC]() Topics: [Website](), [Cloud](), [Serverless](), [Development](), [User Experience]() Tags: [cloud](), [conways-law](), [engineering](), [platform-engineering](), [refactor](), [reorganization](), [serverless](), [team-topologies](), [user-experience]() ### AI overview The BBC describes how its WebCore initiative to reimagine BBC Online required organizational changes alongside technical work. The article discusses the history of separate digital-service teams, duplicated capabilities and maintenance costs, and the role of shared platforms and team interactions in creating a single website strategy. ### Source excerpt Changing the organisation -- to build the technology right.In earlier blog posts, we explored how we moved BBC online to the cloud. This was part of a wider initiative called WebCore, which used a range of serverless technologies to reimagine the BBC website. There were technical challenges we faced integrating WebCore with our architecture, but this initiative has been as much a refactor of our organisation, with profound implications on the people within it. In this blog post, rather than focus just on the technical challenges, I want to share: Some of the organisational history that led to WebCore How we went about re-organising for success How we viewed the team topologies and interaction modes between teams How we view the role of the platform (and the Core teams who build it) in enabling many teams to interact with one another First -- some history... The BBC website is made up of several digital services, including iPlayer, Sounds, News and Sport. Each is a major service in its own right -- with millions of visits every week -- and they have grown independently of one another over several years. This was reflected in the way the organisation was shaped -- with separate departments owning each digital service. This shape meant each individual product achieved its own aims well, but it also meant the user experience across multiple services wasn't as seamless and consistent as it could have been. There were mismatched technologies and duplication between the services. Lots of features, despite being conceptually similar, were implemented multiple times -- with the total cost of maintenance also paid multiple times. Cross-cutting capabilities -- e.g., personalisation and analytics -- were major tasks that each product development team had to tackle themselves. WebCore is part of a strategy to re-imagine BBC Online and create a single website for all the digital services. Standardising onto a single technology set, building shared 'horizontal' capabilities, and sharing com ## Why BBC Engineering aims to be recognized as a leading product and technology organization DevFeed: [Why BBC Engineering aims to be recognized as a leading product and technology organization]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: David Andrade Published: 2022-02-23T15:28:25Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [BBC]() Topics: [Software Engineering](), [Development](), [Streaming](), [cloud-infrastructure](), [engineering-culture]() Tags: [bbc](), [cloud](), [engineering](), [product](), [products](), [software-development](), [software-engineering](), [streaming](), [technology]() ### AI overview The article presents the BBC's case for being regarded as a leading engineering organization. It describes the BBC as a product and technology company operating widely used digital products, video and audio streaming services, multilingual content, and cloud-based services, while emphasizing the complexity of its microservices estate and its public-service mission. ### Source excerpt That's a bold statement I know, but let me explain exactly why I believe this is true, and why I'm so passionate about it. The BBC which is celebrating its centenary this year is like no other organisation in the world. Our job is simple, to ensure that it remains just as relevant in the future as it has been in the past. More specifically in software engineering, our vision is for the BBC to be as renowned for its engineering as it is for its content. For that, we have to further develop the idea of the BBC as a product and technology company. Imagine working in a team that develops and runs digital products that are used by millions of users every day. A team that is not only responsible for some of the biggest websites in the world but on top of that has one of the pioneering and most advanced video streaming services there is, available on hundreds of different devices, alongside an audio streaming service used by millions on a weekly basis. But that's not it, there are more services that are truly positioned to do good in the world like helping parents, teachers and kids get all the fun and information they need. Digital products which deliver unbiased news across the world, which join up communities across the UK, and which appear in multiple different languages for audiences at home and abroad. Digital products that are equally used to help you understand what's happening globally, the latest from the world of sport, to find out the weather outside your front door, and to provide a recipe for you to make this evening. That's what we do. That's our BBC.BBC New Broadcasting House -- London I won't lie to you, this is quite a complex operation but with our mission to inform, educate and entertain, we wouldn't have it any other way. We pride ourselves in our public service mission: delivering value to all audiences. The truth is that in the middle of this complexity there is huge opportunity and we continuously strive to improve, not only the quality of our audien ## My