R29 Has a *NEW* Responsive Homepage

This article was originally published on May 25th, 2016

This week our team launched a long overdue responsive homepage design. This is a huge deal for us not only because the homepage acts as the front-door to our site and our brand but also because it kicks off our plans to transition all Refinery29 pages (categories, articles, slideshows, etc.) to responsive designs. And not only is it beautiful in all window sizes, the new homepage leverages some brand new end-to-end architecture… so *two snaps* for the team that got this launched.

We asked this group of talented people to tell us one thing they found challenging, enjoyed or learned from this project. Here’s what they had to say…

• Claudia Sosa, QA Engineer: “The back-end architecture was completely rebuilt for the homepage which meant lots of dependencies for integration testing. Many times we completed testing only on the front-end or only on the back-end. It was very important to keep a tab on the big areas of functionalities that we would have to revisit later for extensive end-to-end testing. Regardless of the many challenges we faced, this will only help us improve key areas during our planning process, when transitioning the remainder of the site over. Overall, a great team to work with and a project that I learned a lot from!”
• Carlo Francisco, Senior Software Engineer: “On the front-end side, we decided to build using newer, up-and-coming technologies like React and Redux. The biggest lesson I took away from working within these libraries is that many best practices simply haven’t been figured out yet, and that there’s a huge opportunity for us to make our own case regarding what those best practices should be. And that feels incredibly empowering — but it’s also highly dependent on our sharing what we’ve learned to the wider open-source community.”
• Chris Sloop, Senior Software Engineer: “Building this project from the ground up with React and Redux has given me a renewed appreciation for purely functional programming patterns, which have allowed us to rapidly prototype and iterate upon our front-end as painlessly as possible. In particular, declaratively composing our view layer has drastically reduced the complexity of our data flow and UI. Our new tooling and infrastructure will allow us to quickly develop elegant, flexible, and performant interfaces that are built to last.”
• Emily Hengemihle, Product Manager: “This project was absolutely a labor of love. Every part of the homepage, from our editor’s tools to the responsive UX to the end-to-end architecture, is new, new, NEW! It’s very exciting to be part of the kick-off team that introduces our faster, more scalable platform to the world. Being the first doesn’t come without it’s challenges including time estimations, architectural decisions across the stack, and the unknowns of new technologies. In the end, pushing through all the challenges is absolutely worth the pay off — bringing refinery29.com into the future!”
• Ryan Catlin, Platform Engineer: “The data fueling the homepage leverages two new APIs developed with strict standards and rigorous testing. It all payed off to witness the quick response times and error-free logs upon launch. The whole project involved the team tackling a lot of new problems. Everyone eagerly jumped in to problem solve and learn new skills.”
• Jingjing Dong, Platform Engineer: “As part of the backend work for this project we used many tools in new ways — Doctrine, Redis, Solr, Foundry, list goes on. It was a great learning experience and it’s great that it’s all paid off. I’m sure this will be the first of many successes for the whole team.”
• Ming Hou, Platform Engineer: “I learned Zeppelin thanks to my team. To keep it short and sweet, wonderful people. wonderful times.”
• Nicole Pikulin, Senior UX Designer: “Since we were spending so much time building out this new homepage, we were determined to design a system that is scalable enough to last. Our system allows us to add new card types and tweak designs easily and fast!”
• James Cabrera, Interface Designer: “There is more than meets the eye. There is a lot going on behind the scenes of this update that deserves more attention. This will allow us to be more flexible and deliver an extremely versatile and adaptable content experience from here on out. The team worked hard from the ground up to implement this beautiful new system.”
• Josip Herceg, Software Engineer: “On the Dash side, our job was to build a tool for creating flexible page layouts. A combination of a different customized modules that would be made of a various combinations of custom options was a challenge for the dash team (me and Jen). There were many different challenges and problems to solve during the development process. In that process we were using the existing React components form Dash, but also we had to start writing our own components. I liked that approach. I hope I’ll continue working with React in the future, and maybe to add some improvements in the existing dash code. I also had a chance to work directly with Zeppelin team. All in all: Great project, great team!”
• Jen Calloway, Software Engineer: “Connecting individuals and teams who have not worked together before can be challenging, especially on a very large project. I didn’t really think of team building as being *that* important before, but now I really see why it’s so valuable.”
• Jake McGraw, Director of Engineering: “Transition to a service oriented architecture from monolithic codebase should bake in a lot of time for integration and testing. Previously, we had a single codebase for the homepage, the new homepage is now powered by four codebases. Every integration should bake in an additional round of testing.”
• Matt Anderson, DevOps Engineer: “Developing new workflows can be challenging, even when things are going well the newest pieces are always the most suspect. It was really nice however to be able to test this new stack in a multi-server environment prior to pushing it to production and we did find several interesting bugs that way.”