Digital News Publishing Platform

At DPG Media, I was the architect of the Selectives platform, a multi-million-user multi-brand multi-channel cloud-first digital news delivery platform. We built cool stuff with AWS Lambda, AWS Fargate, Akamai, Appium, Applitools, Gremlin and React Native. My role was very versatile and every week was completely different. I programmed critical parts of the platform, lead the transition to the cloud, collaborated with multiple teams on high-level architecture or low-level implementation details, supported customer care with case management, lead refinements, challenged other architects, fixed production issues and drived important architectural and strategic decisions. Moreover, I brought a group of 25 amazing people forward and helped them to navigate the trenches of a 500 men IT-organization.

I enjoyed working for DPG Media as I feel that in this day and age of fake news, extremism and general uncertainty, delivering credible and high-quality news to the people is of crucial importance.

Personal Achievements

Below a list of my accomplishments:

• Implemented a runtime experiment system for trying out new features on a live production environment.
• Increased backend (Java Spring Boot 2) performance by a factor of 10 through SonarQube static code analysis, Apache JMeter performance measurement and implementation of concurrency patterns, pre-warming, bulk-loading, KISS-CQRS, ECS Fargate tweaking and push-over-pull-algorithms (Google Guava; Caffeine).
• Doubled frontend performance through SpeedCurve, WebPageTest and Lighthouse performance measurement, experimenting with many JavaScript, CSS and Akamai CDN tweaks and pushing that-what-works.
• Saved over € 250.000 by optimizing use of serverless cloud technologies such as Amazon AWS Lambda, S3, SNS, SQS, MongoDB Atlas and Akamai) and deprecating over 50 vCPU’s of on-premise infrastructure.
• Improved time-to-market from weekly to hourly by optimizing the continuous delivery pipeline and culture using Gradle, Docker, Atlassian Bitbucket Pipelines, AWS ECS Fargate, AWS CodePipeline and AWS SAM.
• Improved fault tolerance by implementing Chaos Engineering practices & tooling including Gremlin, Spring Boot Admin and Hystrix Dashboard (an open source tool for Circuit Breaker monitoring).
• In addition to supporting my area (25 members), I collaborated with the other 10 architects of DPG Media to align on long-term strategic goals of DPG Media on the group-level (5.000 employees / USD 1,6 billion rev).
• Finally, I won the annual DPG Media hackathon. 😊

About the platform

As the Selectives platform is a joint effort between the Selectives teams and more than ten supporting teams, the platform is strong in both reach, conversion and yield:

• Fifteen million monthly visitors. Half a million app installs. Ten mobile applications. Five websites. Five brands. One platform.
• Dynamic grid-system for displaying attractive content on all screen-sizes
• Runtime A/B-testing on editorial content to maximize reach
• Intelligent temptation banners, conversion screens and content blockers to maximize conversion
• Pre-bid-based advertisement for just-in-time programmatic across multiple ad exchanges to maximize yield
• Personal recommendations powered by state-of-the-art AI/ML-techniques
• The whole DevOps shebang: fully automated functional and visual regression test suite, chaos hardened code, all infrastructure as code and daily deployments to production!

In addition to supporting development, I was the voice-of-architecture in the Product/People/Process triangle and collaborated with the other ten architects of DPG Media to align on long-term strategic goals of DPG Media on the group-level (5,000 employees).