The New York Times Backend

Whilst trawling through the code employed by The New York Times (NYT) in the delivery of their web content, I found links to a number of interesting providers.

I checked out the job page of NYT out of personal interest to see whether more clues of the backend systems they build and use.

I found one open role, Software Engineer, CMS Team, which provided an overview of the technical core powering the The New York Times.

Java and Ruby are the two main languages used in NYT's web development.

Java, PHP, Ruby and Visual Basic (.NET and desktop/server) are all examples of compute-intensive languages compared to C derivatives (C C++, Objective C, C#, etc.), Go, JavaScript and Swift which are far more efficiently designed and refined.

Java is my least favourite language due to its inefficiency and the company behind Java, Oracle

NYT uses React which is a relief given how disastrously inefficient the rest of their web stack is; however, a customised/cutdown implementation of React would be even more efficient.

There is a real tangible benefit for reviewing the speed at which the website loads and tracking customer loading time via a JavaScript module logging start time and the time of loading a specific module which will have the first time stamp subtracted from it to provide the loading duration.

With this information, a developer can see where content and packages are causing bottlenecks and work to create solutions to alleviate the bottlenecks within the website delivery.

Photo by Zach Miles / Unsplash

The New York Times is the best paper with the best poltical information

I would like to see it take its web development to the next level

I would like to see more customised content in big stories - the BBC has been doing it so why shouldn't NYT?

Open NYT is Interesting