Kenmore Connect

A couple months ago, I was borrowed out to the Ruby team here at Sears to help them with the Kenmore Connect project; a project that was, at that point, running a bit behind and needed a bit of help.  I’ve had some experience with Rails in the past, and I didn’t have a whole lot on my plate at the time, so I was chosen as the person that could probably help the most.  My role was primarily front-end, dealing with heavily responsive HAML/SCSS and a whole lot of jQuery, but I did do some work with rails – including building some device-based helpers that would help determine what environments are being used on page-load.

I am not terribly proficient with Rails, as I haven’t had much of a chance to work with it in any real projects; but it is projects like this that make me want to pick it up and run with it, as it is a very fun language to work with.

The coolest bits of this project

There were a few firsts for me in this project.  The coolest by far was probably the responsiveness of the site.  We had to create everything while keeping a responsive design in mind – that is, always thinking about the desktop view, tablet view, and mobile view.  This kept us on our toes resulted in an amazingly usable site, no matter the device you are using it on.  Also, I’ve never worked with HAML/SCSS, and this project opened me up to the amazing possibilities of programatic CSS.  it really seems like a huge piece of the CSS engine that is just missing.  Just the ability to set and use variables was a godsend, and really made it incredibly powerful.

Kenmore was an awesome client, and this was an awesome project.  It really makes me look forward to rails work in the future, since the language is incredibly fun to write and work with.

Happy coding!