Building Series for web
medium haaaaack week 2018 coming in hot
The first week of January this year Engineering was left to its own devices for the time honored tradition of following your own heart, and developing features for Medium that personally interest you — hackweek!.
This year Emma Zhou, Herzog and I with our powers combined are so excited to present to you
We launched Series on the Medium mobile apps last year as an immersive experience that that integrated gorgeous transitions, video, and gifs. I love writing them since they feel way more casual, and it’s much easier to control the pacing of a story + develop narratives over time.
We wanted to maintain that same level of visual polish when porting them over to desktop web. Fortunately our amazing Infrastructure team has been working on a new React stack we got to try out for hackweek that made managing the user states + animations infinitely easier.
…Unfortunately we did not hack together support for embedding series into the home page of our engineering blog so here we are.
I’ve written up a riveting behind the scenes exclusive peek at this triumph of engineering in series form, please check it out ✨ and let us know what you think!
