BuzzFeed
Site Navigation Admin Tool
Background
Before this service was implemented, editors and content creators on BuzzFeed had to request a code change everytime they wanted to change a trending topic on the primary site header. However, analyses on traffic referred from the site header were done, and we found that there was a potential for increased clickthrough if the site header could be more dynamic, and stay up to date with the zeitgeist. However, the code-change workflow involved with changing these topics was too slow, and wasted precious engineering time.
Solution
I built a self-service curation tool for content editors to change these topics on the site header, completely ad-hoc on any international homepage, using AWS S3, Node, and React. I implemented local caching and polling mechanisms to reduce operational cost & API usage, created a slackbot reliant on distributed messaging architecture, and developed a REST API to handle configuration update & storage logic. This tool is still currently being used to configure trending topics on all versions of BuzzFeed's home and feed pages.