How Condé Nast Used Node.js to Unify Brands and Create Customer Faith

Condé Nast is an iconic umbrella company for twenty of the world’s most popular media brands, including Wired, Vogue, and The New Yorker. In 2012, the Condé Nast’s Technology team was faced with a challenge: the different brands were using different systems, tech stacks, and programming languages, a situation that strained the IT teams, both culturally and technically.

Back then, like many organizations, Condé Nast operated on the legacy model: frontend and backend engineers, languages and stacks. Java was used on the backend and JavaScript, HTML, CSS on the frontend. The mix led to both a cultural disconnect between different groups and between members of any given team. Even with a typical team comprised of only five people, reconciling differences bordered on impossible.

The team needed a new solution and eventually came across Node.js. We recently sat down with a few members of the Condé Nast IT team to hear more about why they chose Node.js, how they approached adopting Node.js, and the challenges that they faced along the way. Read more of their insights from the full case study here.