Ruby on Rails is well-known for being a powerful tool to help developers quickly turn ideas into working code. Rails Rumble harnesses that power and drives it to its only logical conclusion: a 48-hour programming competition pitting more than 200 teams of coders against one another for some pretty serious prizes. Each team of up to four people is provided with exactly the same thing: a virtual private server from Linode, a private repository on GitHub, and a really tight deadline. BYO caffeine.
The competition has ended and now that many of the contestants are awake again, it’s time for the public to kick the tires on these mini-applications and vote to decide who will take home the championship belt (and no, that’s not a figure of speech in this case. There really is a belt). The 22 finalists include something for everyone, whether you’re a developer working to nail down requirements, a boozehound trying to figure out what cocktails you can make with the leftovers from last night’s party, an old-school arcade nut looking to play multi-player Asteroid, or a hopeless romantic trying to employ Twitter to woo a crush.
Even the teams that don’t come away with any material prizes will have gained some very valuable feedback on whether their idea might have any legs in the long run. Fifteen of the entries from the 2008 competition are still active and available to users, including all of the prize-winning applications.
So head on over and check out the applications, leave some feedback, and vote for your favorite(s). Voting ends tomorrow, Sunday, at 5 pm PST. You’ll be deciding a grand prize that includes a netbook for each team member and a bottle of 12 year Pappy Van Winkle Whiskey (from GitHub – I knew those guys were classy), not to mention year-long bragging rights.
Rails rumble was tons of fun.
We setup a camera and made a timelapsed video the 48 hours.
It’s fun to watch: http://nicolass...es/makingof.mov
Our app, is howsmycode.com.
that video is great – though it looks like all the nerf gun action happened off screen.
your app is looking good too, strong second place at the moment.
We shared a hotel conference room with another local team, and had a camera time-lapse cam running. While we were out to dinner a storm bumped out the power, and the computer with the camera was the only one not plugged into a UPS. Sadly, no video was salvaged. Our app, however, (http://omnomina...railsrumble.com) was completed nonetheless!
The competition this year was intense. I think my favorite is omnominator.com. Already used it a few times to pick lunch at the office. Great idea, and slick execution on it.
Thanks, Jacques! We’re definitely going to keep the ball rolling with it after the competition, prize or not. There’s a lot of room for improvement, and we’ve gotten a lot of great feedback so far from the rails rumble community.
hurl is great. check out the easter egg if you enter railsrumble.com
http://hurl.r09...ailsrumble.com/
Another “here are all of my social links” site? onxiam.com and others have already done that.
howsmycode isn’t for me, but lowdown looks right up my alley. (sorry rabble)
I don’t get the scoring categories, either. hi.im doesn’t look any better than lowdown / omomomom / peepnote / heart on and they’re that far ahead? Guess I’m not a good judge of looks, eh. howsmycode and lowdown look more “complete” too, but again, that’s just me.
Cool contest, though. Amazing what people can do in a weekend, isn’t it?
hi.im seem like a more refined google profile. Super clean, and with a great url http://hi.im/jacques to share with people. I think it has a lot of potential to be a successful startup & acquisition target.
“Hi, I’m”? it’s awesome
It also has lots of friends upvoting their app and downvoting the rest of the apps. Check the comments on the different team pages.
@jacques: I’m not sure how they’re an acquisition target.
@Anon: Ah, it’s become a popularity contest. Every vote for them is a vote against all the other apps. I wondered how all the scores were dropping from last night.
Great post, Andy! Welcome to the writing crew :D
Thanks for linking to http://lazeroids.com/. We hope you like it.
Also, if you’re interested to know how we built a Canvas + Comet, Rails-driven MMO game in 48 hours, we’ve documented it at http://lazeroid...28/hello-world/
Hehe, I just love Django better :-)
I’m the CEO of Koombea and was on the four person team who built hi.im. We’ve been watching our scores drop pretty steeply today as the other teams scores have been rising. There’s almost certainly downvoting happening. I think it’s bound to happen when you have open voting and teams campaigning for votes. We’ve certainly been asking our friends to rate our app, hopefully highly, but we’ve also asked them not to downgrade others apps. We’ve seen other teams asking their supporters to do the same. Everyone worked incredibly hard to get apps built in 48 hours. We hope we win, but we’re glad to be part of a competition that showcases what the Rails community can do.
It’s a interesting topic.
Here are my favorites:
http://doblock....nners-announced
Trollim – The winner of TC50 !!!!!