Which? is a powerful brand in the UK, combining highly trusted product reviews with consumer advice and campaigning.

Their web site attracts millions of visits each month and helps drive their large subscription base. The project was a responsive rebuild of the Home Entertainment Reviews segment, beginning with TVs.

TV reviews are presented with high-impact use of 3D rotating images overlayed with tech highlights and the all-important Which? score and review breakdown. Review sections were loaded with pushstate for speed. We integrated with other review APIs such as Reevoo and Pluck.

My biggest areas of learning included BDD with Cucumber / Capybara, a bit of a revelation for me. Also responsive / mobile techniques; in hindsight this project should have used a fully mobile-first development approach. We tested Javascript at the behavioural rather than low level and used SASS / BEM / OOCSS to create predictable, re-usable styling patterns.

Working with Rails for the first time and understanding more of the web stack was very empowering; when this contract ended I immediately sought out another using Rails. It has its weaknesses - the Asset Pipeline is a bit too tightly integrated with the front end for comfort - but the speed and ease that you can piece together and debug an app will be a revelation to any front end dev.