From a software developer’s perspective, it’s not just about moving divs left or right but about all the complicated machinery and processes in the background. This area is both fascinating and challenging and creates great opportunities for developers to learn and grow. And, with the Scandinavian approach to advertising that is unintrusive and client focused, it’s fun to work in this field.
As part of the Ad Engineering unit, Inventory’s mission is to ship the next generation of advertising products, which are not only a way to monetise newspapers’ content but also create added value for users. We implement and innovate all advertising products on the shared platforms for the biggest newspapers in Scandinavia. We work with VG, Aftenposten, Bergens Tidende, Stavanger Aftenblad, e24, SvD, Aftonbladet, and others.
Every day we are trying to improve our ad products by experimenting and innovating to deliver even better and more engaging ad inventory.
The Products
We develop, support, and maintain many different types of ads:
- display – A regular banner that comes in many shapes and sizes, e.g., Panorama, L-format, Takeover, Fullscreen Scroll, etc.,
- video – Most commonly known as Instream, i.e., video ads such as Preroll, Midroll, Postroll, etc.,
- content Display – An ad that integrates into the site; it can use the site style to mimic the behaviour (look and feel) of editorial content,
- native – A sponsored teaser or article that integrates onto the site as regular content; it is most commonly published via editorial tools, not the ad server…
…and more.
We provide a variety of tools to Brand Studios and deliver common blocks (like an ad transparency tool) that are used in all Schibsted products.
We are also the creators of Content Studio – a front tool for creating and publishing Content Marketing Teasers running through the CMS.
The Team
Inventory employs seven full stack developers and an engineering manager. Almost the entire development team is located in Cracow (six developers in Cracow, one in Sweden).
But that’s not the whole team! In Inventory, developers work closely with project managers, and both PMs and UX designers are true members of the team. We see each other every day at meetings and on casual online coffee chats. We are really well aligned, and we like to spend time together.
Among developers, we like to discuss code and share our knowledge and experience. We conduct internal knowledge sharing and prepare talks presented outside the team.
Technological stack
We code in JavaScript. Most of the codebase uses Typescript. On a daily basis, we work in React, Node.js (Express, Koa). We like to use modern solutions and we strive for code quality – we use tools such as Babel, Webpack, ESLint, Prettier, Husky, and many more. We use Travis CI for CI & CD; we host our projects and store the data on AWS. On the backend, we use relational databases (PostgreSQL). GitHub Enterprise is our version control system, and we use ZenHub as an issue tracker.