Digital Transformation in Publishing
Dennis was one of the leading publishers of magazines in the UK, before it was eventually acquired by Future Plc in 2021.
When I joined Dennis Publishing in 2019, we were at the very beginning of a digital transformation process, that would take the magazine websites such as The Week, AutoExpress or IT Pro from a monolithic Drupal system onto a more flexible, custom-built platform.
I was hired at Dennis primarily due to my experience single-handedly building a publishing platform for Raconteur, a much smaller publisher. The experience I have gained there would be valuable for the transformation of Dennis' platform.
When I joined
Prior to me joining, the team at Dennis had been working on their new platform for around 6 months. The tech stack was largely decided and it was now down to implementing a reusable platform that would eventually power 5+ very different content platforms.
The tech stack
The platform was a custom-built SSR (server-side rendered) React application with rudimentary state-management built using React Context and Apollo Client.