The site we spent the later part of December working on is now in public beta. HitFix is not the kind of site Noah and I imagined ourselves working on when we got started; it’s a site about entertainment and popular culture with commentary by industry insiders. But they needed more bodies who knew Rails as they pushed to launch, and their designer knew us from his previous job, so we got a call.
We can’t take credit for any individual aspects of the HitFix site; what we did was work as a team with HitFix’s internal Rails developer, Elliott Blatt, to make the site Beta-ready. This meant taking Photoshop demos and making fully-functional pages from them, working at all levels of the Rails stack. (We’ve been joking that our work on this site was in defiance of Brooks’s Law.)
Elliott has been a thrill to work with, having more experience with Rails than either of us, and we were surprised to find him learning from us almost as much as we were learning from him. What we’ve learned from this site is significant as well; it’s impossible to detail all the small conventions we’ve learned from Elliott, but one big example was learning HAML and its CSS sister, SASS.
It has also been an experiment in decentralized development, as some of the HitFix team is in California, Elliott is in Cambridge, and we’re in Amherst.
We’re still in active development with HitFix, but as I mentioned before, the beta is up, so if you’d like to take a look, you may find it interesting.
