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.