media companies as tech companies – is that a joke? mail online flaunts cash assets

https://twitter.com/harryrobbins/status/751362294639104000

Harry was referring to this

This #FullStackCon make sure to check out sponsor's @MailOnline booth & all the fun things they have in store! pic.twitter.com/wqjOO0fYR4

— Skills Matter (@skillsmatter) July 7, 2016

That’s right folks. Mail Online – world’s leading exponent of the sidebar of shame, and so biggest news site worldwide, is now sponsoring Javascript conferences. Everyone is hiring web talent- the war for talent is increasingly fierce. So one of the companies that brought us the Brexit is now sponsoring local tech events. Digital is not something you can outsource if you want to be successful. I wrote earlier this week about the value of getting involved in events, and sponsorship is one of the ways to do that.

I gave a keynote earlier this week at New Relic’s Future Stack conference and the speaker before me represented The Sun (a WordPress shop).

Daily Mail parent company DGMT is doing some really interesting B2B stuff with serverless.

The New York Times has been at the forefront of API-driven news operations, and has a great tech blog, Open. Yesterday on stage at Amazon Web Summit CTO Werner Vogels announced that the Guardian is going All In on AWS Cloud services. I have written about the Guardian tech team before – suffice to say the organisation has been a magnet for UK tech talent and has done some great work, notably investing in data-driven journalism and story-telling.

The Mail Online’s data approach is rather more oriented to clicks, flesh tones and lowest common denominator. It also looks like a dumpster fire. But for developers that want to work in high scale environments? The Mail is one. I assume we’ll see it sponsor more Node conferences.