First 30 days as a Product Manager at the BBC DevFeed: [My First 30 days as a Product Manager at the BBC]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Louise Ankers Published: 2022-02-15T22:31:11Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [BBC]() Topics: [Product Management](), [Agile](), [Self-organizing Team](), [User experience (UX)](), [Testing]() Tags: [agile](), [apps](), [bbc](), [data](), [distributed](), [experimentation](), [exploration](), [management](), [new-starter](), [product](), [product-management](), [software-development](), [teamwork](), [testing](), [ux]() ### AI overview A Senior Product Manager describes her first 30 days at the BBC, including the organization's product-management culture, roadmap practices, agile teamwork, distributed work, and support from specialists in UX, data, experimentation, and testing. ### Source excerpt Much like Sir David Attenborough I was not successful on my first application to the BBC , however I was not dissuaded and applied again! Fortunately, I was successful last year and have joined the BBC as Senior Product Manager -- Children's Apps. CBeebies Playtime Island app icon On my first day all the team were very welcoming and friendly, and have explained (and continue to explain!) every BBC acronym very patiently. As a new Product person, it's often intimidating to join a new organisation, not to mention within a new domain. As I have joined during the COVID-19 Omicron wave, everyone is working from home. I am keen to meet the team in person as much as possible -- though we are quite geographically distributed so we will have to plan quite carefully. Product On an organisational level -- the first thing that was clear to me was that the BBC Product Culture follows the principles and values from good Product Management practice such as that advocated by product experts such as Roman Pilcher or Melissa Perri. Having read many books and blogs over the years about say -- having a roadmap that indicates what you are working on now, next and later to offer transparency to stakeholders rather than a delivery plan -- has always been something I've desired to do, and here it is being used in practice! Agile Values Another thing I noticed was the enthusiasm for teamwork and team values -- as one of the principles of the Agile Manifesto that I am passionate about "The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams" -- again in many organisations this may start as an ambition but be waylaid by older management practices and a blindness to what is a creative process. My own reaction to this approach is that I feel there is the right focus on thinking about why we are building, and even if we should be building -- this makes me feel that people think the same way that I do, and that experimentation and exploration in the problem and discovery space ## BBC Hack Week DevFeed: [BBC Hack Week]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: David Buckhurst Published: 2022-02-10T21:20:33Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [BBC]() Topics: [AdventureX 2025](), [Software Engineering](), [Development](), [DevOps]() Tags: [bbc](), [collaboration](), [feature](), [hackathon](), [hackathons](), [hacking](), [ideation](), [innovation](), [prototype](), [software-development](), [team]() ### AI overview The article discusses the BBC's annual end-of-year hack week, explaining how hackathons support ideation, innovation, collaboration, and rapid prototype development. It also shares practical guidance for organizing large hackathon events, including allowing teams to self-organize and defining goals in advance. ### Source excerpt Hackathons, innovation days, codefests -- whatever you call them -- have been a feature of the tech industry for the last 20 years, and one of the most powerful ideation tools at our disposal. The premise is simple, given a theme or problem space, the hackathon participants must self-organise into teams to explore ideas, write some code, and deliver a working prototype or demo in a ridiculously short period of time. In my time at the BBC I've taken part in many different flavours of hack -- from large multi-department events, collaborations with other organisations, 24-hour hacks, week long hacks ... no two are ever the same. It's also been my privilege to organise many of these events -- in particular our annual end-of-year hack week. The tradition of the end-of-year hack predates my 9 years at the BBC. It's origins are back in our pre-devops days, where our operations team managed our live systems for us, and the run up to Christmas was accompanied by a strict change freeze that brought all development to a crawl. Using this downtime for hacks and ideation was a great change of pace and a chance to connect with colleagues. The days of strict change freezes are long gone, but the end-of-year hack has just grown and grown over the years, and has firmly established itself as a fixture of software engineering at the BBC. Our most recent hack was the biggest ever, a week-long event in the middle of December, bringing together all our development teams. Everyone was invited to participate; Omicron had just cast a new shadow of uncertainty, and forced us all back into Zoom again. A week focused on innovation and collaboration was very much the distraction we needed. If you ever have the good fortune to organise an event of this size (we had 68 teams and nearly enough participants to smash the 500-person Zoom limit), there are some things we've learnt over the years to make these events the success... Allow teams to self-organise Resist the urge to over-manage the hack. Teams ten