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Virginmediashorts.com is the site for Virgin Media’s annual short film competition which has been running for a few years now and supports a vibrant community around the creation, consumption and review of independent short films.
A former colleague of mine was working at Airlock on the Symphony backend of the site when the client realised they needed an interface developer to carry on the work of their full-time developer, who was on paternity leave.
I inherited over 20 half-finished unindented and uncommented templates, a voluminous style sheet, 33 Photoshop files, a list of pages to be built, and seven days to get it done. Whilst this might sound like a tall order, it was made more challenging when I realised that the existing code didn’t validate (making it much harder to debug) and didn’t support IE6.
It was a bit of a slog, but with voracious testing and IE6 bugfixing (assisted by other developers over the weekend), the project was delivered on time.
This project was the first time in quite a while that I’d had to deliver a project based on another person’s code. Most interface developers who are any good tend to have a style, or approach, that runs through their code and ensures that it works in the way they intended. Unfortunately, due to the cascading nature of CSS, these approaches can easily be polluted by well-intended “fixes” further up that can bring the whole presentation crashing down, or at least require a lot of scaffolding.
I must admit, I really like how the site turned out and it certainly seems to be very popular.
Visit the Virgin Media Shorts site.