In the early days of The Conversation, the technical team published a series of blog posts that gave some insights into the challenges they faced. As any blogger knows, the major challenge of such an endeavour is to sustain the practice of writing and publishing.
On February 24, 2012 Gareth Townsend published the tenth post in the series.
Time passed.
Fast forward to September 2016, and the technical team has decided to resume the practice of sharing knowledge related to the development and maintenance of the platform that enables The Conversation to continue to grow. We have resurrected the early posts, one of which was written by Josh Bassett, who has recently rejoined the team!
From now on we hope to share more technical insights as we strive to maintain and improve a platform that has stood the test of time. After all, the initial Git commit for the main repository was made on October 29, 2010. Since its launch in Australia in April 2011, The Conversation has expanded to support a growing number of regions, currently five.
How has The Conversation’s technical platform changed since it was launched in 2011? In brief, it has evolved into a collection of seven Rails 4.2 and Sinatra applications. PostgreSQL 9.4, Node.js, CoffeeScript, Backbone.js and SCSS all play their part. More recently, as part of facilitating the launch of The Conversation France, we began using PhraseApp. But that’s another story.
James, Mark, Nick, Keith, Eleanor, Josh and James.