This year for Rails Rumble, our team decided to write an app for tracking whom you’ve loaned your items to:

It was a blast, just like last year. Having James Pierce as our designer made a huge difference in the quality of our app.

Using Gawker, we recorded time lapse videos of our three sessions.

Session 1:

The fifth person in the video is our co-worker Will, who didn’t actually code anything for our Rumble app. He was there to provide some Git (and morale) support and keep Rumble Helper updated. So we didn’t cheat!

Session 2:

I forgot the timestamps on this one, but it lasted from about 9:30am on Saturday to 5am on Sunday (the last 15 seconds [3 hours or so real time] is dark… we forgot to turn the camera off). Ten points if you can spot our friends Ryan and Leah Stufflebam, who dropped off some homemade chili for us. It was delicious.

Session 3:

The last session! In total, we got about 8 hours of sleep each, drank like I don’t know how many cans of soda, ate a buttload of chips and pizza (and chili). It was a blast.

Go see our app: lend.to, and all the other Rumble apps when you get a chance!

After a meeting of our Rails Rumble team the week before the competition, I decided to undertake a little project to keep track of stuff we wanted to get done during the Rumble. I came up with Rumble Helper:

You can drag and drop items from one bubble to another so you can easily track what needs to be done.

We used it during the Rumble in combination with SmartBoard:

It turned out pretty well! Darcy was nice enough to put it up on the Rails Rumble blog before the competition. At the end, 45 users had signed up (representing 20 different teams) and 327 tasks had been created. I was happy it got some use.

It was a really good warmup for the Rumble. I worked on it solid from Friday (August 14) to about Thursday (August 20). There were several things about it that helped having experience with during Rails Rumble itself.

For next year I plan to add more features to it, like the ability to see what other teams are doing (if they made their team public, that is). There are also some Javascript issues that I need to see if I can take care of. If you leave the app open for too long, eventually the AJAX calls bloat up Firefox pretty badly.