The 2008 Rails Rumble, a competition for Ruby on Rails coders, saw 131 web applications launch into the wild this past weekend. The quality of the applications increased dramatically this year, turning the competition into something of a startup hyper-incubator, with the goal of producing apps that not only win votes but become sustained products.
The rules are simple: you, along with up to three hacker friends, can’t start coding until midnight on Friday and you must finish by midnight on Sunday. All code is loaded into private GitHub repositories and all apps are deployed onto Linode virtual servers (both of which are provided for free by sponsors). And as the weekend draws to an end, your (hopefully) functional app will become frozen for testing and voting by anyone on the net.
The apps that dominated this year’s Rumble (the second ever held) relied a lot less on developing their own “network effect” than last year’s. Many were built around Twitter, and there were a number of project collaboration apps as well. The participants were also significantly more professional and thrived on the pressure to get a real product off the ground. Around five apps out of 90 total from the 2007 competition are still around today, including last year’s winner Tasty Planner. The Rails Rumble team, a volunteer organizing committee led by Nick Plante and Darcy Laycock, expects that number to grow significantly this year.
While the 2008 Rumble was Rails-specific, Plante hopes to host more events and potentially different types of competitions. He says the behind-the-scenes work done this year was primarily concerned with building “a turn-key solution for hosting a coding competition,” including registration and voting infrastructure. This year’s competition also made a big push for OpenID; it was not only required for registration and voting, approximately 95% of competition apps integrated the standard as well.
Here are some stats from the event:
- Last year: 324 participants on 140 teams. 90 teams qualified (successfully created an app).
- This year: 529 total participants on 231 teams. 131 teams qualified.
- 22 solo teams, 28 teams with two members, 27 teams with three people, 54 teams with four people
- 14355 total commits to GitHub (avg 112 per team).
- 245257 total Lines of Code (not including Rails)
Want to get involved? Voting for 2008 Rails Rumble begins now. Here’s how it works: signup to vote and get 10 random app invitations. If you cast votes, you’ll receive 10 more, and so on. Winners of this year’s Rumble will get (among lesser prizes) a mint-condition 1986 Chuck Norris Undercover Agent Action Figure (”Chuck Norris does not sleep…He waits”). So check out some of these apps, vote, and let us know what you think in the comments.
But will any of them be any good? Emperor Steve has his doubts since all the best app developers work on iPhone apps anyway.
Thanks to all who have generously contributed to the Rails Rumble
“solo team” – cool
We had an awesome time last weekend participating in Rails Rumble. We barely slept, but came out with a pretty cool app:
http://www.meetinbetween.us
that’s pretty neat, and actually something that combines my laziness and short attention span into something I’d use. good job, josh.
That’s a useful app. Well done.
Thanks I appreciate the compliments. I’ll pass them along to my teammates.
It wasn’t mentioned in the article, but voters will be selected at random to win prizes. All voters will also have access to a sweet promotion code for service at Linode.
Yarr. And hey, even though I’m the only person that actually uses the app I wrote atm, that’s good enough for me.
I’m having a hard time believing this was build in just two days:
http://app.r08....ailsrumble.com/
If so, wow
If not, boooo.
I can assure you it was. Forty-two hours to be exact, as we slept for about 6 hours early on. Amazing what two guys, some planning, testing (RSpec) and A LOT of caffeine can produce.
You did an amazing job. I’m jealous! This would of probably taken me a month to do if I was consistently working. I’m new to the programming scene in general though.
I love rails and it’s my favorite out of all of the land.
The only thing left for your app is to strap on a paid model, and attach an iphone/ipod app with it
Fearless former TechCrunch Intern Rob Olson was on a team that made a cool app: uBetcha. Wtg, Fearless Rob.
We developed our app, CollegeWikis, on Ruby but used Merb as the framework. http://www.collegewikis.com
Here is my solo entry to Rails Rumble 2008: http://www.comicly.com
Think it turned out pretty well! Hope you guys like it!
My app for for last year’s Rails Rumble (pubbud.com) never really took off, however I was able to extract the code into a white label and make it available here: http://railskits.com/map. So not a total loss!
Hey Jacques… did you compete this year? Also, update your blog more often, dude! Freelancing can’t take all of your time!
Our’s was Foodistic: http://foodistic.com/
You can learn about what you are eating and track your health habits. Give it a shot!
Our rumbler from Spain, Taguéame.
http://tagueame...railsrumble.com
a very fun experiment about tagging people. come with your friends and you’ll see
Speaking as a designer (and not a coder), it was a crazy-fun 48 hours. Our app Qflip (http://qflip.r0...ailsrumble.com/) helps throw a little randomness into your Netflix queue.
This year’s OpenID focus has made it especially awesome to browse and rate the apps, so check out OpenID if you feel like playing with a few but don’t want to type in 131 logins.
@Doug Avery: I love Qflip. Great job!
Our app, http://www.whosgot.me lets you track what you owe your friends and what they owe you. You can even record debts using SMS, so you won’t forget. It was developed by two Railers and two students and it was a blast of a weekend.
I’m one of the “solo teams”, managed to get http://pricepou...railsrumble.com all done and dusted despite going to a murder mystery night half way through…
I’m definitely planning on keeping my app around after the competition – I built it because I wanted it more than anything else. Playing around with the Amazon API has been fun as well.
I worked solo on http://inspires...railsrumble.com . Fun experience. Definitely doing next year.
This is awesome! Just posted a video on my blog linking to this article – I would love to see this done maybe over a week or so. It would be interesting to see if the quality of apps improve.
Don’t you think phpMyAdmin is old and gray? For Rails Rumble, our team bootstrapped an opensource web-based mysql admin with conventions, some ajax and other cool stuff : rbDB (http://socialli...railsrumble.com)!
we recently used ruby as a new tech stack for our company and we are delighted to see the ability
ruby and python both rocks
Nice to see a rails rumble post!
That is also what comes from my experience. Python is extremely powerful especially when combined with Google App Engine -> as it handles both the whole scalability issue and coding simplicity. As an illustration: (found recently): http://www.quotag.com
This is really impressive! Great to see such high quality apps!
I didn’t realize that there were only 22 solo teams. My site, http://www.choresimple.com is a tool that helps parents schedule chores for the week so a family can work efficiently and enjoy more free time.
Scratching my own itch, My tool helps users engage with their contacts in their address book.
Our contacts have a wide range of interests that vary over time.
Needless to say, it is hard to keep track of what they are and as a result when we have something to share, we are not exactly sure which of our contacts are interested in it. So we end up either sending it to those that are not quite interested or not sending it to the right person.
We miss an opportunity to engage.
EngageVia allows you to tag yourself and tag your contacts in your address book and when you get ready to share something, simply tag the content and the tool handily tells you which of your contacts are interested in it so you can send it only to them.
What you see in the competition is only a prototype,
plans are there to extend it with more features to make engagement with your contacts more realistic.
Feedback is greatly appreciated.