I really like the idea of a developer exchange - does anyone know of other places that have done this?
The thing to keep in mind is that accepting non team members and getting them meaningful work to do was already part of Etsy's culture. New engineers would bootcamp with a team for a couple of weeks when they joined. So the culture was already set up for this - managers and team members knew what to expect from a teammate who may not be a domain expert.
I think the way to start a program like this is to start with an internal bootcamping type program and learn and make mistakes through that.
It's on pause given the current situation, but it was very informative!
(From somebody on the outside with absolutely no idea.)
It's used for all of our content, but specifically what you're referring to are liveblogs, where a journalist can write short content and append it to the existing article.
Here's an example of such an article https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/apr/23/coronavir...
The Grid is a good example of what's been produced in house, and it's actually open source (and I think being used by the BBC?) https://github.com/guardian/grid
Both the Guardian and the BBC have separate iOS and Android teams, I'm part of the server side team. We touched about how to organise the teams, how to handle request from editorial, how to test and release the app etc.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/corona-si...
That being said, I’d love to see people rotate between application and service teams. Some applications and services are years ahead of others in terms of their maturity and scaling problems/solutions, so there’s a lot of tacit knowledge to be spread. We have a monorepo so self-starters can read code and commit messages, but a formal program would really help accelerate and democratize the knowledge spreading.