Having built NewsNow into the #1 independent news discovery platform in the UK, founder and CEO/CTO Struan Bartlett might rest on his laurels 25 years on. Instead, Bartlett’s team continues to pursue the kind of technological innovations that have helped the company retain its leading position amidst ferocious competition.
Establishing an in-house R&D arm called NewsNow Labs, Bartlett launched Dockside in December 2021. It’s a dev and staging environment in one that comes with powerful proof-of-concept: NewsNow’s teams have been using the tool for years, with one dev describing the versatile Dockside as “ideal for remote working.”
Indeed, Dockside is “used in production for all aspects of web application and back-end development and staging (including acceptance testing) of the websites newsnow.co.uk and newsnow.com.”
In an intro on Medium, Bartlett reveals that Dockside has been “integral to the operation of the firm’s dev and product teams” and describes the benefits of the cleverly named Dockside — the italics come from “integrated development environments” (IDEs) — like this:
“By provisioning a development container (or devtainer for short) for every task, fork or branch, Dockside allows collaborative software and product development teams to take lean and iterative development and testing to a highly parallelised extreme.” Devtainer is an original NewsLabs coinage.
There is a Dockside demo to test here.
