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Case Study McCann

McCann

Case Study: McCann

In their own words:

McCann has created some of the best-known and most iconic advertising campaigns of the last century. Today, our work helps brands become part of the popular culture across the world and engage with consumers in their daily lives.

It was a pleasure to work at their incredible Manchester offices at Bonis Hall.

Technologies and Key Responsibilities

The main technology McCann use is Microsoft's .NET platform. This is a very powerful platform to use but requires some additional setup if you're using an Apple Mac computer.

In order to help with this my friend and co-organiser of UpFrontConf Dan Donald who had previously worked at McCann had started putting together a boilerplate. The boilerplate was a good start, but was a few years out of date. I cloned the boilerplate repository and updated it, introducing documentation, gulp commands to start a server locally, githooks and other various automated linting rules and helpers to ensure code consistency and catching errors going forwards.

When the linting was in place I discovered redundant code that could be deleted and then set about re-factoring the architecture. Here I used an approach of component driven development that I have come to like that's a mixture of best practices: Name Spacing, Atomic Design, BEM, SMACSS, OOCSS. This made the code base much easier to work with and less likely to run into issues going forwards.

Having such a boilerplate in place means that Front-End Developers (who I find more and more are using Apple Macs today) can quickly spin up a 'skeleton' version of the site to get working on the front-end. This allows for quicker development because at this stage we're not connected to the back-end or .NET. This allows for more productive communication and collaboration with other team members to gain valuable feedback and iterate upon and ultimately end up with a better finished product.

To further help with the back-end integration I put together a Windows Virtual Machine with and all the requirements for .NET. When this was up and running I was able to create a snapshot of the environment. This was then put on a USB drive and the process documented for future employees so they could get up and running quickly with .NET and the set up process automated.

Projects Worked On

As well as the boilerplate and development environment set up I also made some additions to the new McCann Manchester website homepage. I also worked on a few projects for some of their clients, but I'm not sure how much I can say about that ;)

Thanks

Massive thanks to Monica, Adam and the team at McCann, the on-boarding process for a contractor was great. I was quickly integrated into the team and was able to get cracking straight away.

Special shout out to Pritesh who very kindly helped me get up and running with the .NET side of things.

If you ever need my services again, I'll be happy to help, you know where I am.

Testimonial

Simon was a fantastic asset to the McCann Manchester team during his time as front end consultant - an absolute workhorse who brought excellent knowledge of modern web technology and process to the team. Thoroughly recommended.

Technical Director, McCann Manchester

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